BETWEEN EARTH AND HEAVEN: LERMONTOV, BYRON, AND ROMANTIC GNOSTICISM.

One of the early redactions of Mikhail Lermontov's Demon (1829-1839) took its epigraph from Lord Byron's metaphysical drama Cain (1821). Although Lermontov removed the epigraph in subsequent redactions, its presence in the third redaction (1831) suggests the powerful influence that Byron's gnostic temptation narrative exerted over Lermontov's own story of demonic rebellion. This article reads Demon through the textological lens of its eight redactions, arguing that the poema's composition was largely shaped by Lermontov's attempts to confront and work against the dualist cosmogony that he at first adopted unproblematically from Byron. Two major shifts in the narrative allow the mature, "Caucasian" redactions of Demon to evade the tragic dualism of the early, Byronic drafts: first, the increasing agency of the Georgian princess Tamara as both a fully formed subject and a metonymic stand-in for the Caucasian landscape; and second, the synthesis of the initially split subjectivity of the selfdistancing Byronic poet and his hero into a single figure. Ultimately, Lermontov manages to evade the temptation of Cain's dualism by imbuing the Demon with a poetic sensitivity to the beautiful, an aesthetic category which transcends the materiality/ ideality split. In the process, Demon becomes a key to Lermontov's poetic laboratory, offering direct insight into Lermontov's evolving vision of Romantic subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]