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Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov

Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov (October 15 1814 - July 27 1841), a Russian Romantic writer, poet and painter, sometimes called "the poet of the Caucasus", became the most important Russian poet after Alexander Pushkin's death in 1837. Lermontov is considered the supreme poet of Russian literature alongside Pushkin and the greatest figure in Russian Romanticism. His influence on later Russian literature is still felt in modern times, not only through his poetry, but also through his prose which founded the tradition of the Russian psychological novel.

Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov was born in Moscow into a respectable noble family, and grew up in the village of Tarkany (now Lermontovo in Pen za Oblast). Lermontov's father, Yuri Petrovich Lermontov, like his father before him, followed a military career. Having moved up the ranks to captain, he married the sixteen-year-old Maria Mikhailovna Arsenieva, a wealthy young heiress of a prominent aristocratic Stolypin family. Lermontov's maternal grandmother, Elizaveta Arsenieva, regarded their marriage as a mismatch and deeply disliked her son-in-law. On October 15, 1814, in Moscow where the family temporarily moved to, Maria gave birth to her son Mikhail.

The marriage proved ill-suited and the couple soon grew apart. "There is no strong evidence as what had precipitated the quarrels they've had. There are reasons to believe Yuri has got tired of his wife's nervousness and frail health, and his mother-in-law's despotic ways," according to a literary historian and Lermontov scholar Alexander Skabichevsky. An earlier biographer, Pavel Viskovatov, suggested the discord might have been caused by Yuri's affair with a young woman named Yulia, a lodger who worked in the house.

In June 1817, Elizaveta Alekseievna moved her grandson to Penza. In 1821, they returned to Tarkhany and spent the next 6 years there. The doting grandmother spared no expense to provide the young Lermontov with the best schooling and lifestyle that money could buy. He received an extensive home education, became fluent in French and German, learnt to played several musical instruments and proved a gifted painter.

But the boy's health was fragile, he suffered from scrofula and rickets (the latter accounted for his bow-leggedness) and was kept under close surveillance of

a French doctor, Anselm Levis. Looking for a better climate and treatment at the mineral springs for the boy, Arsenieva twice, in 1819 and 1820, took him to the Caucasus where they stayed at her sister E.A. Khasatova's. In summer 1825, as the nine-year-old's health started to deteriorate, the extensive family travelled south for the third time. The Caucasus greatly impressed the boy, inspiring a passion for its mountains and stirring beauty. "Caucasian mountains for me are sacred", he wrote later. It was there that Lermontov experienced his first romantic passion, falling for a nine-year-old girl.

Returning from his third trip to the Caucasus in August 1825, Lermontov began his regular studies with tutors in French and Greek, starting to read German, French and English authors' original texts. In summer 1827 the 12-year-old for the first time travelled to his father's estate in Tula Governorate. In autumn of that year he and Arsenieva moved to Moscow.

In August 1830, Lermontov enrolled in Moscow University's philological faculty. "Petty arrogance" (as Skabichevsky puts it) prevented him from joining any of the three radical students' circles (those led respectively by Belinsky, Stankevich and Herzen). Instead he drifted towards an aristocratic clique, but even this cream of the Moscow's "golden youth" detested the young man for being too aloof, while still giving him credit for having charisma. "Everyone could see that Lermontov was obnoxious, rough and daring, and yet there was something alluring in his firm moroseness", fellow-student Wistengof admitted.

Attending lectures faithfully, Lermontov would often read a book in the corner of the auditorium, and never took part in student life, making exceptions only for incidents involving grand-scale trouble-making. He took an active part in the notorious 1831 Malov scandal (when a jeering mob drove the unpopular professor out of the auditorium), but wasn't formally reprimanded (unlike Herzen, who found himself incarcerated). A year into his university studies, the final, tragic act of the family discord played itself out. Deeply affected by his son's alienation, Yuri Lermontov left Arsenieva's house for good, only to die a short time later of consumption. His father's death under such circumstances was a terrible loss for Mikhail and is reflected in his poems Forgive Me, Will We Meet Again? and The Terrible Fate of Father and Son. For some time he seriously considered suicide; tellingly, each of his early dramas Menschen und Leidenschaften (1830) and A Strange Man (1931) ends with a protagonist killing himself. All the while, judging by his diaries, Lermontov maintained a keen interest in European politics. Some of his University poems like Predskazaniye (The Prophecy) were highly politicised; the unfinished Povest Bez Nazvaniya (The Untitled Novel) was about the outbreak of popular uprising in Russia. Several other verses written at the time Parus (The Sail), Angel Smerti (Angel of Death) and Ismail-Bei later came to be regarded among his best.

