This does not mean that Lermontov is inferior to the Western romantic poets. It simply means that the Russian poet is--and one might add the Russian poets are--different. And, indeed, it is this very difference,--what he did with this peculiar realistic paste in his composition,--that constitutes his unique excellence. So far from its being a vice, he made it into his especial virtue. Lermontov sometimes, in presenting a situation and writing a poem on a fact, presents that situation and that fact without exaggeration, emphasis, adornment, imagery, metaphor, or fancy of any kind, in the language of everyday life, and at the same time he achieves poetry. This was Wordsworth's ideal, and he fulfilled it.
A case in point is his long poem on the Oprichnik, which has been mentioned; and some of the most striking examples of this unadorned and realistic writing are to be found in his lyrics. In the "Testament," for example, where a wounded officer gives his last instructions to his friend who is going home on leave--
"I want to be alone with you, A moment quite alone. The minutes left to me are few, They say I'll soon be gone. And you'll be going home on leave, Then say ... but why? I do believe There's not a soul, who'll greatly care To hear about me over there.
And yet if some one asks you there, Let us suppose they do-- Tell them a bullet hit me here, The chest,--and it went through. And say I died and for the Tsar, And say what fools the doctors are;-- And that I shook you by the hand, And thought about my native land.
My father and my mother, too! They may be dead by now; To tell the truth, it wouldn't do To grieve them anyhow. If one of them is living, say I'm bad at writing home, and they Have sent us to the front, you see,-- And that they needn't wait for me.
We had a neighbour, as you know, And you remember I And she ... How very long ago It is we said good-bye! She won't ask after me, nor care, But tell her ev'rything, don't spare Her empty heart; and let her cry;-- To her it doesn't signify."
The language is the language of ordinary everyday conversation. Every word the officer says might have been said by him in ordinary life, and there is not a note that jars; the speech is the living speech of conversation without being slang: and the result is a poignant piece of poetry. Another perhaps still more beautiful and touching example is the cradle-song which a mother sings to a Cossack baby, in which again every word has the native savour and homeliness of a Cossack woman's speech, and every feeling expressed is one that she would have felt. A third example is "Borodino," an account of the famous battle told by a veteran, as a veteran would tell it. Lermontov's fishes never talk like big whales.