On our left loomed the gorge, deep and black
Finally we get extracts from Pechorin’s diaries, written earlier and so predating both the meeting with the narrator and the story the narrator first heard in the mountains
I started reading this book in ebook form because I was so eager to get to it, prompted by the references in the notes of Sasha Sokolov’s Between Dog and Wolf which I’d just finished. So imagine the following scenario: I’m reading Lermontov’s book on my kindle, I’m listening to Mussorgsky’s Night on Bare Mountain prompted by another Sokolov reference, and I’ve got a google map open on my iPad in order to follow the path Lermontov’s narrator takes northwards from Tbilisi across the bare and brutal Caucasus mountains in a post-chaise drawn by three horses while a fierce storm rages and avalanches threaten to block the mountain passes through which he travels.
As my eyes scroll the kindle screen, I highlight each place mentioned and then mark the spot on the google map, and I continue to do that as I read about the characters’ further journeys eastwards towards the Caspian Sea, and westwards towards the Black Sea, until finally the action ends somewhere in the middle near the town of Pyatigorsk, in a scene where an exhausted horse drops dead on a mountain path. A hero of his time indeed!
Back in our time, I take a screen shot of my map, and mark up the path I’d followed in the tracks of all those exhausted horses. And as I do that, I think about that extra layer of ‘record’ we all engage in every day, via selfies, food shots, travel shots, plus multiple other ways we use our always-ready-to-shoot cameras, though they contain no film, but nevertheless record the film of our lives, a documentary that will exist long after after we ourselves have left the frame. (περισσότερα…)