Mikhail Lermontov

Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov ( , ; ; – ) was a Russian Romantic writer, poet and painter, sometimes called "the poet of the Caucasus", the most important Russian poet after Alexander Pushkin's death in 1837 and the greatest figure in Russian Romanticism. His influence on Russian literature is felt in modern times, through his poetry, but also his prose, which founded the tradition of the Russian psychological novel.

Lermontov grew up in Tarkhany and received excellent home education from his grandmother, nurturing his talents in languages, music, and painting. However, his health was fragile, and he suffered from scrofula and rickets. His grandmother's strict control caused him emotional turmoil, leading to his development as a lonely and introspective individual. In 1827, Lermontov moved to Moscow with his grandmother and joined the Moscow University's boarding school. He excelled academically and started to write poetry. By 1829, Lermontov had written notable poems. His literary career began to take shape, with his early works reflecting the influences of Alexander Pushkin and Lord Byron. Lermontov's early education included extensive travel to the Caucasus for his health, which greatly impressed him and influenced his work.

In 1832, Lermontov moved to Saint Petersburg and enrolled in the School of Cavalry Junkers and Ensign of the Guard, eventually joining the Life-Guard Hussar regiment. His literary career flourished, but his sharp wit and satirical works earned him many enemies. The poem "Death of the Poet," written after the death of Alexander Pushkin, gained Lermontov significant fame, but led to his first exile to the Caucasus due to its controversial content. During his exile, Lermontov continued to write, producing some of his most famous works, including A Hero of Our Time. His experiences in the Caucasus provided rich material for his poetry and prose. Despite returning to St. Petersburg briefly, his rebellious nature and another duel led to his second exile. In 1841, Lermontov was killed in a duel with fellow officer Nikolai Martynov. His death marked the loss of one of Russia's most promising literary talents.

Background

Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov was born in Moscow into the Lermontov family, and he grew up in the village of Tarkhany (now Lermontovo in Penza Oblast). His paternal family descended from the Scottish family of Learmonth, and can be traced to Yuri (George) Learmonth, a Scottish officer in the Polish–Lithuanian service who settled in Russia in the middle of the 17th century. He had been captured by the Russian troops in Poland in the early 17th century, during the reign (1613–1645) of Mikhail Fyodorovich Romanov. Family legend asserted that George Learmonth descended from the famed 13th-century Scottish poet Thomas the Rhymer (also known as Thomas Learmonth). 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 Mikhaylovna Arsenyeva, a wealthy young heiress of a prominent aristocratic Stolypin family. Lermontov's maternal grandmother, Elizaveta Arsenyeva (née Stolypina), regarded their marriage as a mismatch and deeply disliked her son-in-law. On 15 October 1814, in Moscow where the family temporarily moved to, Maria gave birth to her son Mikhail.

Early life

thumb|upright=.8|Maria Mikhaylovna Lermontova (1795–1817), mother

The marriage proved ill-suited and the couple soon grew apart. "There is no strong evidence as to what precipitated the quarrels they'd had. There are reasons to believe Yuri had grown tired of his wife's nervousness and frail health, and his mother-in-law's despotic ways," according to 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. Apparently it was her husband's violent, erratic behavior and the resulting stresses that accounted for Maria Mikhaylovna's early demise. Her health quickly deteriorated and she developed tuberculosis and died on 27 February 1817, aged only 21.

thumb|left|upright=.8|Yuri Petrovich Lermontov (1787–1831), father

In June 1817, Yelizaveta Alekseyevna moved her grandson to Penza. In 1821 they returned to Tarkhany and spent the next six years there. While living with the grandmother, Mikhail hardly met with his father.

