LÈrmontov was descended from a Scotsman, George Learmonth, who was present at the siege of a small Polish town in 1613.

He had always been connected with the army: his father was an officer, his mother a young girl, at the time of her marriage, of noble birth: she died at the age of twenty. He was brought up by his maternal grandmother, who only permitted him to visit his father on very rare occasions. He was in all respects very lonely, entirely without society or friendship, excellently educated by the very best tutors in noble tastes and refined manners, with such success that he knew French, German and English thoroughly before he was twelve. If ever he saw a serf being punished he would immediately give vent to his anger by attacking the torturer with a knife or stones.

He was, in spite of his fondness for other languages, tenacious of his own, and a great lover of Russia. "In the Russian folklore," he wrote when he was fifteen, "told from mouth to mouth there is probably more than in the whole of French literature."

But it was the Caucasus that first led him to creative art. He was ten when he first accompanied his grandmother to that land, whither she went in search of health. It is, I think, worth while to dwell on the beauties of this country in order to see quite what sort of scenery it was that so fascinated the child's mind.

In his fifteenth and sixteenth year LÈrmontov was educated at the University Pension at Moscow, and filled all his exercise-books with poetry, all of which betrayed a deeply impressionable, passionate, highly strung nature, permeated with views quite extraordinary in one so young.

The two years following saw him a member of the University proper, consciously isolating himself from his contemporaries in spite of adequate means; on the other hand, he launched into the sea of fashionable society life.

The influence of an unending round of balls, masquerades and supper-parties prompted him to write drinking songs and epigrams which could not be tolerated by the Press, while at the same time he showed an extraordinary power of detaching himself from vulgarity and giving himself up to his work. Always he would invest his productions with mockery and sarcasm.

During his second year he left Moscow on account of a row which he got into over an unpopular professor, and went to Petrograd, where he joined the fashionable Yunker's School, and learnt some of the joys of military life.

Half his time was occupied in revelling, the other half in seeking some remote class-room where he could work and satisfy his craving to write.

At the age of nineteen he was commissioned and gazetted in the Life Guard Hussars, already the author of The Demon, though that poem was still in manuscript. A satirical comedy was censored, and other poems began to appear in the reviews, so that not only the literary circles but Society looked with keen expectation for something good at his hands.

One of his poems in particular at this time attracted attention: it is the author's prayer in dedicating a girl to the Virgin. It was so sincere and simple in its religious tone that some of his critics declared that it was merely a pose of his. They failed to realise that his sanctuary was his supreme elation of love for a girl who answered his feelings by friendship. LÈrmontov loathed the idea of the marriage bond—real love was to him something far higher: his VÀrenka, who married another, was his kindred spirit. She it was whom he dedicated to the Virgin, and this relationship finds expression in several of his poems.

For five years he remained in his regiment, and during this time translated Byron, Heine and Goethe ... then in 1837 came the blow of Pushkin's death, which stung LÈrmontov to such a pitch of fury that he wrote his immortal ode, On the Death of Pushkin, which became at once known and repeated throughout the length and breadth of Russia by people who repeated it to, and copied it from, one another:

For this daring outburst he was arrested, tried and banished to the Caucasus, which again acted, as in his childhood, as a direct inspiration. New poems came flying to Petrograd full of human passions, and descriptions of a Nature prodigal and passionate as her devoted lover. No geography book could ever give such a vivid picture of the Caucasus as LÈrmontov's verse and prose. As the Arabs say: "They turn our hearing into seeing." Fame at last descended upon him. Then appeared the "Song of the Tsar IvÀn VasÌlyevich, the young Opriknik, and the Brave Merchant KalÀshinkov," in which the Opriknik insults the merchant's wife, and the merchant challenges him to fight with his fists, kills him and is executed for it. The poem is written as a folk-song, in the style of the Byliny: as an epic there is nothing in modern Russian literature to compare with it for simplicity, appropriateness of tone, vividness, truth to nature and terseness.

Every line begins with an anapÆst, followed by some odd dactyls, and ends in a dactyl unrhymed. It has been translated by Madame Voynich admirably, and is published by Elkin Mathews.

While in the Caucasus, his age being now twenty-three, LÈrmontov finished The Demon, on which he had been at work for so long.

