Mikhail Lermontov

• 1. Introduction

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  Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov was a Russian Romantic writer, poet and painter, born in Moscow on the 15th of October 1814. Russians sometimes called him the poet of the Caucasus. After Alexander Pushkin died in 1837, many regarded Lermontov as the most important Russian poet alive. His literary career lasted only about six years, yet it left behind more than thirty large poems, around 600 minor ones, a novel and five dramas. He was killed in a duel in 1841 by a fellow officer he had known since cadet school. That officer, Nikolai Martynov, had once described him as a young man so far ahead of everyone else as to be beyond comparison. How did a sickly, bow-legged boy raised by a doting grandmother become a writer whose prose founded the Russian psychological novel? Why did a poem written about another man's death change the course of his own? And how did a name that traced back to a Scottish officer end up carved into Russian literature?

• 2. Scottish Blood And A Grandmother's War

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  The Lermontov family traced its paternal line to the Scottish family of Learmonth, and to Yuri, or George, Learmonth, a Scottish officer in Polish-Lithuanian service who settled in Russia in the middle of the 17th century. He had been captured by Russian troops in Poland in the early 17th century, during the reign of Mikhail Fyodorovich Romanov, which ran from 1613 to 1645. Family legend held that George Learmonth descended from the 13th-century Scottish poet Thomas the Rhymer, also known as Thomas Learmonth. The poet's father, Yuri Petrovich Lermontov, followed a military career and rose to captain, then married the sixteen-year-old Maria Mikhaylovna Arsenyeva, a wealthy heiress of the aristocratic Stolypin family. Maria's mother, Elizaveta Arsenyeva, born Stolypina, considered the marriage a mismatch and deeply disliked her son-in-law. The marriage proved ill-suited and the couple soon grew apart. Maria's health declined, she developed tuberculosis, and she died on the 27th of February 1817, aged only 21. Nine days after her death, a final row broke out at Tarkhany, and Yuri rushed away to his Kropotovo estate in Tula Governorate, where his five sisters lived. Yelizaveta Arsenyeva fought to keep her grandson, promising to disinherit the boy if his father took him away. The two sides agreed that the boy would stay with his grandmother until he turned sixteen. At the age of three, Lermontov began a spoilt and luxurious life with his grandmother. That bitter feud became the plot of his early drama Menschen und Leidenschaften, written in 1830, whose protagonist Yuri strongly resembled the young Mikhail.

• 3. Tarkhany And The Mountains

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  In Tarkhany the doting grandmother spared no expense on the best schooling money could buy. Lermontov became fluent in French and German, learned to play several musical instruments, and proved a gifted painter. His health, though, was fragile. He suffered from scrofula and rickets, the latter accounting for his bow-leggedness, and he was watched closely by a French doctor named Anselm Levis. Colonel Capet, a prisoner of war from Napoleon's army who settled in Russia after 1812, was the boy's first and best-loved governor. A German tutor named Levy introduced him to Goethe and Schiller, and an English teacher, Mr. Windson, was recommended by the Uvarov family. The intellectual atmosphere resembled that of Pushkin's youth, though the dominance of French was giving way to English, and Lamartine shared popularity with Byron. Looking for a better climate, Arsenyeva took the boy to the Caucasus twice, in 1819 and 1820, and again in the summer of 1825 when the nine-year-old's health worsened. The mountains stirred him deeply. "Caucasian mountains for me are sacred," he later wrote. It was there that he experienced his first romantic passion, falling for a nine-year-old girl. His German governess, Christina Rhemer, a religious woman, taught him that every man, even a serf, deserved respect. By his own later account, written under the name Sasha Arbenin, he was an impressionable boy passionately in love with all things heroic, yet emotionally cold and occasionally sadistic, taking out a fearful and arrogant temper on his grandmother's garden, on insects, and on small animals.

• 4. Schoolrooms And A University Quit

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  In autumn 1827 Lermontov and his grandmother moved to Moscow, and in February 1829 the fourteen-year-old joined the fifth form of Moscow University's boarding school for the children of the nobility. His personal tutor there was the poet Alexey Merzlyakov. He read widely from his vast home library, which held books by Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Krylov, Zhukovsky and Pushkin. His cousin Yekaterina Sushkova described him as married to a hefty volume of Byron. By 1829 he had written several of his well-known early poems, including the original version of The Demon, and Byron remained his major source of inspiration despite his tutors' efforts to divert him. Alongside his poetic gifts grew a taste for poisonous wit and cruel, sardonic humor, his caricatures matched only by his well-aimed epigrams. In April 1830 the boarding school was turned into an ordinary gymnasium, and Lermontov, like many fellow students, quit. In August 1830 he enrolled in Moscow University's philological faculty, but he kept apart from the radical student circles led by Vissarion Belinsky, Nikolai Stankevich and Alexander Hertzen. A fellow student named Wistengof admitted there was something alluring in his firm moroseness. A year into his studies the family discord reached its final act. Yuri Lermontov left Arsenyeva's house for good and died a short time later of consumption, a loss reflected in poems such as "The Terrible Fate of Father and Son." Both his early dramas, Menschen und Leidenschaften and A Strange Man, end with a protagonist killing himself. In his second year Lermontov clashed with his professors, and on the 18th of June 1832 he left with a two-year-graduate certificate rather than face exams.

