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visited the wild, picturesque mountain regions of the
Caucasus, absorbed Byronism, studied at the university
in his native city, went through the school for
gentlemen’s sons at St. Petersburg, and left it as cornet in the
hussar regiment, and while only a young officer was
already known for wanton and indecent verse. The
poem Hadji-Abrék, written in his early youth, is strong
and harsh as a fantasy of Mérimée written in verse.
In 1837 the twenty-three-years-old poet was for the first
time exiled to the Caucasus and for a reason possible
only in Russia, for his elegy on Pushkin’s death, which
simply expressed what everybody felt, the Tsar included,
but in which Lermontof had shown the boldness to call
on Nicholas for vengeance on the murderer, who was
one of the favorites of the Imperial Court — as he
afterwards in the reign of Napoleon III. was one of the
courtiers, best known for his shameless appearance in the
Senate as the leader of Orthodoxy against Sainte-Beuve.
At the end of a year Lermontof was pardoned, and
then lived for some time in St. Petersburg, where he was
already highly esteemed as a poet. He published his
“Song of the Tsar Iván Vasilyevitch, of his young chief
of the life guard, and the bold merchant Kalashnikof.”
Pushkin had already tried his hand at giving the keynote
of the old bîlinî, yet only in purely romantic poems.
Lermontof reproduced the spirit of the historical and
heroic bîlinî in a graceful little epic, sustained in the
most correct style, which breathes the whole spirit of the
age of Iván III., expressed with pure native simplicity.
What an artist he was, this demon in human form, who
as a boy was man, and who died in his youth after having
produced works of undying importance.
And at the same time he wrote a host of short lyrical
poems, in which his proud soul unreservedly exposes
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