The personality of this Demon, the Spirit of Exile, is quite different from the Satanic Mephistopheles or Lucifer. With all his contempt for Earth, LÈrmontov's Demon is fascinating in every way. He is always musing over his former days in Heaven, and vainly seeking some relief in the desert of time and space into which he is cast out alone; he is the embodiment of the idea of loneliness in a proud soul. His sudden love for the GrÙzian girl TamÀra inflames him with the desire of abandoning his pride, of opening his heart to Good, of making peace with Heaven ... we are never allowed to forget that the Angel and the Demon had been brothers. Moved by his love, the Demon is on the verge of humility and of opening his heart to Goodness when his pride and hatred return upon him, due entirely to the tone of enmity which the Angel adopts on meeting him. The Angel is a good hater and thorough in his scornfulness. Being TamÀra's celestial guardian, he becomes quite human and understandable when he meets the Demon (whom he might have conquered by greeting him with Heavenly grace) with icy contempt and threats. Here we have a perfect delineation of the kinship between the spirits of good and evil.

The Demon's wooing of TamÀra is irresistibly bewitching, one of the most passionate love declarations ever written, in couplets of sonorous iambics that glow like jewels and tremble like the strings of a harp. TamÀra yields to him (what human girl could have done otherwise?) and forfeits her life, but her soul is borne off to Heaven by the Angel: by death she has expiated her offence, and the Demon is left as before desolate in a loveless universe.

Owing to his grandmother's persistence LÈrmontov was recalled before one of his five years' exile had elapsed, and we see him again in Petrograd with his old regiment, a tremendous source of interest to all society, half of whom hated, while half loved him.

In 1838 Duma appeared, in which LÈrmontov gave to the world his view of his contemporaries: it was the severest indictment imaginable, far saner and truer than Byron's, not of the great Russian nation of course, but of the shallow side of that human nature to which he had allied himself. How clear he was of the shortcomings of that lot of people to which he himself, at least outwardly, belonged, and how deeply it hurt him is proved by the exquisite precision with which he exercised his lancet of lampoon.

It is in form a perfect example of his rhymed and scanned prose as it were—that is, not a single word would have to be altered or shifted if you wanted to write it out in prose. It is the work not of a superficial satirist, but of a deep and profound thinker, of a Shelley rather than a Byron.

In 1840 he was challenged to a duel by a son of the French ambassador, in which LÈrmontov fired his shot in the air and received himself a slight scratch. For this he was again arrested and banished as before to the Caucasus. This, the last year of his life, he spent at Patigorsk, a town forming the centre of a fashionable healing-springs district, at the foot of a mountain range. Here he wrote his only novel in prose, The Hero of Our Times, as great a piece of artistry as anything that he did in poetry. It is the first psychological novel in Russia. The hero, Pechorin by name, was undoubtedly LÈrmontov himself, although he said, and quite probably thought, that he was merely creating a type.

This Pechorin is an officer in the Caucasus, who analyses his own character, and lays bare his weaknesses, follies and faults with extreme candour and frankness. "I am incapable of friendship," he says. "Of two friends, one is always the slave of the other, although often neither of them will admit it: I cannot be a slave, and to be a master is a tiring business."

Or again: "I have an innate passion for contradiction ... the presence of enthusiasm turns me to ice, and intercourse with a phlegmatic temperament would turn me into a passionate dreamer."

On the eve of fighting a duel he writes:

"If I die it will not be a great loss to the world, and as for me, I am sufficiently tired of life. I am like a man yawning at a ball, who does not go home to bed because the carriage is not there, but as soon as the carriage is there, Good-bye! I review my past and I ask myself, Why have I lived? Why was I born? And I think there was a reason, and I think I was called to high things, for I feel in my soul the presence of vast powers: but I did not divine my high calling: I gave myself up to the allurement of shallow and ignoble passions: I emerged from their furnace as hard and as cold as iron, but I had lost for ever the ardour of noble aspirations, the flower of life. And since then how often have I played the part of the axe in the hands of fate. Like the weapon of the Executioner I have fallen on the necks of the victims, often without malice, always without pity. My love has never brought happiness, because I have never in the slightest degree sacrificed myself for those whom I loved. I loved for my own sake, for my own pleasure.... And if I die I shall not leave behind me one soul who understood me. Some think I am better, others that I am worse than I am. Some will say he was a good fellow: others he was a blackguard."

From this it may be easily seen that LÈrmontov must have been a most trying companion. He had an impossible temperament, proud, exasperated, filled with a savage amour-propre: he took a childish delight in annoying: he was envious of that which was least enviable in his contemporaries. When he could not make himself successful—that is, felt—by pleasant, he would choose unpleasant means, and yet in spite of all this he was warmhearted, thirsting for love and kindness and capable of giving himself up to love—if he chose.