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. Colonel Capet, a Napoleon army prisoner-of-war who settled in Russia after 1812, was the boy's first, and best-loved governor. A German pedagogue, Levy, who succeeded Capet, introduced Mikhail to Goethe and Schiller. He didn't stay for long and soon another Frenchman, Gendrot, replaced him, soon joined by Mr. Windson, a respectable English teacher recommended by the Uvarov family. Later Alexander Zinoviev, a teacher of Russian literature, arrived. The intellectual atmosphere in which Lermontov grew up resembled that experienced by Aleksandr Pushkin, though the domination of French had begun to give way to a preference for English, and Lamartine shared popularity with Byron.

Looking for a better climate and treatment at the mineral springs for the boy, Arsenyeva 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 extended family traveled south for the third time.

thumb|upright=.8|Yelizaveta Arsenyeva, grandmother

Fearing that Lermontov's father would eventually claim his right to bring up his son, Arsenyeva strictly limited contact between the two, causing young Lermontov much pain and remorse. Despite all the pampering lavished upon him, and torn by the family feud, he grew up lonely and withdrawn. In another early autobiographical piece, "Povest" (The Tale), Lermontov described himself (under the guise of Sasha Arbenin) as an impressionable boy, passionately in love with all things heroic, but otherwise emotionally cold and occasionally sadistic. Having developed a fearful and arrogant temper, he took it out on his grandmother's garden as well as on insects and small animals ("with great delight, he would squash a hapless fly and bristled with joy when a stone he'd thrown would kick a chicken off its feet"). Positive influence came from Lermontov's German governess Christina Rhemer, a religious woman who introduced the boy to the idea of every man, even if that man was a serf, deserving respect. In fact, Lermontov's poor health served in a way as a saving grace, Skabichevsky argued, for it prevented the boy from further exploring the darker sides of his character and, more importantly, "taught him to think of things... seek pleasures that he couldn't find in the outer world, deep inside himself."

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.

School years

thumb|left|upright=.8|Lermontov as a child

After having received a year of private tutoring, in February 1829 the fourteen-year old Lermontov took exams and joined the 5th form of the Moscow University's boarding-school for the nobility's children. Here his personal tutor was poet Alexey Merzlyakov, alongside Zinoviev, who taught Russian and Latin.

thumb|upright=.8|Lermontov's handwritten request to Moscow University to leave

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 Hertzen, who found himself incarcerated). 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 (1831) 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)'s theme was 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. During the investigation, in an act he considered cowardice, Lermontov faulted his friend, Svyatoslav Rayevsky, and as a result the latter suffered a more severe punishment than Lermontov did: was deported to the Olonets Governorate for two years to serve in a lowly clerk's position.

At sixteen Lermontov fell in love with Yekaterina Sushkova (1812–1868), a friend of his cousin Sasha Vereshchagina, whom he often visited in Srednikovo village. Yekaterina failed to take her suitor seriously and in her "Notes" described him thus:<blockquote>At Sashenka [Vereshchagina]'s I often met her cousin, a clumsy bow-legged boy of 16 or 17, with reddened eyes, which were clever and expressive nevertheless, who had a turned-up nose and caustic sneer... Everybody was calling him just Michel and so did I, never caring about his second name. Assigned to be my 'errand boy' he was carrying my hat, umbrella and gloves, leaving them behind from time to time... Both Sashenka and I, while giving him credit for his intelligence, still treated him like a baby which drove him mad. Trying to be perceived as a serious young man, he recited Pushkin and Lamartine and never parted with a huge volume of Byron."</blockquote>

Several 1830–31 poems by Lermontov were dedicated to Sushkova, among them "Nishchy" (The Beggar Man) and "Blagodaryu!, Zovi nadezhdu snovidenyem" (Thank you! To call the hope a dream...).

thumb|upright=.8|Natalya Ivanova in the 1840s

In 1830, Lermontov met Natalya Ivanova (1813–1875), daughter of a Moscow playwright Fyodor Ivanov and had an affair with her, but little is known about it or why it ended. Judging by thirty or so poems addressed to "N.F.I", she chose a man who was older and richer, much to the distress of young Lermontov who took this as a 'betrayal'. These poems were published only once, in 1936, as part of a scholarly edition of Lermontov's complete works, edited by Irakly Andronikov.

