MAGAZINE: The Caucasus Mountains, in the spirit of writer Lermontov. By Bill Donahue (washingtonpost.com)

(washingtonpost.com) By the time I reached the snowfield, four hours into the hike and roughly 11,000 feet up in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia, it was raining, and a late afternoon fog was drifting in, soon to veil the rocky peaks. I kept climbing, kicking the toes of my sneakers into the remnant June snow for a foothold, scrabbling on my hands and knees over rocks in steep places. Near the top of the pass leading to Juta, the highest village of the Khevsureti people, I spied three hikers emerging out of the mist, shuffling downhill, exhausted. They were Slovakian. “We are lost,” one of them said. “Now we go down. We look for rest in the willage.”

They were lean and in their 20s, with enough common sense to have invested in stiff-soled, snow-suitable hiking boots. Which underscored how flimsy my own preparations had been. Did I really want to die in some half-baked scheme to conquer the Caucasus? I had started out that morning amid the winding dirt roads and the little stone houses of Georgia’s sparsely settled Khevsureti region; it was time to go back. So now I began slinking downhill behind the Slovaks, and in the endless creases of the valley below, I swear I heard a man snickering, his voice a gleeful mockery as it caromed off the rocks.

The Russian poet and novelist Mikhail Lermontov (1814-41) had been there in the Georgian Caucasus before me. These mountains are the setting of his signature work, the 1840 novel “A Hero of Our Time,” and I had become convinced that Mikhail and I hated each other.

Lermontov was a short, bowlegged man, prematurely balding, with a bent back and a nasty temper. After his mother died young, he was raised in Moscow by his indulgent grandmother, a society dowager who permitted little Mishenka to rage on the servants and tear out her manicured shrubbery. He was annoying right up until his death. The day before, his friend was fraternizing with a young woman Lermontov fancied. Lermontov goaded him into a duel with guns. Lermontov lost. We can credit him with the dumbest death in literary history.

Or we can remember him by his eyes. They were captivating and coal black and set in dark sockets. They were plaintive and sad. When you look at old oil paintings, it’s impossible to forget that this dyspeptic brat was also a sensitive Romantic artist. His eyes saw things. They saw beauty, even as Lermontov himself was consumed by a haughty nihilism. Most critically, they saw the Caucasus Mountains straddling Russia and Georgia, more than 900 miles from the salons of Moscow.

When Lermontov was 3 and suffering from rheumatic fevers, his grandmother packed him, along with his French tutor and German governess, into a horse-drawn wagon and set out for the curative airs of the mountains. Lermontov returned at ages 5 and 10, and again when he was in his 20s and an officer in Czar Nicholas I’s army. Russia was occupying Georgia then, engaged in a century-long campaign to conquer the Caucasus’s peoples: the Chechens and Ossetians, and the largest group, the Circassians. Lermontov spent a pivotal year fighting and gathering material for his novel.

“Hero” is a slim, ironically titled autobiographical tale that follows Pechorin, a young Army officer, as he womanizes his way up the Georgia Military Highway, northeast from the capital, Tbilisi, and over the Caucasus into what is today Russian Chechnya. It is filled with grandiose riffs. Lermontov writes, “The dark-blue mountain tops, furrowed with wrinkles, covered with layers of snow, were silhouetted against the pale horizon.”One Georgian damsel comes off as “beautiful: tall, slender, with black eyes which resembled that of a mountain gazelle.”

After Vladimir Nabokov rendered the definitive English-language translation of “Hero” with his son, Dmitri, in 1958, he said Lermontov’s language “is the tool of an energetic, incredibly gifted, bitterly honest, but definitely inexperienced young man.”

Lermontov had almost zero compassion. For him, Caucasians were noxious when they weren’t being exotic. “What wretched people,” his alter ego Pechorin remarks.

“An extremely foolish people,” adds a fellow officer, “incapable of any education.”

I was there in Georgia in part to see what Lermontov had vainly overlooked. But I was also there in homage, for I loved the thrill in Lermontov’s voice. I wanted to know this brilliant young man who tossed away all his talent but still looms large in the Caucasus, remembered by all, reviled by some, and as important to his region as, say, Nathaniel Hawthorne is to Americans. To this day, most Georgian and Russian schoolchildren read Lermontov.

I got down out of the snow, eventually. The slope grew gentler and the sky cleared as I began descending toward the village of Roscha, following goat paths through the clover. The valley grew wider, until it was about a half-mile across — a huge, stunning expanse of rocky green land set against the patchy snow in the distance. After an hour, I saw a few grazing cows.