• 5. The Hussar's Double Life

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  In mid-1832 Lermontov traveled to Saint Petersburg hoping to continue at the university there, but it proved impossible, and instead he entered the prestigious School of Cavalry Junkers and Ensign of the Guard. On the 14th of November 1832 he joined the Life-Guard Hussar regiment as a junior officer. Books were a rarity there and reading was frowned upon. He learned to enjoy the mix of drills, discipline, drinking and wenching, and a horse-riding accident left him with a broken knee and a limp. In a letter to Maria Lopukhina dated the 4th of August 1833, he wrote that the time of his dreams had passed, and that he now wanted material pleasures, happiness that could be bought with gold. He concealed his literary ambitions from friends, including his relatives Alexey Stolypin and Nikolai Yuriev, and produced scabrous verses such as "Ulansha" and "The Hospital" for the school magazine under the names "Count Diarbekir" and "Stepanov." When his poem "Khadji-Abrek" was published in July 1835, without his consent, many refused to take him seriously. After graduation in November 1834 he joined the regiment at Tsarskoye Selo, sharing lodgings with his friend Svyatoslav Rayevsky. His grandmother's lavish support, with personal chefs and coachmen, let him plunge into high society. Yevdokiya Rostopchina remembered him as sardonic, caustic, smart and independent, the soul of high society. During what he later called four wasted years he finished Demon and wrote Masquerade, his best-known drama. Through Rayevsky he met Andrey Krayevsky, who would later edit the influential journal Otechestvennye Zapiski.

• 6. The Poem That Made And Broke Him

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  The death of Pushkin, widely suspected to be the result of an intrigue, set Russian high society alight. Lermontov, agitated to the verge of a nervous breakdown, was vexed by Petersburg ladies sympathizing with D'Anthès, the man he even considered challenging to a duel. His grandmother sent for the doctor Arendt, who had spent Pushkin's last hours with him and told Lermontov exactly what had happened. The poem Death of the Poet, its final part written impromptu in the course of several minutes, was spread by Rayevsky and caused an uproar. Its last sixteen lines all but accused the powerful pillars of high society of complicity, portraying them as a greedy throng huddling about the throne. The poem propelled Lermontov to unprecedented fame, and popular opinion greeted him as Pushkin's heir. Alexander von Benckendorff, the founding head of the Tsar's Gendarmes and secret police and a distant relative of his grandmother, had to report the matter to Nicholas I, who had already received a copy subtitled "The Call for the Revolution" from an anonymous sender. Lermontov was arrested. On the 21st of January he was held in the Petropavlovskaya fortress, and on the 25th of February he was banished as a cornet to the Nizhegorodsky dragoons in the Caucasus. During the investigation, in what he himself considered an act of cowardice, he implicated Rayevsky, who suffered a harsher punishment, deported to the Olonets Governorate for two years to serve as a lowly clerk.

• 7. Exiles Among The Mountain Tribes

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  In the Caucasus Lermontov found himself quite at home, drawn to the stern virtues of the mountain tribesmen he had to fight and to the scenery he had loved as a child. He studied local languages such as Kumyk, wrote some of his finest poems, and painted extensively. "The mountain air acts like balsam for me, all spleen has gone to hell," he wrote to Rayevsky. By year's end he had traveled the whole Caucasian line, from Kizlyar Bay to the Taman Peninsula. He met A. A. Khastatov, whose stories fed into A Hero of Our Time, and a Dr. Mayer who became the prototype for Doctor Werner. Not everyone was charmed; the Decembrist Mikhail Nazimov later wrote that they hardly understood each other and found his views chaotic and vague. His first exile was short, thanks to Benckendorff's intercession, and his return journey, hailed as Pushkin's heir, ran through Moscow and Saint Petersburg. A second exile followed in early 1840, after he insulted Ernest de Barante, son of the French ambassador, in the presence of Princess Shcherbatova. The resulting duel took place almost at the exact spot by the Tchernaya Retchka where Pushkin had been fatally wounded. Lermontov was slightly injured, arrested and jailed, where Belinsky visited him. Sent back to the Caucasus, he joined General Galafeyev's unit and distinguished himself in hand-to-hand combat at the Battle of the Valerik River on the 11th of July 1840, the basis for his poem Valerik. He led a unit of Cossack troopers charged with heading into the enemy first, and became immensely popular with men whom others called the international gang of reckless thugs.

• 8. Mashuk And The Buried Coffin

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  On the 9th of May 1841 Lermontov arrived in Stavropol, then on a whim changed course to Pyatigorsk and sent word that he had fallen ill. A commission recommended treatment at Mineralnye Vody, but he embarked instead on a weeks-long spree. "I feel I'm left with very little of my life," he told his friend A. Merinsky on the 8th of July, a week before his death. In Pyatigorsk his cadet-school friend Nikolai Martynov took to dressing as a Circassian and affecting the manners of a romantic hero. Lermontov teased him mercilessly until Martynov could stand it no longer, and on the 25th of July 1841 he challenged Lermontov to a duel. The fight took place two days later at the foot of Mashuk mountain. Lermontov allegedly let it be known that he would shoot into the air. Martynov shot first and hit him in the heart, killing him on the spot. On the 30th of July Lermontov was buried without military honors, and thousands attended. In January 1842 the Tsar allowed the coffin to be moved to Tarkhany, where he was laid in the family cemetery. His grandmother suffered a minor stroke on hearing the news and died in 1845. In his lifetime Lermontov had published only one slender collection of poems, in 1840. Many of his verses were discovered afterward in his notebooks, and his name later traveled far: a town in Russia granted municipal status in 1956, the cruise liner MS Mikhail Lermontov launched in 1970, and the minor planet 2222 Lermontov discovered in 1977 all carry it forward.