Mikhail Lermontov

Born on October 15, 1814, in Moscow, Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov was raised at the estate of Tarkhany in Penza Province by his wealthy and possessive grandmother, Elizaveta Arsenyeva, who wrested him from his father after his mother’s early death , a childhood of privilege shadowed by emotional deprivation and chronic illness, including bouts of scrofula and rickets. He received an excellent home education in languages, music, and painting, and by his teens was composing poetry at a furious pace, producing over three hundred poems by the age of twenty. When Alexander Pushkin was killed in a duel in January 1837, the twenty-two-year-old Lermontov wrote "Death of a Poet," a scorching denunciation of the aristocratic society responsible, which circulated in manuscript across Russia and earned him immediate exile to the Caucasus by order of Tsar Nicholas I. The Caucasus became his artistic landscape: its mountains, warriors, and sense of wild freedom pervade his masterpiece, A Hero of Our Time (1840), a novel composed of five interlocking stories whose protagonist, Pechorin , bored, brilliant, destructive , founded the tradition of the Russian psychological novel and became the archetype of the “superfluous man.” His poetry, including "Mtsyri" (1840) and "The Demon" (completed 1839, published posthumously), combined Byronic intensity with a distinctly Russian music. Often called the most important Russian poet after Pushkin, Lermontov was killed in a duel on July 27, 1841, at Pyatigorsk in the Caucasus, shot through the heart by a fellow officer, Nikolai Martynov, in circumstances eerily foretold by the duel scene in A Hero of Our Time. He was twenty-six years old.

In February 1840, Lermontov fought a duel with Ernest de Barante, the French ambassador's son, on almost the same ground by the Black River where Pushkin had died three years before. Both men fired into the air and shook hands afterward. St Petersburg's authorities were less forgiving: Lermontov was arrested and exiled back to the Caucasus.