The first house in Roscha was a crude bed-and-breakfast with a woodshed in the back yard and a cowshed affixed with a TV satellite dish. As I lay in my room there, resting, I could hear a man grunting in labor on the grass just below me. I went outside and found a large, muscle-bound athlete throwing 50-pound rocks. — so they thudded softly on the spongy turf.

Zviadi Gogochuri competes for Georgia’s national judo squad in the 90-kilogram weight class. He was oblivious to me, ensconced next in some exercise that involved pulling on a thick rubber chord. A kid stood nearby, spectating in rapt admiration. “He is training,” Uturga Tsiklauri, 16, said in careful English. “He comes to the mountains for the fresh air. It is important.”

Uturga lives at the bed-and-breakfast with his parents. His father was away overnight, so his mother entrusted him with all the manly duties — such as turning on the hot-water heater so I could take a shower out in one shed. His manner was watchful and serious. He knew things. When he took food scraps out to the chickens, he did so with a solemn reverence. And as we dined — the judoist, Uturga and I — Uturga worked his angles, ensuring that when I got a taxi out the next morning, he and his mother would ride along for free.

The cab arrived at 7:30. The road toward the next town, Korsha, was more of a path, cut into a steep mountainside and scattered with basketball-size boulders. We descended at seven miles an hour. At one point Uturga saw a stray rooster bobbing along through some scrub grass near a wooden drop-off. He leaped out and began chasing the bird into the woods, throwing smalls rocks at it. His mother leaped out, and (why not?) I, too, joined in the chase. By now the bird was scurrying at top speed, squawking in terror. I had an elevated vantage point, with the rooster running right before me. But Uturga, holding his arm up, stopped me. Then he trailed the rooster until it was cornered in the nook of a cliff. He grabbed it by its feet, then carried it upside down, wings flapping, back to the cab. We resumed rolling, now with a live, useful farm animal on board. In the back seat, Uturga’s mother laughed with pride and delight.

“Giji,” I said to the driver, drawing on my scant Georgian skills. “Crazy.”

The driver laughed, too, then pointed his finger to his head and said: “No. Smart.”

About half the size of Rhode Island and separated from Chechnya only by the Caucasus Mountains, the Khevsureti region is just 50 miles outside Tbilisi, but the route there is steep. The place has always felt remote, and its people — nature-worshiping Christians descended from the last crusaders of Europe — are fiercely independent. As late as 1915, Khevsureti men wore chain mail armor when they galloped their horses into Tbilisi.

Today, slender medieval stone watchtowers still dot the hillsides, bearing tiny slit windows, and in the ghost town of Shatili, on the Chechen border, there’s an ancient stone fortress.

The old Khevsureti is crumbling, though, challenged by Georgia’s mounting prosperity and urbanization, and the Khevsureti people boast few cultural preservationists. I was there in Korsha to stay with one of them — a visual artist named Shota Arabuli, who runs the Korsha Guesthouse.

One of my fellow guests, Otari Laliashvili, 62, is a painter and a night guard at a museum outside Tbilisi. A bald chain smoker with a wry, playful laugh, he has extensively studied Georgian history, honing a worldview that is at once hypernationalist and slightly surreal. “Georgians,” he told me, “were the first humans. Before the Tower of Babel, everyone spoke Georgian.” Laliashvili had read all of Lermontov, and his take was decisive: “Lermontov was an unhappy genius-idiot. He knew nothing about the Caucasus.”

Laliashvili had arrived with three friends and a five-liter decanter of red wine purchased at a gas station. As we sat in the airy dining room, we sampled that vintage and homed in on the Circassian war. Over 100 years, the Russians killed roughly 400,000 Circassians, and in 1864, Czar Alexander II formally expelled 500,000 more. Today, Islamic leaders in Chechnya still do not accept Russian authority.

“Lermontov was writing history from the perspective of an occupier,” Laliashvili told me. The novelist’s greatest error, Laliashvili felt, was his failure to lionize a Circassian ruler named Shamil, a guerrilla leader who defeated the Russians in several battles as he spent 25 years trying, unsuccessfully, to unite the disparate tribes of the Caucasus in battle. “Shamil was the true hero of the Circassian war,” Laliashvili said. “Shamil fought for his land, for his own earth. He had a reason to fight, and he told the Russians, ‘Your country is huge. I can ride my horse around my whole kingdom in a day. Why do you need it?’ ”

We replenished our wine glasses, and in time Laliashvili revised his take on the war. The true hero, he declared, was not Shamil, but his deputy, Boysangur, who upbraided Shamil when the warlord at last surrendered, in 1859. According to Laliashvili, Boysangur said: “Don’t give up. You are Shamil. Remember you said we should fight to the end?” Boysangur kept fighting. “It didn’t matter that he had only one arm, one leg and one eye,” Laliashvili said. “He fought until the Russians caught him and hanged him.”

