Short answers, pulled from the story.
Mikhail Lermontov was a Russian Romantic writer, poet and painter, born in Moscow on the 15th of October 1814 and killed in a duel in 1841. After Alexander Pushkin's death in 1837 he was regarded as the most important Russian poet, and his prose founded the tradition of the Russian psychological novel.
Mikhail Lermontov was killed in a duel at the foot of Mashuk mountain in 1841. His cadet-school friend Nikolai Martynov, whom Lermontov had teased mercilessly, challenged him on the 25th of July 1841, shot first two days later, and hit him in the heart, killing him on the spot.
Mikhail Lermontov was first exiled to the Caucasus in 1837 after his poem Death of the Poet, written after Pushkin's death, was read as an attack on Russian high society and even subtitled "The Call for the Revolution." A second exile followed in 1840 after a duel with Ernest de Barante, the French ambassador's son.
Mikhail Lermontov wrote the novel A Hero of Our Time, published in 1840, along with more than thirty large poems, around 600 minor ones, and five dramas, all in a literary career lasting about six years. His best-known works include the poems Demon, Mtsyri, Borodino and Death of the Poet, and the drama Masquerade.
Mikhail Lermontov descended on his father's side from the Scottish family of Learmonth, traced to George Learmonth, a Scottish officer who settled in Russia in the middle of the 17th century. Family legend linked him to the 13th-century Scottish poet Thomas the Rhymer. Lermontov was raised by his grandmother Elizaveta Arsenyeva after his mother Maria died on the 27th of February 1817.
Mikhail Lermontov is called the poet of the Caucasus because the region's mountains, which he first visited as a child, deeply inspired his poetry and prose. He wrote that the Caucasian mountains were sacred to him, studied local languages such as Kumyk, and drew on his exiles there for works including A Hero of Our Time and Valerik.