This lean period bore a few fruits: "Khadji-Abrek" (1835), his first ever published poem, and 1836's Sashka (a "darling son of Don Juan", according to Mirsky), a sparkling concoction of Romanticism, realism and what might be termed a cadet-style verse. The latter remained unfinished, as did Princess Ligovskaya (1836), a society tale which was influenced at least to some extent by Gogol's Petersburg Stories and featured characters and dilemmas not far removed from those that would form the base of A Hero of Our Time.

"Death of the Poet" (1837), arguably the strongest political declaration of its time (its last two lines, "and all of your black blood won't be enough to expiate the poet's pure blood", construed by some as a direct call for violence), made Lermontov not just famous, but almost worshipped, as a "true heir to Pushkin". More introspective but no less subversive was his "The Thought" (1838), an answer to Kondraty Ryleyev's "The Citizen" (1824), damning the lost generation of "servile slaves".

thumb|left|Pyatigorsk, Lermontov's duel location (photo 1958)

Lermontov had a peculiar method of circulating ideas, images and even passages, trying them again and again through the years in different settings until each would find itself a proper place – as if he could "see" in his imagination his future works but was "receiving" them in small fragments. Even "In Memory of A. I. Odoyevsky" (1839) the central episode is, in effect, the slightly re-worked passage borrowed from Sashka. were named after him.

The crew of Soyuz TMA-21 selected Tarkhany as their call sign, after the estate where Lermontov spent his childhood and where his remains are preserved.

The 2011 contemporary classical album Troika includes a setting of Lermontov's French-language poem "Quand je te vois sourire…" by the composer Isabelle Aboulker. Soviet composer Maria Semyonovna Zavalishina also set some of Lermontov's writing to music.

On 3 October 2014, a monument to Lermontov was unveiled in the Scottish village of Earlston, the place being selected due to a suggested association of Lermontov's descent with Thomas the Rhymer. Until only a few years earlier, the connection had been little-known in Scotland.

Lermontov has been depicted in numerous movies and TV series. In 2012 Azerbaijani movie "Ambassador of Morning", telling the story of another great poet, Abbasgulu Bakikhanov, Mikhail Lermontov was depicted by Oleg Amirbekov. In 2014, in memory of his 200th birthday, a biography documentary about him was released in Russia.

Ukrainian composer Valentina Ramm (1888-1968) set Lermontov's poems to music, as did Latvian composer Lauma Reinholde (1906-1986).

Selected bibliography

Prose

Vadim (1832, unfinished; published in 1873)
Princess Ligovskaya (Knyaginya Ligovskaya, 1836, unfinished novel first published in 1882)
"Ashik-Kerib" (the Azerbaijani fairytale, 1837, first published in 1846)
A Hero of Our Time (Герой нашего времени, 1840; 1842, 2nd edition; 1843, 3rd edition), novel

Dramas

The Spaniards (Ispantsy, tragedy, 1830, published 1880)
Menschen und Leidenschaften (1830, published 1880)
A Strange Man (Stranny tchelovek, 1831, drama/play published 1860)
Masquerade (1835, first published in 1842)
Two Brothers (Dva brata, 1836, published in 1880)
Arbenin (1836, the alternative version of Masquerade, published in 1875)