By the end of the evening, we had finished the bottle.

The next morning, Laliashvili woke late and looked somewhat rumpled as shambled to the bathroom. “If you don’t drink, why live?” he said to me with a groggy smirk. “That is the philosophy of your friend Lermontov, and I have been sacrificing myself at his altar.”

Later in the day I settled down with my Lermontov books. There are few quiet moments in the works of Mikhail Lermontov. Reading him, you feel as if you are up in the middle of the night with insomnia — in some spare hotel room, perhaps, watching a super-dramatic old movie on a black-and-white TV, with the contrast dial notched up to 10. His epic poem, “The Demon,” stars an outcast soul who sadly flies over the sinful world, only to launch an ill-fated romance with a Georgian princess. Another long poem, “The Novice,” is about a young monk who flees his monastery (and organized religion) and contemplates dying “between the abrupt and dark rocks.” The poem begins with an epigraph paraphrasing the Bible’s First Book of Samuel: “I have barely tasted the honey; And I must die.”

“Hero’s” wanton antics can be hard to take, but there are passages that sing with enchantment. “All these snows burned with a ruddy glow,” Lermontov writes, “so merrily, so brightly, that it made one wonder why one should not stay here forever.” The Russian dramatist Nikolai Gogol said of one chapter, “No one among us has yet written a prose so perfect, so beautiful, so full of flavor.”

But I, myself, was taken most by a letter Lermontov wrote in 1837: “As I careered up and down the mountains in Georgia, I abandoned the cart and took to horseback; I’ve climbed the snowy mountain of the Cross to the very top, which isn’t altogether easy; from it, one can see half of Georgia as though it were on a saucer. … For me the mountain air is balm; the blues go to the devil, the heart thumps, the breast breathes high.”

By “the Cross,” Lermontov meant Mount Kazbek, a 16,512-foot peak that forms the border with Russia, looming over the Georgian village of Stepantsminda. I boarded a bus headed there the next afternoon. En route, we came upon a green hillside where throngs of people toiled up a narrow path, many wearing heavy crucifix necklaces as they towed bleating sheep on ropes. I deduced that things would not work out well for the sheep at the top.

I began climbing. Beside me were young families carrying children, and old women barefoot and bent over walking sticks. Finally, using hand signals to query my fellow travelers, I ascertained that we were all on a pilgrimage. It was Lomisoba, an ancient pagan feast updated 15 centuries ago after Christianity came to Georgia. We were climbing to the Lomisa Monastery to slaughter farm animals and pray at the stone shrine of Georgia’s patron, Saint George.

Lermontov had skipped this one, I’m pretty sure — it was beneath him to mingle with the hoi polloi — but I loved the sight of the crowds before me, moving now through a steep, shadowed meadow spotted with wildflowers. I loved that, even on this holy mission, they had weighted their backpacks with chacha, a grape-based moonshine.

It was dusk. The monastery sits on a knoll at 7,500 feet, and it took most people three hours to hike there. I didn’t have any food, never mind a tent for the inevitable night out in the chill. But I’d built up a certain trust in Georgians by now. Somehow I knew I’d find spirit and warmth up at the top.

There must have been 1,000 people there — a constellation of small groups scattered amid a jumble of giant boulders and grassy ravines. Campfires glimmered, and hundreds of believers waited for hours to light devotional candles before icons of George.

Mostly, though, the top was a party — and, for me, a primer on the delights and perils of chacha. Every time I opened my mouth, pilgrims swarmed around me with bottles of homemade chacha. A typical conversation, translated from Georgian and hand signals, went roughly like this:

Pilgrim: Drink! Drink!

Me: But I have already had four shots of chacha.

Pilgrim: But it is the national drink of Georg-ee-ah! You must take one more shot, for Georg-ee-ah!

Me: I, uh —

Pilgrim: Just one more, for Georg-ee-ah! For the friendship of nations!