During the course of this second banishment he took an active part in the fighting with the Circassian tribes, showing striking courage combined with perfect modesty.

This experience was the direct inspiration of ValÈrik, one of the most beautiful of his long poems on the Caucasus.

After this came his second duel. On this occasion he somehow contrived to offend a somewhat posing officer called Major Mart?nov, who could not bear LÈrmontov's jokes in the presence of ladies. As before, LÈrmontov fired his pistol into the air, but Mart?nov aimed so long that the seconds began to remonstrate. He then fired and killed LÈrmontov immediately.

As a result Mart?nov only escaped the anger of the mob by being arrested.

In 1909 MerejkÒvski produced a little book on LÈrmontov as a counterblast to one by SolovyÒv in which Mart?nov was hailed as "Heaven's weapon sent to punish blood-thirstiness and devilish lust." It is a blessing indeed that SolovyÒv should have been led to attack LÈrmontov, for MerejkÒvski was thus brought to criticise LÈrmontov with an amazingly accurate insight. He loved the poet and so his appreciation is the more perfect. "Something like SolovyÒv's attitude towards LÈrmontov," he says, "must have been in the minds of the poet's contemporaries and successors. Even Dostoievski mentions him as the 'spirit of wrath.' Nicholas I. expressed grim pleasure at his death. He has been up till now the scapegoat of Russian literature. All Russian writers preach humility, even those who began by heading revolts—Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoievski, Tolstoi ... here is the one single man who never gave in and never submitted to his last breath ... he is the Cain of Russian literature and has been killed by Abel, the spirit of humility. SolovyÒv's cry of 'Devilish superman' is only another proof of the fact that the struggle between superhumanism and deo-humanism is the eternal problem of life." MerejkÒvski's idea is that LÈrmontov could remember the past of his eternity ... from the ordinary human mind this previous existence is excluded, we dwell on the eternity to come ... but LÈrmontov never did: his mind was concentrated on what he saw left behind him. From the very first his poetry attracts you uneasily: you may—Russian youths often are—be taught to hate him as a "spring of poison" ... he knew the harrowing threat of fruitless ages. Even as a boy he frequently said: "If only I could forget the unforgettable." His Demon is never permitted to forget the past. He lives by what is death to others.

Pechorin, in The Hero of our Days, speaks as LÈrmontov when he says: "I never forget anything—anything."

In one of his poems he laments that his despair is that no love lasts through eternity: he means his eternity. He knows of a kind of existence which is neither this life, nor death as promised by Christianity. That existence is not deprived of love: his idea is that the less earthly, the deeper and greater the passion becomes. The difference between Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations and LÈrmontov's is that Wordsworth speaks of these intimations coming to him from outside this world and LÈrmontov speaks from the outside world himself, as one belonging to it, while realising his temporary existence in this world to which he does not belong. This attitude was a continual torment to him; it made him feel very much of a stranger.

"Usually," says MerejkÒvski, "artists find their creation beautiful because nothing like it has existed before." LÈrmontov feels the beauty just where it had been always. That is why there is something so individual and inimitable in him when he speaks of Nature: 'For several moments spent among the wilderness of rocks where I played as a child I would give Paradise and Eternity.'

"He is in love with Nature. He longs to blend in an embrace with the storm and Shelley-like catches of lightnings with his hands. It is the only non-earthly love for earth to be found in poetry. Christianity is a movement from here—thither: LÈrmontov's poetry is from there—hither. He was not-quite-a-man encased in a man's shell. He tried to conceal this, because people do not forgive anyone for being unlike them. Hence his reticence, which people mistook for pride. They thought he was untruthful, posing ... while in reality it was his tragedy that he felt out of place here and tried to be like everyone else. This explains his escape into the sphere of dissipations, his cruel attitude towards the girl he deserted ... when he could feel that at last he was like his contemporaries.

"The fourth dimension seemed to be squeezed into the three for a while, and the icy horror of eternity and the inane temporarily forgotten in the warmth of human vulgarity."

This, MerejkÒvski thinks, accounts for that amazing child-likeness in LÈrmontov which dwelt side by side with his pessimism, sadness, bitterness, flippancy and sarcasm. He could always play children's games to the state of self-forgetfulness and had no fear of death, because he knew that there was no death.

