Mikhail Lermontov

Mikhail Lermontov (Moscow, 1814 – Pyatigorsk, 1841) was a Russian Romantic writer and poet, sometimes called «the poet of the Caucasus». He wrote in Russian and became the most important Russian poet after Alexander Pushkin was killed in a duel in 1837. Lermontov died in a duel himself four years later, in strikingly similar circumstances. His reputation rests on more than verse: his prose helped establish the tradition of the psychological novel in Russia, and his work is still widely read outside the Russian-speaking world.

He was born in Moscow into a family that traced its origins to a Scottish officer who had settled in Russia in the seventeenth century. According to family legend, that officer descended from the medieval poet Thomas the Rhymer, though this claim is hard to verify. His father followed a military career, as his own father had, while his mother, Maria Arsenyeva, died of tuberculosis in 1817 at only twenty-one. After a bitter dispute between his father and his maternal grandmother, Yelizaveta Arsenyeva, the boy was raised by his grandmother, who gave him every advantage money could buy. He grew up at the family estate in Tarkhany with French, German and English tutors, and he learned languages, music and painting. His health was fragile, however, and the tense atmosphere of the household made him solitary and withdrawn.

His journeys to the Caucasus in 1819, 1820 and 1825 left a lasting mark on him. Years later he wrote that those mountains were sacred to him, and their presence runs through much of his poetry. In 1827 he moved with his grandmother to Moscow, and in 1830 he began university studies, which he abandoned after taking part in student protests against the academic authorities. In 1832 he entered the Military Academy, and from then on his life was bound to the army, though he never stopped writing. As early as 1830 he had completed an early drama, Menschen und Leidenschaften, whose protagonist bears a strong resemblance to the author himself.

Pushkin's death inspired his poem «Death of the Poet» (1837), which expressed anger at the tragedy and at the society that had allowed it. The poem brought him immediate fame, but also his first exile to the Caucasus because of its controversial content. There he produced some of his finest prose and verse, among them the novel A Hero of Our Time (1840), which became his best-known work. It portrays a disillusioned and complex protagonist. He returned briefly to Saint Petersburg, but another duel brought a second banishment to the south.

He was killed in 1841 in a duel with a fellow officer, Nikolai Martynov, near Pyatigorsk, at the age of twenty-six. His death was widely felt as the loss of one of Russia's most promising literary talents. His legacy endures in his poetry, his fiction and his way of exploring the inner lives of his characters, an approach that shaped later generations of Russian novelists.