A serious, bearded man, a frame maker who shared bread and cheese and olives with me, sold tiny framed portraits of Saint George bearing a broad sword and a gilt Byzantine halo. Some university students, English speakers, hailed me with Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” as they strummed guitars by their campfire. I heard a long medley of patriotic folk songs as we perched there on rocks in the smoky darkness, and I remember thinking that, even now, 170-odd years after Lermontov’s death, Georgia is still overwhelmed by Russian imperialism. The two countries fought a war in 2008, over a tiny Caucasian territory, South Ossetia. Georgia got crushed, and the sting lingers. After each folk song, the woman sitting beside me synopsized the lyrics the same way: “Finally,” she said, “it is about Georgia.”

I learned the refrain to one song, kind of, but then things got blurry, and I got very tired of being asked to drink chacha. At about 1:30, I located a declivity in a remote meadow and, hiding inside it, drifted into a merciful sleep. Then I was rousted. “Drink!” commanded the man hovering above me with a bottle. “Drink!”

Finally, at 2:45, I began weaving back down the mountain. It was quiet, and in the pitch black hundreds more pilgrims were climbing to the top, intent on making the morning Mass. They scarcely spoke. I heard the hard rasp of their lungs and the slight patter of their feet on the soil.

I would never attempt Mount Kazbek after my vigorous worshiping at Lermontov’s altar. But when I reached the highway at dawn, I stuck out my thumb and caught a ride north, toward Stepantsminda, with a beefy Russian in a sports car. Russian techno music blared over the stereo, so loud the vehicle vibrated. I strapped on my seat belt. We swooped along through small towns, past churches and little stores and patches of snow. I watched the sun rise into the blue sky over the lofty crags of the Caucasus. I was on an adventure way up in the mountains, and at least part of me forgot how bratty and mean and difficult Mikhail Lermontov had been. For a moment, I wished that he were sitting right there beside me, savoring the thin mountain air.

Bill Donahue is a writer living in Portland, Ore.

Georgian highlights

What to do

The 17th-century Orbeliani Baths, in Tbilisi, offer communal sulfur pools beneath domed bathhouse roofs in a blue-tiled palace.

The Gergeti Trinity Church is a 14th-century stone church that sits on a hilltop in the shadows of snowcapped Mount Kazbek. Hike or drive there from the picturesque village of Stepantsminda.

Lomisoba is a holy celebration and a wild party. On a Wednesday near the summer solstice, thousands of people hike uphill from the village of Arakhveti to Lomisa ridge, to pray to Georgia’s patron, Saint George, and spend the night drinking homemade spirits before they greet the sunrise with a Mass.

Where to stay

Korsha Guesthouse. Two hours north of Tbilisi, this rustic six-room lodge features a stone replica of a Khevsureti tower and sprawling gardens with sculptures of animals carved out of sticks. 011-995-599-74-11-99 or e-mail korshaltd@gmail.com.

Where to eat

Rooms Hotel. Set in Stepantsminda, with a breathtaking view of Mount Kazbek, the restaurant here offers gourmet dining in an exquisitely renovated Soviet-era resort. 011-995-322-71-00-99.

— Bill Donahue

(by guest blogger Vitaliy L. Rayz, in collaboration with Martin W. Lewis)

(geocurrents.info) The present GeoCurrents series has focused on the peoples of the Caucasus, examining Russia and Russians only insofar as they have impacted the region. But the Caucasus has played a significant role in the politics of Russia, and in its cultural history as well. The most prominent Russian poets and writers, including Alexander Pushkin, Michael Lermontov, and Lev Tolstoy, traveled through the region and described it in their renowned books. The “cultural exchange,” moreover, went both ways: many members of the Russian elite served, worked, or vacationed in the Caucasus, while quite a few Caucasians made it to the top ranks of Russian society.

Several Georgian nobles, for example, gained fame for their service to the Russian Empire. Prince Pyotr Ivanovich Bagration (“Prince Pyotr”), depicted on the left, a descendant of the Georgian royal family, became one of the most successful Russian generals during Napoleonic wars. In 1812 he led one of the Russian armies fighting the invading French troops. Bagration heroically fought in the bloody battle of Borodino, where he commanded the left wing of the Russian position. After repelling more than half a dozen massive attacks led by the most talented French marshals, Bagration was mortally wounded.

As the Russians advanced into the Caucasus in the first half of the 19th century, their armies included a number of nobles. For many, service in the North Caucasus—a land of unrelenting war—was itself a form of punishment, entailing exile from the capital. Some Russian nobles serving in the region were actually de-ranked from the officer class and reclassified as ordinary soldiers. Such a penalty could stem from many kinds of misbehavior, ranging from participation in a duel to the holding of “untrustworthy” political views.

Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s best-loved poet, visited the Caucasus twice and described its snow-covered mountains and proud highlanders in poetry and prose. In his famous poem “The prisoner of the Caucasus,” he describes a Russian captive who falls in love with a Circassian girl. “A Journey to Arzrum,” written during his second visit in 1829, provides a detailed account of his trip. In this remarkable work, the ever sharp-witted and discerning Pushkin describes different peoples, their traditions, and their cuisines. He also had sharp words for the relationship between the Russians and the Circassians:

"The Circassians hate us. We have pushed them from free pastures; their villages are devastated, whole tribes are exterminated. With every hour they get higher and higher in the mountains and from there launch their raids. Friendship with the “pacified” Circassians is not reliable: they are always ready to help their violent kinsmen."

In order to safely get to Vladikavkaz in what is now North Ossetia-Alania, Pushkin had to join a regular military convoy, protected by infantry, mounted Cossacks, and a cannon. After crossing the formidable Caucasus range, Pushkin was delighted to see the “fair-looking” Georgia. After arriving Tiflis (Tbilisi), he described the city’s inhabitants:

"The Georgians are warriors who had proven their courage under our banners… They are in general of cheerful and sociable spirit… The wines from Kakheti and Karabakh are not inferior to some of the Burgudian ones. … In Tiflis the main part of the population is Armenian: in 1825 there were up to 2500 Armenian families… The Georgian families are no more than 1500. The Russians do not consider themselves to be local inhabitants"

On his way to Armenia, Pushkin ran into a gruesome procession, one carrying the body of another famous Russian poet, Alexander Griboedov. Griboedov had lived in the Caucasus for many years. Owing to his knowledge of the region, he was sent as a Russian ambassador to Teheran, where he was murdered by a crowd storming the embassy.

In Michael Lermontov’s book A Hero of Our Time, widely considered one the best examples of Russian prose, a St. Petersburg aristocrat named Pechorin travels to the Caucasus. Pechorin undergoes a variety of adventures, dueling in Pyatigorsk, serving in a small fort at the frontier, and even getting involved with a beautiful Circassian girl. He kidnaps the girl, according to the local custom, only to see her killed by an avenging kinsman.

In the late 19th century, Lev Tolstoy published his own work entitled “The prisoner of the Caucasus,” echoing some of the themes deployed earlier by Pushkin. Again, a Russian military man is captured by local insurgents. They keep the unfortunate officer, in hopes of getting a ransom from his family, but he eventually escapes with help from a young daughter of his captor who had taken pity on him. Interestingly, Tolstoy refers to the Chechens as “Tatars”, a term familiar to his Russian readers, based largely on their Muslim faith. Tolstoy had also served as a soldier in the Caucasus, and the story is said to be based on real events. Tolstoy’s final work, the posthumously published Hadji Murat, also takes place in the Caucasus.

The very same themes of the Russian-Caucasian war, captivity, and love between a Caucasian beauty and a Russian hostage are further explored in yet another “Prisoner of the Caucasus”, a 1996 film directed by Sergei Bodrov and based loosely on Lev Tolstoy’s story. This film is set during the First Chechen War and was shot in the mountains of Dagestan, only a short distance away from the then-ongoing battles of that war, giving it an eerie almost-documentary quality.

Quite a few Caucasians numbered among the revolutionaries fighting in the Russian Civil War and serving in the subsequent Communist regime. These figures include: Anastas Mikoyan, a shrewd politician, who managed to survive in the top echelon of the Soviet government from the time of Lenin to that of Brezhnev; the infamous henchman Lavrentiy Beria, chief of the Soviet secret police apparatus (NKVD); Politburo member Sergo Ordzhonikidze; the terrorist and master-of-disguise “Kamo” (Semeno Aržakovitš Ter-Petrossian); and, of course, comrade Stalin himself (Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili). (As was brilliantly said by one of his Georgian countrymen, Stalin became a murderous tyrant only in Russia; in Georgia he was merely a petty criminal.)

