The romantic movement, for various reasons, affected Russia less many-sidedly than was the case with other European countries. The influence of Byronism itself was limited only to some of its aspects, and even those were partly conditioned by a regime under the pressure of which the few liberties still left seemed to be going from bad to worse. In Pushkin's day there was at least the atmosphere of the pléiade, the members of which firmly believed in literary culture and were able to stimulate one another. The growing vigilance of the Nicholas' police made fellowships on such a scale impossible even in matters of culture, let alone politics. As there was no outlet for any independent initiative and ambition of one's own, a number of gifted young men were bound to turn into "superfluous" Childe Harolds of the peculiar Russian brand, so conspicuous in the literature of that country. But the danger of maladjustment loomed large from another quarter also. There were signs that the patriarchal-feudal system, based on serfdom, would have to yield, before long, to the advent of a capitalist era, demanding an economic as well as psychological change which could not be achieved overnight. A feeling of vacillation and general uncertainty was in the air, and no gendarmes, no political strait-jackets were able to eliminate the bewilderment arising in the public mind.

In this respect, too, there was a difference between the generation of Pushkin and that to which his immediate successor, the poet Mikhail Lermontov, belonged. In spite of all personal adversities, Pushkin was still rooted in his age, in his class and in the culture of which the members of the advanced gentry-elite were rightly proud. Even the "Decembrists" who rebelled in 1825, did so because they believed in certain values which they, as the most progressive representatives of their own class, were called upon to uphold. Yet the social and mental atmosphere of the next generation was no longer the same. The leadership on the part of a gentry-elite became impossible, because such an elite as a compact group or body no longer existed. The best representatives of that class suddenly found themselves in a vacuum. Others were absorbed by the bureaucratic system, or else went to seed in their provincial back-waters. Even the slowly emerging intelligentsia—an amalgam of the gentry intellectuals and the educated "commoners"—was of no use to many of those who were unable or else unwilling to adapt themselves to the spirit of the age. And Lermontov, for all his genius, was the least adaptable of men.

This fact alone determined the basic character of his work. If Pushkin introduced the "superfluous man" on a romantic or quasi-romantic plane, Lermontov added two salient features to this phenomenon. First, he deepened the inner isolation of such an uprooted individual until he touched upon that metaphysical region which, later on, was disturbingly tackled by Dostoevsky. And secondly, he gave a psychological analysis of a tragic Russian descendant of Childe Harold (via Pushkin's Onegin) so brilliantly as to affect thereby, romantic though he was, quite a few facets of Russian realism. He is still regarded as being the greatest and also the most Byronic romanticist in Russian literature; yet his Byronism was not an imitation but had certain definite traits of its own. He himself said in one of his early poems:

No, I'm not Byron, I'm different,
I'm still unknown, a man apart,
Like Byron by the world rejected,
Only I have a Russian heart.

In spite of this "Russian heart" on which he insists, or perhaps because of it, Lermontov's mal du siècle, with all its ingredients, sprang not only from social but from what might be termed spiritual causes. His nostalgia resembled that of a fallen denizen of a different timeless realm, who still vaguely remembers its enchantment and therefore finds it impossible to fit into any conditions of the actual world, least of all into those of Russia under Nicholas I. When Lermontov was only seventeen, he wrote the following poem, called "The Angel", which may provide a clue to the undercurrents of his romanticism:

An angel was flying through night's deep blue
And softly he sang as he flew.
Moon, stars and clouds in a wondering throng
Listened rapt by that heavenly song.

He sang of the blest, who live without stain
In God's garden, a shining train.
He hymned the Lord's might, and his voice rang clear,
For he sang without guile and fear.

He bore in his arms a young soul to its birth
On the dark and sinful earth,
And the Angel's song remained in the soul
Without words yet unblemished and whole.

Long after on earth when the soul would tire,
It felt a strange, aching desire
For the music of heaven which it sought for in vain
In earth's songs of sorrow and pain.

