He looms before us on the screen, menacing, grandiose, Byronic. But he is great only from the scaling of values. His contact is incessantly with weaker types who bend or break before him. Grushnitski is a modish idealist; Bela, a captive maid who acknowledges his right to do as he wills; Vera, a hysterical sentimentalist of that spirituelle type to whom the intense physical traits of Pechorin make a ready appeal. She quiets her scruples with the sacred notion that she is sacrificing herself, soul and body to one whose life would otherwise be incomplete. Princess Mary is a typical Byronese victim, a devotee at the shrine of heroism, who for nothing in the world would give herself to a man who has not some mystery or who has not been the victim of some crushing sorrow. Contrast her with the vital, passionate Natalya in Turgene’s _Rudin_.... Pechorin hunts easy game. He acknowledges that he has never loved women of spirit: “Once only I loved a woman with a firm will that I was unable to vanquish. We parted enemies.” What would these erotic, parasitic Byrons subsist upon nowadays? Woman is no more the mere giver; she asks and receives in return. Pechorin wins from us not honest hatred but contempt. One searches the book for an honorable impulse upon his part. He is a washed-out Byron; a pale Don Juan. He loves many women for the excitement of mere change. “We live out of curiosity. We expect something new. How absurd, and yet how vexatious!” Women fall at his feet and he asks derisively: “Can it be that wickedness is so attractive?” He knows the ways of his victim by heart, he anticipates her every move, and calls her accomplishment tiresome. Passion has shriveled until it is an inglorious segment of his life. It is a thing of curiosity rather than of sympathy. Love is an annoyance, yet he persists in it: “I feel within me an insatiate hunger that devours everything it meets upon the way. I look upon joy and suffering only in their relation to myself, regarding them as nutriment that sustains my spiritual forces.... To none has my love ever brought happiness because I have never sacrificed anything for the sake of those I loved. I have only tried to satisfy the strange cravings of my heart, greedily draining their feelings, their tenderness, their joy, their suffering—and I have never been able to sate myself.”