In Soviet times, the Caucasus became the prime attraction for mountain climbers from the western USSR, as the loftier Tian Shan and Pamir were too far away. The Soviet government wanted to train climbers capable of fighting in alpine terrain. In pursuing this goal, it established a number of alpine training camps along the ridge of the Great Caucasus Range. Many intellectuals from Moscow, Leningrad, and other large cities in Russia and Ukraine regularly spent a few weeks a year in such camps. In addition to climbing the challenging mountains, they enjoyed relative freedom from the oppressive grip of the regime: on the steep slopes they could freely talk with friends and make decisions independent of the government and the bureaucracy. As the brilliant poet Vladimir Vysotskiy put it, “You trust only in the strength of your hand, in a hammered piton and the hands of a friend and pray that a rope belay will never betray”.

Professional mountaineering instructors supervised the training of the alpinists, and a rigorous system of ranks and examinations ensured that the abilities and experience of a climber would correspond to the difficulty of the climb. Considering the casual disrespect for human life in the Soviet Union, this strict system kept the number of casualties relatively low. Many songs were dedicated to courageous mountaineers, describing beautiful mountains such as Ushba (see picture on the left) and Shhelda. Quoting again from Vysotskiy: “The one thing that can be better than mountains is mountains that nobody has climbed yet”.

Many Soviet intellectuals and other members of the elite who were not interested in mountaineering would still regularly visit the Caucasus. Most would head for the warm Black Sea coast of Georgia, where they would enjoy authentic Georgian food, fine Georgian wines, and unparalleled hospitality.

Georgian poetry was highly respected by Russian literary figures. The works of the best Georgian poets, Shota Rustaveli, Titsian Tabidze, Ilia Chavchavadze and others, were translated into Russian by the finest Russian masters, including the Nobel-prize winner Boris Pasternak. In the second half of the 20th century, Russian culture came to be influenced by prominent intellectuals and artists with Caucasian roots. The list is long, but a few deserve special mention: the poet Bulat Okudzhava, a revered founder of the “singing poetry” genre (see picture on the left); the famous Abkhazian writer and thinker Fazil Iskander; the celebrated theatre directors Georgiy Tovstonogov and Yevgeny Vakhtangov; the beautiful actress Sofiko Chiaureli; and the talented film director, Georgiy Daneliya, who showed authentic Georgian culture in such films as “Mimino”. These names are recognized by most Russian intellectuals, celebrated as cultural leaders who had helped form their views and beliefs. Current Russian public figures of Caucasian background include the novelist Boris Akunin (Grigory Chkhartishvili) and the famed chess champion Garry Kasparov, who is also an important leader of the Russian opposition.

On maps of the both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, the Caucasus appear to be a small and rather insignificant place. In Russian cultural and intellectual history, however, it looms large indeed, having profoundly influencing the development of Russian civilization.

(Translations by Vitaliy Rayz)

HÖRSPIEL: Ein Held unserer Zeit. Von Michail Lermontow (mdr.de)

Mo., 28.02. +++ 22.00 bis 23.30 Uhr

MDR: Live-Stream >>>

Hörspielbearbeitung: Elisabeth Panknin

"Ein Held unserer Zeit, meine Herrschaften, ist in der Tat ein Porträt, aber nicht das eines einzelnen Menschen: es ist ein Porträt, zusammengesetzt aus den Lastern unserer ganzen Generation, in ihrer vollen Entfaltung." Als Michail Lermontov sein Prosawerk "Ein Held unserer Zeit" schrieb, war er Anfang 20, ein gestrandeter Soldat, verbannt in den Kaukasus. Die fünf Novellen seines Buchs, erzählt aus drei unterschiedlichen Perspektiven, kreisen um die Person eines jungen Offiziers, Grigorij Aleksandrovic Pecorin, in dem man viele Züge von Lermontov selbst entdecken kann. Für die Nachfolgegeneration der russischen Autoren wurde er zum Typenvorbild eines überflüssigen Menschen. Seine Leidenschaft wird von der Langeweile und der Gleichgültigkeit erstickt. Am Schluss beschreibt der Held sich selbst als unsteten und tragischen Charakter: "Ich habe nie genug: an den Kummer gewöhne ich mich genauso wie an den Genuss, und mein Leben wird von Tag zu Tag inhaltsleerer."

Michail Jurjevic Lermontov (1814-1841) besuchte eine Militärschule, obwohl sein Hauptinteresse der Dichtung galt. Als er 1837 in seinem Gedicht "Der Tod des Dichters" Zar Nikolaus indirekt beschuldigte, verantwortlich für Puschkins Tod zu sein, wurde er in den Kaukasus strafversetzt. Er starb bei einem Duell.