The poem could serve as an epigraph to the whole of Lermontov's work. It goes a long way to explain his difference from Byron, the character of his pessimism, and of his protest against the realities he saw around. This again was intertwined with a number of less "transcendental" elements, the nature of which will become clearer if we approach Lermontov through some of his biographical data. For in contrast to Pushkin, Lermontov was the first great poet in Russian literature who deliberately turned his entire work into an inner biography; that is into a personal confession of a poignant and often glowingly passionate kind.

Born in 1814, Lermontov had some Scottish blood in his veins. One of the Learmonths entered the Russian service at the beginning of the 17th century, settled in his adopted country and altered his ancestral name to make it sound Russian. (In some of his early poems, especially in "The Wish", Lermontov alludes to Scotland as his distant homeland.) His father was an impoverished landowner who had married the daughter of a rich, capricious, and overbearing woman and was always treated by his mother-inlaw, Mme. Arsenyeva, as a "poor relation." As his wife died after a few years of marriage, Mme. Arsenyeva took her little grandson to her own estate where he was brought up until the age of twelve. Puzzled by the family quarrels, spoiled by his grandmother's adulation, and at the same time deprived of congenial companions, the boy must have felt lonely even in those formative years. Gradually he developed into a self-centered dreamer, anxious to conceal his passionate nature under the mask of aloofness, and his innate idealism behind the pose of callous flippancy. His poetic gift, which remained his only outlet for self-expression, began to develop rather early and was fostered by two circumstances: his visit to the Caucasus at the age of eleven, and his education in a Moscow boarding school (from 1827 onwards) which was not devoid of literary interests. Under the guidance of such teachers as Merzlyakov and Raitch, young Lermontov was initiated into the principal works of Russian literature, as well as into those of Byron, Moore, Goethe, Schiller, and Scott. He was much impressed by Thomas Moore's biography of Byron (he read it in 1830) and, in his early years, his own translations from Byron helped him to work himself into Byronic moods. At the same time he cultivated his own aloofness to such a degree that even on entering, in 1830, Moscow University, he showed but little inclination to mix with his fellow-students and paid hardly any attention to the fact that after the débâcle of the "Decembrists" the University of Moscow, with its debating circles, became the actual focus of Russian culture. The Stankevich circle, with the subsequent critic Vissarion Belinsky as one of its members, was exploring all sorts of literary and philosophic problems. The youths gathering round Herzen and the poet Ogaryov showed, however, a keener interest in the social questions of the day, the liberal "Decembrist" spirit still hovering over their debates.

German philosophy, notably the ideas of Schelling and Hegel, happened to be one of the strong influences among the intellectuals of that period. Another stimulus came from the French Utopian socialists. Their theories were later combined by quite a few firebrands (Belinsky included) with "left" Hegelianism, and the two together helped to shape the radical and revolutionary thought of Russia.