"His Demon never laughs and never lies; he has something of the child-like in him. He is always genuine, as far removed as possible from Gogol's spirit of mischief or Dostoievsky's wicked, sneering Devil. LÈrmontov's Devil is beautiful, because he is not thought out, but suffered out by the poet himself; he is hardly a devil at all."

There is a legend that once there was a fight between God and Satan and some of the angels were undecided which side to take. In order to help them to make up their mind they were sent to be born on earth, where they should dwell for a little in a limited world: the soul of LÈrmontov had been in his past one of these. That is why his duality was always such a burden to him. This explains many queer things about LÈrmontov: his amazingly deep passion for a girl of nine when he was ten ("I did not know whence she came") and his having drawn a detailed picture of his death many times before his final duel: most strange of all is MerejkÒvski's idea that LÈrmontov remembered the future of eternity. Pushkin is the day-luminary of Russian poetry and LÈrmontov is the night-luminary: "It is high time to rise after our final stage of humility and start on our last revolt, and remember that besides Pushkin we have LÈrmontov and his message to the world.... Because in the end Satan will make peace with God."

He owed nothing to his contemporaries, little to his predecessors and still less to foreign models.

As a schoolboy he imitated Byron, merely echoes these, however, of his reading. Shelley urged him as Byron urged Pushkin to emulation, not imitation. His pride and obstinacy if nothing else would have made him carve out his own path: he chose the narrow path of romance, the Turner method rather than the Constable in his depictions of landscape, as may be seen in Mtsysi, the story of a Circassian orphan educated in a convent, who has ungovernable longings for freedom: he escapes, loses his way in the forest and is brought back after three days, dying from exhaustion and starvation. The greater portion of the poem is given up to his confession: he then tells how insatiable were his desires to seek out his own home and people: he describes his wanderings, hearing the song of a girl ... seeing at nightfall the light of a dwelling-place twinkling like a fallen star, but afraid to seek it. He then kills a panther and in the morning finds a way out of the woods and lies exhausted in the grass under the blinding sun of noon. He then fancies in his delirium that he is lying at the bottom of a deep stream; the fish sing to him in a voice so unearthly that he is enticed and allured as if the fish were the Erl-King's daughter.

In The Testament he rises to an unadorned realism that is little short of magic in its poignancy:

It is such a poem that led Baring to apply to LÈrmontov what Arnold said about Byron and Wordsworth: "there are moments when Nature takes the pen from his hand and writes for him." When one passes in review the vast output of his short life, we are struck by the lyrical inspiration, the strength and intensity, the concentration of his power, the wealth of his imagination, his gorgeous colouring and maintained high level.

It is as though he combined the temperament of a Thackeray with the wings of a Shelley, so exquisitely blended is his romantic sense and stern realism. So simple and straightforward is he that his style escapes notice in its absolute appropriateness, as in The Testament. There is none of the misty vagueness of Keats or Coleridge; he never follows Shelley into the intense inane.

I propose to conclude this chapter with extracts from his masterpiece, The Demon, to illustrate, if I can, the amazing achievement of this Lucifer-spirit. He opens with a description of his hero-devil ruminating over his past:

Now an outcast:

We follow him in his exile over the world through the Caucasus to Gruzia:

We are now introduced to the heroine, TamÀra, whose wedding feast is being prepared:

TamÀra's bridegroom-elect is foully done to death on his way to the wedding. The bride, fallen on her bed, sobs with a lorn and piteous feeling until she suddenly hears a voice of magic sweetness urging her to cease.

He beseeches her to listen to his pleas:

We are not surprised that fire began to flow along the maiden's veins as she listened to so exquisite a speech. She decides to enter a nunnery to avoid both marriage and the hellish spirit that assails her in dreams. The Devil follows:

He catches a glimpse of the glimmering lamplight in TamÀra's window and hears a song in the far distance, a song for earth in heaven born and nourished.

As he entered he was met by the guardian angel of the fair sinner, who reproaches the Demon, and bids him begone.

The guardian angel departs and the Demon is left victor of the field to plead his cause. In answer to TamÀra's question, "'But who art thou? Who?... Answer me,'" he replies:

TamÀra then asks him why he loves her, to which he replies:

TamÀra is gradually won to listen to his passionate pleading.

The Demon vows fidelity:

The guardian angel returns and banishes the Demon.

Comment on such a poem is needless. I have done my part if I have induced you by my brief extracts to go back to the original and read the whole of it for yourselves.