Mikhail Lermontov (1814 - 1841) was a Russian Romantic poet, novelist, playwright and painter, widely regarded as the most important Russian poet after Alexander Pushkin. [1] He came to sudden fame in 1837 with "Death of the Poet", written in the days after Pushkin was fatally wounded in a duel, a work that led to his own arrest and exile to the Caucasus. His novel A Hero of Our Time (1840) introduced the disillusioned antihero Pechorin and shaped the development of the Russian psychological novel. [2] He was killed in a duel at the age of twenty-six.
Early life
Lermontov was born in Moscow on 3 October 1814 by the calendar then in use in Russia, into a family of modest gentry with distant Scottish ancestry. [1] His mother died when he was three, and after a quarrel his wealthy grandmother, Elizaveta Arsenyeva, took charge of his upbringing at her estate at Tarkhany, effectively excluding his father. The estrangement supplied a theme of isolation that runs through his early verse.
He was educated at the Moscow university boarding school, where he began writing poetry heavily influenced by Byron, and briefly attended Moscow University before transferring to the Nikolaevskaya Cavalry School in St Petersburg, from which he was commissioned into the Life Guards Hussars in 1834. [2] He was also a skilled draughtsman and painter, producing landscapes and scenes of the Caucasus.
Fame and exile
In January 1837 Pushkin was mortally wounded in a duel. Lermontov's response, "Death of the Poet", mourned him and accused the court aristocracy of driving him to his death. [3] The poem circulated rapidly in manuscript, made its author famous, and brought official retribution: he was arrested and transferred to a regiment in the Caucasus.
The mountains, the war against the highlanders and the peoples of the region became the dominant setting of his mature work, including the narrative poems "The Demon" and "The Novice" and the ballad-like "Song of the Merchant Kalashnikov". [1] Allowed to return to St Petersburg in 1838, he was exiled again in 1840 after a duel with the son of the French ambassador.
A Hero of Our Time
Published in 1840, A Hero of Our Time assembled five loosely connected narratives around the officer Grigory Pechorin, a clever, restless and destructive figure whom Lermontov presented in a preface not as a model but as a portrait composed of the vices of his generation. [2]
The novel's fractured chronology, its shifting narrators and its unsentimental interior analysis broke with existing Russian prose and influenced Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov. [4] The lishny chelovek, or superfluous man, that Pechorin embodies became a recurring type in nineteenth-century Russian literature.
Death and legacy
While taking the waters at Pyatigorsk in the Caucasus, Lermontov quarrelled with a former schoolfellow, Nikolai Martynov, whom he had mocked in company. The two fought a duel on 15 July 1841, and Lermontov was killed instantly. [1] He was twenty-six.
His collected verse, much of it published only after his death, established him alongside Pushkin at the centre of the Russian Romantic canon. [3] Several of his poems were set to music by composers including Anton Rubinstein, whose opera The Demon is based on his narrative poem, and his works remain standard reading in Russian schools.