Lermontov did not belong to any of these groups. Besides, in 1832 he suddenly left the University and went to Petersburg where he entered a military school and, after two years of detestable training, obtained a commission in the Guards. In 1837 he was transferred (or, rather, exiled) to a Caucasian regiment on account of his aggressive invective, The Death of a Poet, written on the day of Pushkin's death (January 29th). The poem could not be printed [in a footnote Lavrin adds: "It first appeared in print in 1856, in Herzen's Polar Star, published in London. Two years later the poem was printed also in Russia."], but as it was read in countless written copies, it made Lermontov's name known from one end of Russia to the other. In the Caucasus, which was fated to be strangely connected with his life, his work, and even with his death, he met another poet, the banished "Decembrist" Alexander Odoevsky—one of the few people he really befriended. Owing to his grandmother's influence, Lermontov was allowed to return at the end of the same year to his old Hussar regiment, and he made a considerable impression in St. Petersburg. By this time he was already regarded as one of the great hopes of Russian poetry and a successor to Pushkin. He was admired, lionized, but in spite of his numerous conquests among the society ladies, he remained as bored and lonely as ever. Mixing a life of dissipation with intensive poetic activities, he did not care to make himself popular either in society or among his own comrades. As for literary men, he knew very few and seemed to avoid them on purpose. After a duel he had in February 1840 with the son of the French ambassador, M. de Barrante, he was arrested and again sent to the Caucasus. He took part in some dangerous expeditions against the mountaineers, in which he displayed reckless courage. One of such engagements—the battle on the river Valerik (on July 1 lth, 1840)—he described in a most beautiful poem. In the spring of 1841 he made a flying visit to Petersburg in the hope of being allowed to remain there, but without success. On his return to the Caucasus he stopped for a longer period at his favorite spa Pyatigorsk. The place was full of summer guests. Among them there were ubiquitous society people, including some of his old acquaintances. One of them, a certain Major Martynov, whom he tactlessly ridiculed in the presence of a lady, challenged him to a duel. The duel took place outside Pyatigorsk on July 27th, 1841, and the poet was killed on the spot. He died at the age of twenty-seven, i.e. ten years younger than Pushkin.

The best of Lermontov's work is second only to Pushkin's, but with reservations. Pushkin showed even in his early verse great technical skill and finish. In the case of Lermontov, however, it is only the mature work—roughly from 1836 onwards—that really counts. His youthful writings, whether poems or plays, compare with his later products chiefly as a series of experiments. He was perfectly aware of this and even kept returning to some of his themes again and again in order to perfect them during his later and more mature phase, until they received an adequate form. Yet however much he differed from Pushkin in his outlook and temperament, he could not do without Pushkin's influence. Even Byron was at first approached by him mainly through Pushkin. His two immature tales in verse, The Circassian and The Prisoner of the Caucasus (both written at the age of fifteen) were imitations of Pushkin's Byronic tales with the Caucasus as the exotic "Eastern" background. After a more thorough acquaintance with Byron's work Lermontov wrote his longer Caucasian tales Ismail Bey (1832) and Hadji Abrek, the latter having been his first longer poem to be printed in a periodical in 1835.

In the meantime Lermontov tried his hand also at plays. They are pretentiously romantic, redolent of Schiller's "storm and stress" period but much more juvenile and with an obvious tendency towards self-dramatization. Men and Passions (to which, for some reason, he gave a German title, Menschen und Leidenschaften, 1830) and A Queer Fellow (1831) must have been written under the impact of the family quarrels between his grandmother and his father. His later drama, The Masquerade (1835), over-stated though it be, is more impressive in its combination of blind jealousy (the influence of Othello) on the one hand, and of a conflict between the self-centered individual and society on the other. Whereas Pushkin the poet could and did rise to that affirmative attitude which made him look sympathetically upon life at large, Lermontov was too often inclined to reduce the whole of life to the moods and demands of his own frustrated ego and to treat it accordingly. He also preferred to Pushkin's visual imagery the more visionary symbols often originating in the realm of the spirit (like his "Angel"). The language of many an early poem of his seems rather blurred. At his best, however, he soon developed a matchless pictorial gift. Lermontov the romantic has certain features in common with the other-worldly romanticism of Zhukovsky; yet instead of sharing Zhukovsky's passivity and quietism, he remained a "Byronic" rebel to the end. Like Byron, too, he broke morally with his own class, even if he was unable to do so socially. And as in the case of Byron again (or for that matter of Gogol), the virulence of his romantic indictment taught him to watch and to expose life also by realistic methods. These he kept perfecting with such success as to emulate, in his mature stage, the disciplined realism of Pushkin himself.

