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Petsjorin had drained the cup of enjoyment; I had never tasted so much as a drop of it. Petsjorin was as blase as a splendid Russian Officer of the Guards could be; I, as full of expectation as an insignificant Copenhagen schoolboy could be.
No woman had ever loved me, still less had I ever let a woman pay with suffering the penalty of her affection for me. Never had any old friend of mine come up to me, delighted to see me again, and been painfully reminded, by my coolness and indifference, how little he counted for in my life. Petsjorin had done with life; I had not even begun to live.
Amongst those who eagerly sought for admission but never secured it was a young student, handsome, and with no small love of study, but stupid and pushing, for whom I, who continued to see myself in Lermontof's Petsjorin, cherished a hearty contempt, for the curious reason that he in every way reminded me of Petsjorin's fatuous and conceited adversary, Gruchnitski.
That which I called the daemonic I had encountered for the first time outside my own mind in Lermontof's hero. Petsjorin was compelled to act in pursuance of his natural bent, as though possessed by his own being. I felt myself in a similar manner possessed. I had met with the word Daimon and Daimones in Plato; Socrates urges that by daemons the Gods, or the children of the Gods, were meant.
For the first time I encountered in a book a chief character who was not a universal hero, a military or naval hero whom one had to admire and if possible imitate, but one in whom, with extreme emotion, I fancied that I recognised myself! I had certainly never acted as Petsjorin did, and never been placed in such situations as Petsjorin.
Of Heine's personality, of the poet's historic position, political tendencies or importance, I knew nothing; in these love-poems I looked more especially for those verses in which violent self-esteem and blase superiority to every situation find expression, because this fell in with the Petsjorin note, which, since reading Lermontof's novel, was the dominant one in my mind.
I ceased to preoccupy myself about my likeness to Petsjorin after having recovered from a half, or quarter, falling in love, an unharmonious affair, barren of results, which I had hashed up for myself through fanciful and affected reverie, and which made me realise the fundamental simplicity of my own nature, and I then shook off the unnatural physiognomy like a mask.
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