Who Was Lermontov?

Zabolotsky painted him in 1837 for his grandmother: an unbuttoned hussar jacket, gold cords, a face that is not yet the legend of the duel. The Tretyakov still hangs it. Encyclopaedia Britannica calls Mikhail Lermontov the leading Russian Romantic poet after Pushkin and the author of A Hero of Our Time (1840), a novel that would press on later writers. He was dead at twenty-six. The shortness is not a romantic decoration. It is the fact that makes the path look steeper than it was. He had already changed voice more than once: Byronic apprentice, angry elegist, Caucasian observer, and then a prose so clear that Chekhov, the Poetry Foundation records, said he knew no better language than Lermontov’s.

He was born in Moscow on 3 October 1814, 15 October New Style. His mother, an aristocrat, died when he was three. His father, a retired officer, was pushed aside by the wealthy grandmother who raised the boy on her estate in the Penza country and, from 1827, in Moscow. Poetry Foundation’s life is blunt about the marriage and the separation. The grandmother wanted a European education and got one. French was giving way, the 1911 Britannica notes, to a taste for English; Byron and Lamartine sat on the same table. The child had already seen the Caucasus with her, at about ten. Exile would later send him back to a landscape that was not foreign. It was a memory with mountains in it.

In 1830 he entered Moscow University, then a noisy centre of talk: serfdom, philosophy, the shadow of 1825. Britannica names classmates in that air — Herzen among them. He left after two years, the 1911 account says, after trouble with a teacher, and went to the cadet school in St Petersburg. In 1834 he became a guards officer. The army was a career he kept and a costume he used. Early narrative poems — The Corsair, The Prisoner of the Caucasus in a Byronic vein — show a young man learning intensity from a foreign model. The model would not be enough. He needed a Russia that could hold a private weather and a public insult in the same line.

The 1838 page from Otechestvennye Zapiski is print, not myth: verse in a thick journal, a name the capital could already find. The turning year was the one before. When Pushkin died in January 1837, Lermontov wrote Death of the Poet, an elegy that did not stop at grief. Poetry Foundation’s summary is the right degree of heat: it accused high circles of a part in the death, was copied by hand across the city, and made the young officer famous in a way that is also a police file. He was arrested and sent to the Caucasus. His grandmother and the poet Zhukovsky helped bring him back in 1838. Critics began to speak of an heir. Heirs in Russian literature are a dangerous job. The court had already noticed him.

What the elegy did, in plain terms, was refuse a private funeral. Pushkin had been killed in a duel that the capital already understood as a court scandal dressed as honour. Lermontov’s poem, copied in notebooks, treated the killer as an instrument and the surrounding world as the cause. Poetry Foundation’s life is enough: it accused the high courts of a part in the death. He was twenty-two. The Caucasus, as punishment, gave him material he already loved. That irony is not a consolation. It is how a police measure became a landscape in Russian verse.

The Caucasus did what a salon could not. Britannica’s life is plain: twice, in 1837 and in 1840, he was exiled to Caucasian regiments for verse the authorities read as politics. He studied languages and local life while remaining a soldier. The mountains in his poems are not wallpaper. They are a moral climate — steep, indifferent, a place where a European officer can discover that his boredom is not interesting to the rock. Mtsyri (1840), a novice’s confession of three days of freedom, and Demon, revised across years and finished in the late 1830s, are the long Romantic machines. A fallen angel loves a mortal and ruins what he touches. The plot is old. The heat is Lermontov’s: desire as a form of exile.

Mtsyri is the cleaner of the two long poems, and the one a first reader can hold. A boy taken from the mountains grows up in a monastery and breaks out for three days: a storm, a fight with a leopard, a girl at a stream, then the fever that returns him to the walls. He would rather die having seen his country than live tonsured and safe. The plot is a Romantic machine. The feeling is homesickness so physical it becomes action. Demon is larger and stranger: an immortal who cannot love without destroying. Schoolrooms still assign both. The honest order is Mtsyri first, then the Demon if you want the excess Vrubel later painted.

Vrubel painted the seated Demon in 1890, half a century later: heavy lids, a body of mineral colour, a sky that looks like a wound. It is not Lermontov’s drawing. It is what a later painter heard in the poem — isolation with a beautiful face. Pasternak would dedicate an early book to that Demon. Schoolrooms still meet the poem as a legend of the Caucasus. Read it, if you read it, for the odd tenderness inside the blasphemy. The Demon is tired of evil in the way Pechorin is tired of pleasure. That rhyme between the poem and the novel is the creative path in miniature: Romantic furniture, modern emptiness.

The flying Demon of 1899 is the same fatigue in motion. Lermontov’s lyric gift, Chekhov’s praise aside, is a language that can be both ornamental and exact. Masquerade, the verse drama of 1835, puts jealousy in a Petersburg ball and does not let society off as scenery. The lyrics — night roads, a sail, a cliff — are still recitable because the feeling is large and the diction, at its best, does not pant. Pushkin had made Russian light enough for speech. Lermontov made it tense enough for a man who cannot forgive the world for being the world. The difference is not a contest. It is two instruments.

He also drew and painted. Britannica notes the painting alongside the early verse. The Caucasus in his pictures is the same country as in the poems: rock, distance, a human figure small against it. The gift matters because the novel’s looking is visual — a road, a hut, a face at a spa — before it is psychological. Pechorin notices like a draughtsman. That is one reason the prose still feels modern. It does not explain a mood until it has placed the room.

