Neglected Author - Mikhail Lermontov

“What of it? If I die, I die. It will be no great loss to the world, and I am thoroughly bored with life. I am like a man yawning at a ball; the only reason he does not go home to bed is that his carriage has not arrived yet.” – A Hero of Our Time
 
Mikhail Lermontov was born in Moscow in 1814, the son of a retired army captain. He was descended from George Learmont, a Scottish officer who entered the Russian service in the early seventeenth century. At the age of three Lermontov’s mother died and he was brought up by his grandmother on her estate in Penzenskaya province. As a child he was often ill, and was taken to spas in the Caucasus, where the exotic landscapes created lasting impressions on him. In 1827 he returned to Moscow for his schooling, and became acquainted with the poetry of Pushkin and Byron. He became known as something of a wit, though known also for a cruel humour that expressed itself in caricatures (he was a talented artist) and wounding comments.
 
He entered Moscow University in 1830, where he was remembered for his aloofness and haughtiness, and for playing pranks on the professors. His student attitudes (common at the time) of dislike of the tyrannical tsarist state and its treatment of the serfs caused him to quarrel with a fogeyish professor, and he left the university in 1832, entering a cadet school in St Petersburg.
 
In 1834 he joined a Hussar Regiment with the rank of cornet in the Life Guards, and was stationed near St Petersburg. He appears to have spent a good deal of his time attending balls and dances, and producing poems and plays that often satirised aristocratic life. In 1837 one of Lermontov’s heroes, Pushkin, challenged his wife’s alleged lover to a duel and was killed. Lermontov’s reaction was to write an elegy, “The Death of a Poet”, which accused the Tsar and his court of complicity in, and being the cause of, Pushkin’s death. Because of this poem Tsar Nicholas I exiled Lermontov to a regiment in the Caucasus.
 
Lermontov was allowed to return to Moscow in 1838, during which time he published his masterpiece, the novel A Hero of Our Time. In January 1840, at a ball, Lermontov quarrelled with the son of the French Ambassador, a quarrel that resulted in a duel in which Lermontov was slightly wounded. Lermontov was once again exiled to the Caucasus, where he distinguished himself in skirmishes against insurgents.
 
A Hero of Our Time is divided into six short novellas (mostly set in the Caucasus and featuring smugglers, Cossacks, brigands, duelling soldiers, and aristocratic femmes fatales). They concern the exploits of a Byronic soldier called Pechorin, a proud and wilful man who’ll engage in any adventure (military or amorous) to relieve his ennui, and who leaves a string of broken hearts behind him.
 
The novel also prophetically describes the duel that killed Lermontov. In 1841 Lermontov stayed at the spa town of Pyatigorsk. At a party a fellow officer, Nicholas Martynov, took issue with Lermontov’s jokes and witticisms, and challenged Lermontov to a duel. The duel took place at the foot of Mount Mashuk on 27^th July 1841. Lermontov was killed instantly, aged 26. Many of his best poems were discovered posthumously in a pocket-book found on his body.
 
(A version of this post first appeared in The Chap magazine.)