In mid-1832, Lermontov, accompanied by grandmother, travelled to Saint Petersburg, with a view of joining the Saint Petersburg University's second-year course. This proved impossible and, horrified by the prospect of repeating

a first year, he enrolled into the prestigious School of Cavalry Junkers and Ensign of the Guard, under male relatives' pressure but much to Arsenieva's distress. Having passed the exams, on November 14, 1832, Lermontov joined the Life-Guard Hussar regiment as a junior officer. One of his fellow cadet-school students, Nikolai Martynov, the one whose fatal shot would kill the poet several years later, in his biographical Notes decades later described him as "the young man who was so far ahead of everybody else, as to be beyond comparison", a "real grown-up who'd read and thought and understood a lot about the human nature."

Upon his graduation in November 1834, Lermontov joined the Life-Guard Hussar regiment stationed near St. Petersburg in Tsarskoye Selo, where his flatmate was his friend Svyatoslav Rayevsky. Grandmother's lavish financial support (he had his personal chefs and coachmen too) enabled Lermontov to plunge into a heady highsociety mix of drawing-room gossip and ballroom glitter. "Sardonic, caustic and smart, brilliantly intelligent, rich and independent, he became the soul of the high society and the leading spirit in pleasure trips and sprees", Countess Rastoptchina recalled.

After visiting Moscow (where he produced no less than 8 poetic invectives aimed at Benkendorff), on May 9, 1841, Lermontov arrived in Stavropol, introduced himself to General Grabbe and asked for permission to stay in the town. Then, following a whim, he changed his course, found himself in Pyatigorsk and sent his seniors a letter informing them of his having fallen ill. The regiment's special commission recommended him treatment at mineral waters. What he did instead was embark upon a spree of several weeks. "In the mornings he was writing, but the more he worked, the more need he felt to unwind in the evenings," Skabichevsky wrote. "I feel I'm left with very little of my life," the poet confessed to his friend A. Merinsky on July, a week before his death.

In Pyatigorsk, Lermontov enjoyed himself, feeding on his notoriety of a social misfit, his fame of a poet second only to Pushkin and his success with A Hero Of Our Time. Meanwhile in the same salons, his Cadet school friend Nikolai Martynov, dressed as a native Circassian, wore a long sword, affected the manners of a romantic hero not unlike Lermontov's Grushnitsky character. Lermontov teased Martynov mercilessly until the latter couldn't stand it anymore. On July 25, 1841, Martynov challenged his offender to a duel.

The fight took place two days later at the foot of Mashuk mountain. Lermontov allegedly made it known that he was going to shoot into the air. Martynov was the first to shoot and he aimed straight into the heart, killing his opponent on

the spot. On July 30 Lermontov was buried, without military honours, thousands of people attending the ceremony.

In January 1842, the Tsar issued an order allowing the coffin to be transported to Tarkhany, where Lermontov was laid to rest at the family cemetery. Upon receiving the news, his grandmother Elizaveta Arsenieva suffered a minor stroke. She died in 1845. Many of Lermontov's verses were discovered posthumously in his notebooks.

A Hero of Our Time

In February 1838, Lermontov arrived at Novgorod to join his new regiment. However, in less than two months, Arsenieva ensured his transfer to the Petersburg-based Hussars Guard regiment. At this point, in Petersburg, Lermontov started working on A Hero of Our Time, a novel which later earned him recognition as one of the founding fathers of Russian prose.

In January 1839 Andrei Kraievsky, now at the helm of Otechestvennye Zapiski, invited Lermontov to become a regular contributor. The magazine published two parts of the novel, Bela and The Fatalist, in issues 2 and 4, respectively; the rest of it appeared in print during 1840 and earned the author widespread acclaim. The partially autobiographical story, describing prophetically a duel like the one in which he would eventually lose his life, consisted of five closely linked tales revolving around a single character, a disenchanted, bored and doomed young nobleman. Later it came to be considered a pioneering classic of Russian psychological realism.

Sources:

http://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/literature/mikhail-lermontov/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Lermontov

http://www.poetry

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