Then the novel, which is why a visitor who does not read verse still needs him. A Hero of Our Time appeared in 1840. It is five stories around Grigory Pechorin, a young officer in the Caucasus, told out of chronological order: a traveller meets a captain who tells of Bela; the traveller finds Pechorin’s papers; the papers give “Taman,” “Princess Mary,” and “The Fatalist.” Britannica calls it a reflection on a generation and a portrait that would mark later fiction. The 1911 Britannica adds a rumour that the book helped cause the duel in which he died. That is too tidy a moral. What is sure is that readers recognised themselves and were not grateful.

Pechorin, gentlemen, is in fact a portrait, but not of one man only: he is a composite portrait, made up of all the vices which flourish, fullgrown, amongst the present generation.

The preface is a feint and a dare. Lermontov tells the shocked that if they can believe in stage villains they can believe in Pechorin, and that the wound is the truth in the portrait. Pechorin kidnaps a Circassian girl, toys with a smuggler’s world in Taman, makes a wreck of a spa romance, and tests fate with a cocked pistol. He is intelligent, brave, and emotionally cheap. The novel does not ask you to like him. It asks whether a society that produces such a man can still call him an accident. Dostoevsky’s underground and Tolstoy’s officers are later weathers. This is an early, mountain-clear version of the same unease: a hero who is not a model.

Vrubel’s Pechorin of 1891 is almost a fashion plate: the uniform, the stare, the man who will be bored again tomorrow. In “Bela,” the captain repeats the officer’s own confession, and Wisdom and Murray’s English keeps the chill.

Whether I am a fool or a villain I know not; but this is certain, I am also most deserving of pity—perhaps more than she. My soul has been spoiled by the world, my imagination is unquiet, my heart insatiate.

To me everything is of little moment. I become as easily accustomed to grief as to joy, and my life grows emptier day by day. One expedient only is left to me—travel.

Pity is Pechorin’s last luxury. He would give his life for Bela and is already tired of her. The sentence is not wisdom. It is diagnosis, spoken by the patient. That is why the book still reads as if it were later than its date. A Romantic hero suffered beautifully. Pechorin explains himself as if explanation were a cigarette. The prose — Chekhov’s “no better language” — is the other half of the feat. Short sentences, travel notes, a duel at dawn, a smuggler’s hut: the novel taught Russian fiction that a psychological study could look like an adventure story and still refuse adventure’s comforts.

“Taman” is the chapter to steal for a first hour. A night town on the Black Sea, a blind boy, a smuggling boat, a girl who sings and then tries to drown the narrator: it reads like an adventure and behaves like a theft of certainty. Pechorin is almost killed and is mostly irritated. The clean line of the prose — room, shore, song — is what later realists heard. You can feel Pushkin’s speech in it, tightened. Nothing is explained that the officer would not notice. That discipline is new. Romantic fog stays in Demon. Here the fog is weather, and weather can drown you.

“Princess Mary” is the longest room: a watering-place, a rival Grushnitsky, a girl who believes in a novel, a killing that is also a piece of theatre. “The Fatalist” asks whether predestination makes a man braver or only more theatrical, and then stages the question with a gun and a drunk Cossack. Lermontov the poet of the Demon and Lermontov the writer of Taman are the same hand: one likes excess, the other likes a clean line, and the novel is where they agree to share a hero.

His second exile came in 1840. On the way back toward his regiment he stopped at Pyatigorsk. On 15 July 1841, 27 July New Style, he was killed in a duel with another officer, Nikolai Martynov. Britannica’s dates are enough. Later paintings of the snow or the mountain are reconstructions, as Naumov’s Pushkin duel is a reconstruction. The 1911 Britannica, closer to the nineteenth century’s gossip, still treats the novel as if it had been a personal insult. Maybe it was, for someone. The work does not depend on the seconds and the barrier. It was already done: a handful of lyrics, two long poems, a play, and a small novel that behaves like a whole generation’s mirror.

Readers still set him beside Onegin, which is fair and not a copy. Pushkin’s man is bored in drawing rooms and a country garden; Lermontov’s is bored under bullets and at a spa. Both are clever. Pechorin is crueler because he watches himself being cruel and calls the watching honesty. The novel’s broken chronology — we meet the legend of Bela before we read the diary — is part of the diagnosis. You do not get to build a hero in order. You get fragments, as the generation did after 1825, when public hope had been punished and private style had to do the rest. Britannica’s “profound influence on later Russian writers” is this method as much as this character.

Masquerade and the lyrics are the other wing. The play’s jealousy is a social machine: a Petersburg ball, a rumour, a man who would rather destroy than be unsure. The short poems last because they can hold a whole weather in a few stanzas — a sail, a cliff, a road at night — without telling you what to feel beyond the feeling. Chekhov’s praise of the language, as the Poetry Foundation records it, is a craftsman’s compliment. It is also a map: if you want Russian that is both musical and exact, this is a place to listen, even if you come only for the novel.

How to begin depends on your patience for verse. If you want the shock that made him famous, Death of the Poet is the document — grief as accusation — even in a plain prose rendering of its argument. If you want the Romantic mountain, Mtsyri or Demon. If you want the reason he still sits beside Pushkin in a conversation about Russian prose, open A Hero of Our Time at “Taman,” then “Bela,” then the preface last, as a dare. The book is short. It is not small. Pushkin had died with a language finished enough for other people to use. Lermontov used it at once, at full tension, and then the mountain took the rest of the years he might have had.

What remains is not only a Byronic costume. It is a way of looking at a clever man as a social fact. Pechorin travels because travel is the last stimulant. Russia, in these pages, is a garrison, a spa, a road, and a sky that does not care. Later novels would add cities and families and God. They would not need to invent the empty centre. Lermontov had already given it a name and a uniform. That is a cold gift, and a lasting one. A visitor who learns a few lines of the lyrics and then reads the novel has not done a school exercise. They have heard the second voice of the language’s morning: not Pushkin’s ease, but the unquiet heart that ease could not soothe.