Produktion: HR/SWR 2008
Regie: Oliver Sturm
Bearbeiter: Elisabeth Panknin
Komponist: Andreas Bick

Martin Engler - Autor
Gunter Schoß - Stabshauptmann
Michael Rotschopf - Grigorij Aleksandrovic Pecorin
Mark Schmal - Asamat
Maxim Kowalewski - Kasbitsch
Jeanette Spassova - Bela
Peter Danzeisen - Diener
Ingo Hülsmann - Grusnickij
Hans Diehl - Doktor
Hans Diehl - Werner
Caroline Junghanns - Princess
Caroline Junghanns - Prinzessin Mary
u.a.

RADIO: Guter Tropfen aus Georgien. Weinlese in Kachetien. Von Henning Hübert (dradio.de)

Wachleute eines Sicherheitsdienstes sitzen plaudernd auf einer weiß angestrichenen Parkbank vor dem Museum. Das zeigt die großbürgerliche Lebensart seines Erbauers inmitten kleinbäuerlicher Bescheidenheit: 1886 erbaute der georgische Schriftsteller und Militär Alexander Tschawtschawadse das Weingut Zinandali samt Weinkellerei an einem Hang wenig östlich von der kachetischen Provinzhauptstadt Telawi.

Die Lebensart von damals ist ein Besuchermagnet. Im Garten, an einer Palme, posiert ein Hochzeitspaar - die Braut ganz in weiß, der Bräutigam mit schwarzer Tracht, Wams, Dolch und stilisierten Patronenhülsen an der Brust. Eine Besuchergruppe nach der nächsten strömt hinein in das Schlösschen. Die meisten haben Führung durch Museum und Weinkeller sowie eine anschließende Weinprobe gebucht. Zu Zeiten der Sowjetunion war Zinandali Erholungsort für die Nomenklatur. Ganz in der Nachbarschaft soll bis heute Eduard Schewardnadse ein Wochenendhaus haben. Doch die Führerin Marina Msuqnishwili spricht viel lieber vom vergangenen Glanz des 19. Jahrhunderts:

"Also das ist das Hausmuseum des genialen georgischen Dichters Alexander Tschawtschawadse. Er wurde in Petersburg geboren. Er war Generalleutnant und hat an vielen Kämpfen teilgenommen. Alexanders Vater war georgischer Botschafter in Russland. Die Mutter war eine Adlige und eine gute Erzieherin ihres Sohnes. Sie starb in Tblisi, begraben ist sie hier in Kachetien im Kloster Neu-Shoamta, 20 Kilometer von hier entfernt."

Gezeigt werden die beiden wohl ältesten Klaviere und Flügel, die es in Georgien gibt - 200 Jahre sind sie alt. Sie stehen im Salon und stammen aus Deutschland, Marke Becker. Der Salon des Offiziers - Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts ein Sommertreffpunkt der geistigen Elite.

"Alexander Tschawtschawadse war ein sehr gebildeter Mensch, er beherrschte sechs Sprachen. Dieses Haus war das Sommerhaus des Dichters, meistens lebte die Familie des Dichters in Tbilisi. Sie waren sehr gastfreundlich. Hier waren zu verschiedenen Zeiten der französische Schriftsteller Dumas, Professor Koch von der Universität Jena, russische Schriftsteller wie Lermontow und Puschkin."

Den runden Esstisch ziert weit gereistes Porzellan aus Limoges und Meißen. Vom Speisesaal hat man einen Blick auf den schneebedeckten Kaukasus. Ausnahmsweise wird auch die Kristallglocke angeschlagen, die schon den Dichter zum Essen rief und ansonsten still zwischen Sauciere und Weingläsern liegt.

Das Signal für den Abgang Richtung Weinkeller und Weinprobe. In einem tief unter der Erde liegenden Keller lagern bis heute über 16.000 Flaschen bei konstant 10 bis 14 Grad. Die ältesten sind von 1814. Fotos von ihnen darf man nicht machen. Und natürlich auch nicht den echten Staub von den Etiketten abwischen. Ob sie noch trinkbar sind? Seit Sowjetzeiten soll keine Flasche aus dem 19. Jahrhundert mehr neu verkorkt oder aufgefüllt worden sein.

"Alexander Tschawtschawadse war selbst ein großer Wirtschaftler. Er hatte große Weinberge. Und sein Wein hatte eine hohe Qualität und sein Wein konkurrierte mit französischen Weinen. Hier im ersten Stock haben wir einen Raum, in dem man Wein probieren kann, und hier gibt es auch rote und weiße Weine. Rote Weine namens Zinandali."

