Mikhail Lermontov: Six Years, and the Whole Inheritance
In July 1841, at the foot of Mashuk mountain outside Pyatigorsk, a twenty-six-year-old officer is said to have announced that he would fire into the air. Nikolai Martynov — his old cadet-school classmate, a man Lermontov had teased past endurance for dressing up as a Circassian — shot first and hit him in the heart. Lermontov died on the spot. He had been publishing for roughly six years. In that time he produced more than thirty major poems, some six hundred minor ones, five dramas and the novel that invented Russian psychological fiction.
The Grandmother's Fortress
He was born in Moscow on 15 October 1814 to Yuri Petrovich Lermontov, a captain of modest means, and Maria Mikhaylovna Arsenyeva, of the grand Stolypin family. The paternal line descended from a Scottish officer, Yuri Learmonth, who settled in Russia in the seventeenth century. The marriage was a disaster. Maria died of tuberculosis on 27 February 1817, aged twenty-one, and her mother, Elizaveta Arsenyeva, went to war for the child — threatening to disinherit him if his father took him. Yuri retreated to his Tula estate and effectively vanished. He died of consumption around 1831, and the loss detonated in his son's writing; the early dramas *Menschen und Leidenschaften* (1830) and *A Strange Man* (1831) both end in suicide.
Elizaveta raised him at Tarkhany, in what is now Penza Oblast, in what he later called a spoilt and luxurious life. He was a sickly child — scrofula and rickets, the latter leaving him bow-legged — and she bought him the best education money could reach: a former Napoleonic prisoner of war, a German tutor who handed him Goethe and Schiller, an English tutor named Windson. He came out fluent in French and German, competent on several instruments, and a genuinely gifted painter. She also took him three times to the Caucasus, in 1819, 1820 and 1825, for the mineral springs. "Caucasian mountains for me are sacred," he wrote later. It was the one landscape that never disappointed him.
Byron in a Boarding School
The family moved to Moscow in 1827, and in February 1829 he entered the boarding school for noblemen's children attached to Moscow University, where the poet Alexey Merzlyakov tutored him privately. He was already writing — "Kavkazsky Plennik," "Oleg," an early version of "The Demon" — and already carrying Byron everywhere; his cousin Yekaterina Sushkova remembered a "clumsy bow-legged boy" who could not put the book down. He declined to join the radical student circles around Belinsky, Stankevich and Herzen, preferring an aristocratic set; classmates found him obnoxious, rough and daring, and somehow alluring in his firm moroseness. He entered the philological faculty in 1830 and left in June 1832 rather than face his examinations.
The Uniform
Refused a place at St Petersburg University, he enrolled instead in the School of Cavalry Junkers and joined the Life-Guard Hussars in November 1832. Martynov, the future killer, remembered him from those years as "the young man who was so far ahead of everybody else, as to be beyond comparison." Barracks life did not suit a bookish boy: reading was frowned on, a riding accident broke his knee and left him with a permanent limp. He adapted by splitting himself. In public he was, in Yevdokiya Rostopchina's description, sardonic, caustic and smart, brilliantly intelligent, rich and independent — the soul of high society. In private he finished "Demon," wrote "Boyarin Orsha" and the drama *Masquerade* (1835). He also wrote obscene barrack verse under pseudonyms, which damaged his reputation for years.
The Poem That Made and Broke Him
Pushkin's death in January 1837 undid him. He had probably never met the man, but he was disgusted by St Petersburg society's sympathy for the killer D'Anthès, and he wrote "Death of the Poet" at speed. The final sixteen lines accused the court itself — "the hangmen who kill liberty, genius, and glory" — and closed with the line about black blood not sufficing to expiate the poet's pure blood. Copies flew. Zhukovsky hailed a "new powerful talent"; the public simply called him Pushkin's heir. On 21 January he was arrested and held in the Peter and Paul Fortress, and on 25 February exiled to a dragoon regiment in the Caucasus. Under interrogation he named his friend Svyatoslav Rayevsky, who was deported to Olonets for two years — one of the least attractive episodes of his life.
Exile agreed with him. He rode the whole Caucasian line from Kizlyar Bay to Taman, studied Kumyk, painted, and met the people who would become his characters: Dr Mayer in Stavropol, the prototype for Doctor Werner; Khastatov, whose stories fed *A Hero of Our Time*. Benckendorff's intercession cut the sentence short.
Pechorin
Back in the capital, he was a celebrity. *Sovremennik* printed "Borodino," the 1812 epic told in the plain voice of a tired veteran. From 1839, *Otechestvennye Zapiski* serialised the tales that became *A Hero of Our Time* (1840): five linked narratives circling Pechorin, a disenchanted, doomed young nobleman, in which the author dissects his own generation. It contains a duel that eerily prefigures the one that killed him.
In early 1840 he insulted Ernest de Barante, son of the French ambassador; they duelled at the very spot where Pushkin had taken his fatal wound. Lermontov was scratched, arrested, visited in jail by Belinsky, and exiled again to the Tengin infantry regiment. He fought. At the Battle of the Valerik River on 11 July 1840 he led a Cossack unit into hand-to-hand combat, and General Galafeyev reported that "defying danger, [he] did an excellent job." He turned it into the poem "Valerik," which D. S. Mirsky called a missing link between Pushkin's "Bronze Horseman" and the battle scenes of *War and Peace*.
Why Mikhail Is Called a Genius
The case rests on compression and on prose. Lermontov's entire mature career lasted about six years, and inside it he wrote both the finest Romantic lyrics in Russian and the first Russian psychological novel — two achievements that usually belong to different careers, let alone different men. Mirsky, no soft touch, called "The Angel" (1831), written when Lermontov was sixteen, "arguably the finest Romantic verse ever written in Russian," and went further on the prose: "Lermontov's prose is the best Russian prose ever written," appreciable only by those who really know the language. Chekhov, who knew, said flatly: "I know no better language than that of Lermontov." Belinsky called *A Hero of Our Time* a masterpiece. The distinctive faculty is a cold analytic eye turned on the Romantic self — he could inhabit the Byronic pose and anatomise it in the same sentence, which is what makes Pechorin unkillable while a thousand other Byronic heroes have died of embarrassment.
The counter-case has serious names behind it. Nabokov thought the prose "inelegant... dry and drab... at times, almost as crude as Stendhal's in French." Mirsky himself found the Demon an operatic figure. The Decembrist Nazimov, meeting him in exile, dismissed him as a low-brow realist with chaotic, vague views. And much of the early work is straightforwardly derivative Byron. The honest verdict is that Lermontov's genius is a matter of velocity and of one or two perfect instruments rather than of breadth: he did not have time to become a great mind, and he did not need to.
Legacy
He was buried on 30 July 1841 without military honours, though thousands came; in January 1842 the Tsar allowed the coffin to be moved to Tarkhany. His grandmother had a stroke on hearing the news and died in 1845. Only one thin collection had appeared in his lifetime; three heavily censored volumes followed his death, and more verse kept surfacing from his notebooks. Vrubel painted the Demon; Pasternak dedicated *My Sister, Life* (1917) to his memory. A Russian town and minor planet 2222 carry his name. Lewis Bagby's judgement holds: Lermontov, closely examined, remains open and unfinished.
Achievements
- Notable work: A Hero of Our Time
- Genres: verse and narrative poetry
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