Lermontov's unfinished realistic tale Sashka (1836) is an offspring mainly of Byron's Don Juan and, to some extent, of the first chapter of Pushkin's Onegin. It is a scathing and at times obscene satire against the provincial gentry in its process of moral decomposition. The realism of another tale inverse, A Treasurer's Wife (1837), written in the Onegin stanza, is modelled on Pushkin's Count Nulin and, through the latter, on Byron's Beppo. It gives a humorously caustic picture of provincial officials, one of whom gambles away his pretty wife to an army officer. At times Lermontov the realist actually reaches Pushkin's simplicity and detachment. In Borodino (1837), for example, he renders to perfection the tone, the manner and also the grumbling humor of an old veteran who talks to his grandson about Napoleon's first defeat during his invasion of Russia in 1812. And if the realism in some of his poems (such as his famous "Cossack Cradle Song") can be poignantly touching, it acquires a dynamic matterof-factness in the already mentioned picture of the battle on the Caucasian river Valerik—an anticipation of Tolstoy's battle scenes in War and Peace. The pathos of his "Testament" again is due to the discrepancy between the tragic situation of a soldier dying of wounds and the almost jokingly casual tone in which he tells his last wishes to a comrade due to go home on leave.

But if somebody questions you
About me as they may:
Just say that a certain bullet flew—
My chest was in the way;
Say I died bravely for the Tsar,
And say what fools our doctors are,
Tell them I send my duty
To Russia, home and beauty.

Mother and Dad—surely they still
Alive can scarce remain.
At any rate I'd hate to fill
Those old folks' days with pain.
But, if one of them lingers yet,
Just tell that there's no use to fret:
They've sent us to the fighting,
And I'm no hand at writing.
[Translated by V. de Sola Pinto.]

The height of poetic detachment was reached, however, by Lermontov in a great work of a different order: The Song about Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich, the Young Body-Guard and the Brave Merchant Kalashnikov. This poem is the finest literary emulation of the historical folk-songs (similar to, and formally like the byliny). Here Lermontov came at least as close to the spirit of the people and to folk genius as Pushkin did in his poetic transposition of fairy tales. But this is Lermontov at his best rather than his most typical. Essentially subjective, he succeeded only during the last period of his life in turning his personal moods and attitudes into great poetry, notably so when face to face with nature. This poem, the whole of which consists of one single sentence, can serve as a proof:

When o'er the yellowing corn a fleeting shadow rushes,
And fragrant forest glades re-echo in the breeze,
And in the garden's depths the ripe plum hides its blushes
Within the luscious shade of brightly verdant trees;

When bathed in scented dew, the silver lily,
At golden morn or evening shot with red,
From out behind a leafy bush peeps shyly,
And nods with friendly mien its dainty head;

When down the shady glen the bubbling streamlet dances,
And, lulling thought to sleep with its incessant

song,
Lisps me the secrets, with a thousand glances,
Of that still corner where it speeds along;

Then does my troubled soul find solace for a while,
Then vanish for a time the furrows from my brow,
And happiness is mine a moment here below,
And in the skies I see God smile.

Pushkin would not have used so many adjectives and "purple patches" as Lermontov was wont to do, yet this does not mean that all his poems are full of them. Nor is he often as conciliatory as in the quoted lyric. His awareness of the difference between the world to which he was chained, and the timeless realm of the spirit was too painful to make him accept his fate. Besides, like so many romantics, he derived his poetic power principally from protest, rebellion, and that proud isolation which repudiates anything tainted with the stigma of the "human-all-too-human."

Oh gloomy and dreary! and no one to stretch out a hand
In hours when the soul nears disaster …
Desire! but what use is an empty desire without end?
And the years, the best years, but fly faster.

To love! yes, but whom? It is nothing in time's little space.
No love has an endless to-morrow!
Just look at yourself: what is past does not leave any trace.
They are nothing—both pleasure and sorrow.

What is passion? That sickness so sweet, either early or late,
Will vanish at reason's protesting;
And life, if you ever, attentive and cool, contemplate,
Is but empty and meaningless jesting.