Seit Tausenden von Jahren läuft das Keltern im Weinland Georgien anders ab als in den Anbaugebieten Europas. Die Reiseführerin Nino Kurtskhalia kann das im Weinkeller von Zinandali erklären:

"Das unterscheidet man von den Europäischen: Damit man Maische und Saft von den Weintrauben nicht voneinander trennt, hält man sie zusammen in einem Kessel für ein paar Tage. Damit diese Maische eine eigene Farbe und einen eigenen Geschmack gibt und auch das Tannin dabei ist und auch die Stärken. Dann nach ein paar Tagen trennt man schon diesen Saft und die Maische voneinander. Dann braucht man noch Zeit. Manche kommen in die Tongefäße, manche in Holzfässer, um dort zu altern. Und mit der Maische macht man den georgischen Schnaps namens Tschatscha."

Früherer Hauptabnehmer georgischen Weins war der Nachbarstaat Russland. Doch die Beziehungen liegen auf Eis, 2008 gab es einen Krieg zwischen beiden Staaten, der Georgien die Kontrolle über zwei Provinzen kostete. Bereits 2006 hatte Russland ein Handelsembargo für georgische Waren verhängt. Der Hauptexportmarkt brach weg - offiziell haben die georgischen Winzer darauf mit einer Qualitätsoffensive reagiert. Heute wollen sich georgische Spitzenwinzer mit spanischen und französischen Tropfen messen lassen. Aber auch die Masse der Weingüter hat nach dem ersten Schock durch das Handelsembargo eine Lösung gefunden: Georgischer Wein finde auch heute noch trotz Verbots seinen Weg nach Norden über Kazbegi und den hohen Kaukasus hinein nach Russland, verrät Nino Kurtskhalia:

"Macht man das, natürlich offiziell, sondern illegal. Das ist also durch Armenien. Zuerst bringt man die Waren nach Armenien. Und dann werden in Armenien diese Waren als armenische ausgegeben. Und dann bringt man sie wiederum durch Georgien nach Russland. Und durch Aserbaidschan geht es auch. Alles, was man erntet, kann man in Georgien auch verkaufen oder exportieren."

Darauf wird dann noch angestoßen mit einem abschließenden Glas Zinandali in Zinandali.

Quelle: www.dradio.de

LITERATUR: Einsam und traurig. Von Thomas Rothschild (freitag.de)

Helden: Thomas Bernhard und Lermontow-Spuren einer entfernten Verwandtschaft

(freitag.de) Im Vorwort zur zweiten Auflage seines bekanntesten Werks, Ein Held unserer Zeit, beklagt sich Michail Jurjewitsch Lermontow: »Unser Publikum gleicht dem Provinzler, der aus der Unterhaltung zweier Diplomaten einander feindlich gesinnter Höfe die Überzeugung gewinnt, dass sie der gegenseitigen zärtlichsten Freundschaft zuliebe ihre Regierung betrügen.« Und er mokiert sich über jene Leser, die sehr feinsinnig bewiesen, »der Verfasser habe sich und seine Bekannten porträtiert…« 

Der ganze Text in Freitag (10. Februar 2006, S. 14)

LITERATUR:

Ein Held unserer Zeit: die kalte Seele

Rezensiert von Maike Albath (dradio.de)

Überheblicher Lebemann mit kalter Seele - Michail Lermontovs Novellensammlung "Ein Held unserer Zeit" ist ein Klassiker der russischen Literatur. Im Mittelpunkt des fünfteiligen Novellenkranzes steht ein überheblicher Lebemann mit einer kalten Seele. Pečorin heißt dieser "Held unserer Zeit", und er wird uns aus drei verschiedenen Perspektiven präsentiert.

Lermontov, Angehöriger des Leibhusarenregiments, Sohn eines schottischen Offiziers, zugleich Abkömmling eines russischen Adelsgeschlechts und wegen seiner Frauengeschichten allenthalben verrufen, landete an der Front im Kaukasus. Der aufmüpfige Lyriker, durch derartige Repressalien nicht zu verschrecken, drehte den Spieß um und nutzte den Kaukasus als Reservoir für seine Dichtung. Lermontov legt mit Ein Held unserer Zeit auch eine ungeschonte Selbstanalyse vor.

Michail Lermontov: Ein Held unserer Zeit

Aus dem Russischen übersetzt und herausgegeben von Peter Urban.

Friedenauer Presse, Berlin 2006, 256 Seiten, 22, 50 Euro