Poems

The Circassians (Tcherkesy, 1828, published in 1860)
The Corsair (1828, published in 1859)
The Culprit (Prestupnik, 1828, published in 1859)
Oleg (1829, published in 1859)
Julio (1830, published in 1860)
Kally ("The Bloody One", in Circassian, 1830, published in 1860)
The Last Son of Freedom (Posledny syn volnosti, 1831–1832, published in 1910)
Azrail (1831, published in 1876)
Confession (Ispoved, 1831, published in 1889)
Angel of Death (Angel smerti, 1831; published in 1857 – in Germany; in 1860 – in Russia)
No, I'm not Byron (published in 1832)
The Sailor (Moryak, 1832, published in 1913)
Ismail-Bei (1832, published in 1842)
A Lithuanian Woman (Litvinka, 1832, published in 1860)
Aul Bastundji (1834, published in 1860)
The Junkers Poems ("Ulansha", "The Hospital", "Celebration in Petergof", 1832–1834, first published in 1936)
Khadji-Abrek (1835, Biblioteka Dlya Chtenya)
Mongo (1836, published in 1861)
Boyarin Orsha (1836, published in 1842)
Sashka (1835–1836, unfinished, published in 1882)
The Song of the Merchant Kalashnikov (Pesnya kuptsa Kalashnikova, 1837)
Borodino (1837)
The Death of the Poet (1837)
Tambov Treasurer's Wife (Tambovskaya Kaznatcheysha, 1838)
The Cossack Lullaby (1838)
The Fugitive (Beglets, circa 1838, published in 1846)
Demon (1838, published in 1856 in Berlin)
The Novice (Mtsyri, in Georgian, 1839, published in 1840)
Valerik (1840)
The Children's Fairytale (Detskaya skazka, 1839, unfinished, published in 1842)

Selected short poems

The Turk's Laments (Zhaloby turka, 1829)
Two Brothers (1829, Dva brata, published in 1859)
Napoleon (1830)
The Spring (Vesna, 1830)
15 July 1830 (1830)
The Terrible Fate of Father and Son... (Uzhasnaya sudba otsa i syna... 1831)
The Reed (Trostnik, 1831)
Mermaid (Rusalka, 1831)
The Wish (Zhelanye, 1831)
The Angel (Angel, 1831)
The Prophecy (Predskazaniye, 1831)
The Sail (Parus, 1831)
Forgive Me, Will We Meet Again?.. (Prosti, uvidimsya li snova..., 1832)
The Hussar (Gusar, 1832)
Death of the Poet (1837)
The Branch of Palestine (Vetka Palestiny, 1837)
Mother Of God, Here I Stand (Molitva, 1837)
Farewell, Unwashed Russia (Proshchai, nemytaya Rossiya, 1837)
When Yellowish Fields Get Ruffled... (Kogda volnuyetsa zhelteyushchaya niva..., 1837)
The Thought (Duma, 1838)
The Dagger (Kinzhal, 1838)
The Poet (1838)
Don't Believe Yourself... (Ne ver sebye..., 1839)
Three Palms (Tri palhmy, 1839)
In the Memory of A. I. Odoyevsky (1839)
So Dull, So Sad... (I skuchno, i grustno..., 1840)
How Often, Surrounded by a Motley Crowd... (Kak tchasto, okruzhonny pyostroyu tolpoyu..., 1840)
Little Clouds (Tuchki, 1840)
The Journalist, the Reader and the Writer (1840)
The Heavenly Ship (Vozdushny korabl, 1840)
Fatherland (Rodina, 1841)
The Princess of the Tide, 1841, ballad
The Dispute (Spor, 1841)
Alone I set out on the road... (Vykhozu odin ya na dorogu..., 1841)

References

Sources

Dual-language links

. 1986 Mosfilm movie
Various Lermontov poems in Russian with English translations, some audio files
Various Lermontov poems, many in Russian, some English translations, at Friends & Partners
Russian text of various poems with English translations
Russian text of «Смерть поэта» ("Death of the Poet") with English translation
Russian text of "Cossack Lullaby" with English translation

Russian-language links

Online Lermontov shrine
Short biography at Russian Biographical Dictionary
Short biography at Megabook
Texts of various Lermontov works
Lermontov Museum, Moscow
Photographs of State Lermontov Museum and Reserve at Tarkhany
The ancestors of Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov
"I Walk Out Alone Upon My Way" performed by Anna German
Mikhail Lermontov poetry