So the mood of "The Angel" keeps recurring in Lermontov's poetry like a permanent refrain to his own life. And since both his pessimism and his rebellion were due to metaphysical nostalgia, they often gave him that well-nigh elemental force of negation and challenge which came out in his two principal works,The Novice (1840) and The Demon (1841).

These two tales in verse represent the climax of Lermontov's romanticism and poetic genius in one. The Novice, in particular, is the most glowing assertion of freedom that ever came from the pen of a Russian poet. Full of unsurpassed pictures of nature, it has nothing of the slow despondent rhythm of his famous "Meditation," beginning with the line, "Sadly do I look upon our generation." The very pace of The Novice (he calls it in Georgian—Mtsyri) is so manly and bracing that there are no feminine endings in its four-footed iambics. The theme itself goes back to Lermontov's early period. He began to work upon it in 1830. Five years later he embodied it as one of the motifs in his somewhat confused romantic tale in verse, The Boyar Orsha, and completed its final draft in the last year of his life. The tale is in the form of a confession on the part of a young Caucasian mountaineer who as a child had been captured by the Russians and was then left in a Georgian monastery where he became a novice. But the monastery walls did not obliterate the memories of his childhood and his yearning for freedom. Determined to see his native place and to taste of a free life once again, he escapes, wanders amidst the gorgeous Caucasian scenery, but in the end is found dying of exhaustion and starvation not far from the spot where his adventure had started. Having thus completed the vicious circle, he is brought back to the monastery. He knows that his hours are numbered, but his spirit refuses to surrender. In words burning with passion he confesses to an old monk the reasons why he escaped and perseveres in his defiance to the end.

Tragic, but in a different sense, is Lermontov's "Eastern tale," The Demon. He had started working at it as far back as 1829 and 1830, took it up again in 1833, then during his stay in the Caucasus in 1837, and completed it (after several previous drafts) in 1841. The demon of this tale is Lermontov's own double, projected into the realm of the spirit. He is a rebellious exiled angel who still remembers his one-time bliss ("The Angel" motif again), but is doomed to be imprisoned in his own isolation till the end of time. The theme bears traces of Byron's influence—especially of his Heaven and Earth, of Thomas Moore's The Love of Angels, of Eloa by Alfred de Vigny, but in spite of this it remains Lermontov's most typical and personal creation. For it combines, in an intensified symbolic manner, all the features of his own nature: his feeling of loneliness, his rebellious pride, his secret wish as well as his inability to come to terms with life.

Unhappy Demon, spirit of exile,
Soared high above the sinful world,
And memories of the days of erstwhile
Before him brooding vision whirled,
Of days when in the light of grace
A cherub bright and pure he shone,
When in the swift, unending race
The comet turned its smiling face
To greet him as they fastened on;
When through the everlasting gloaming,
Athirst of knowledge he pursued
The caravans of planets roaming
Through endless space without a goal,
When faith and love imbued his soul,
The happy first-born of creation,
Unknown to fear or pride's inflation,
Nor came to haunt his limpid mind
The threat of endless years of pain …
And much, so much he strove to find
Deep in his memory, but in vain.

And since this is an "Eastern tale," the Caucasus—the Russian romantic East—is introduced as the only adequate background for a spirit of such stature. It is the Caucasus Lermontov had known and admired since his boyhood.

Then o'er the high Caucasian maze
The banished angel slowly rose,
Kazbek with glinting lights ablaze,
Stood clad in everlasting snows.
And deep below, an inky track
Like a dark serpent's hiding-crack,
The winding Darial met his gaze.
The Terek like a lion bounding
With shaggy mane upon the peak
Set all the hollow vales resounding;
And beasts upon the mountain bleak
And birds aloft in heaven's light
Both harkened to its thundered word;
And golden clouds in endless flight
Sped with it northward undeterred.

The beauty of Gruzia or Georgia, embedded in that scenery, is

Spread out in glittering, gorgeous views,
Ablaze with morning's rosy dews,
With lofty ruins ivy-decked
And purling brooks that flow unchecked
O'er beds of multi-colored stones.

