Volume 31, Number 9 · May 31, 1984
Lermontov's Demon
By Henry Gifford
Mikhail Lermontov: Major Poetical Works
translated with an introduction and commentary by Anatoly Liberman
University of Minnesota Press, 635 pp., $39.50
Narrative Poems by Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov
by Alexander Pushkin, by Mikhail Lermontov, translated by Charles Johnston, introduction by Kyril FitzLyon
Random House, 144 pp., $5.95 (paper)
Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841) came into the world at the same time as Byron's Lara, whose brow could turn 'almost to blackness in its demon hue.' His career was suitably Byronic—what the journalist in Howell's novel The Rise of Silas Lapham would have called 'regulation thing.' A lonely and difficult childhood; parents at odds with each other; his mother's death when he was two and a half. Moreover, a maternal grandmother, from the old and highly placed Stolypin family, took over and ensured that his father, the descendant of a Scottish soldier of fortune, should see the boy very seldom in the fourteen years of life that remained to him.
Review, 3694 words
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