It is amidst the most beautiful views in the world that the Demon suddenly beholds Tamara—the most beautiful of mortals, and falls in love with her. But Tamara, already betrothed, is expecting the arrival of her bridegroom who, accompanied by a whole caravan, hurries to the wedding. Tamara and her girl-friends while away the time with innocent pleasures.

And on the roof in rich array
The bride sits with her maiden throng,
Filling the hours with play and song
Till o'er the distant hills the day
Warns them that night will not be long.
Their palms in gentle measure clapping,
They sing, and then the young bride takes
Her tambourine, which, gently tapping
Above her head, she gaily shakes
With a lily hand that faintly quakes.
Now lighter than a bird she dashes,
Then, pausing, she will fix her gaze
While two moist eyes are seen to blaze
Beneath their jealous tapering lashes;
Now she will raise her brows with pride,
Now suddenly her form incline,
Then o'er the patterned floor will glide
Her foot so lovely, so divine!
And oft her face will sweetly smile
With gentle mirth devoid of guile.
A beam of moonlight faintly trembling
Upon the ruffled water's face,
Though much her wreathed smile resembling,
Can scarce compare for light or grace.

The Demon sees to it that the caravan of the wedding guests is dispersed, while the bridegroom himself is killed. In despair, Tamara retires to a convent, but here the Demon begins to tempt her in her dreams. He does this with no evil intentions, for Tamara's beauty has made such a profound change in him that he actually hopes his love for her might save him at last from isolation and even reconcile him to God and His world. Invisible, he whispers to her:

The gentle prayer of love unending
I bring to thee with heart aglow,
On earth my spirit's first unbending,
The first tears from my eyes to flow.
O let them not unheeded go!
Heaven knows that one word of thine
Can make my simple soul surrender,
And clad in thy love's light divine
In Paradise again I'd shine
Like a new angel in new splendor.

But this is not granted to him. When, finally, he embraces Tamara, she dies from the kiss of an immortal. Her soul is taken away by a messenger of God, while the Demon is left in the same cosmic loneliness as ever.

Again he roamed in desolation,
The haughty exile of creation,
On whom no hope or love shall gleam.

In spite of its somewhat operatic theme and setting, this poem remains one of the masterpieces of Russian literature. Lermontov expressed in it symbolically the depth of his own uprootedness as only a romantic of his brand could have done. Yet the plane of such poetry was too vague, too far removed from the actualities of the day and the conditions of an entire generation lost as it were in the desert of Russian life under Nicholas I. So he decided to tackle the problem from a different angle and in prose; which he did in his novel, A Hero of Our Time (1840)….

Frustrated strength, doomed to turn against itself or else to degenerate into the nihilistic "will to power"—such was the inner tragedy of Lermontov's own personality. Through his masterly analysis of this tragedy Lermontov deepened the problem of the "superfluous man" and thus became the creator of the psychological novel in Russian literature. He was among the first to tackle some of those aspects of individual frustration which afterwards were further developed in Dostoevsky's writings.

Even the "demoniac" pride and self-assertiveness of Dostoevsky's complex heroes, such as Raskolnikov and Stavrogin, have some of their roots in Lermontov. Whereas one aspect of Dostoevsky's work goes back to Gogol, the other points to Lermontov, and via Lermontov to Byron—however distant the affinities may be at times.

As a painter of the "superfluous man" Lermontov forms a link between Pushkin on the one hand, and Turgenev and Goncharov on the other. As a psychologist, however, he leads to Dostoevsky. By his frankness and his refusal to indulge in any shams or rosy spectacles, he introduced into Russian literature that psychological and moral honesty which often verged on recklessness. Both as poet and novelist, Lermontov inaugurated the vertical direction in Russian literature. It was he who made it conscious of depth (which is something different from the unconscious depth) at a time when the more horizontal "natural school" was already branching off into a number of those aspects which formed the basis of the subsequent Russian realism.