As he grew older, his pride and the exasperating provocativeness of his conduct increased to such an extent that he seemed positively seeking for serious trouble, and for some one whose patience he could overtax, and on whom he could fasten a quarrel. And this was not slow to happen.
At the bottom of all this lay no doubt a deep-seated disgust with himself and with the world in general, and a complete indifference to life, resulting from large aspirations which could not find an outlet, and so recoiled upon himself. The epoch, the atmosphere and the society were the worst possible for his peculiar nature; and the only fruitful result of the friction between himself and the society and the established order of his time, was that he was sent to the Caucasus, which proved to be a source of inspiration for him, as it had been for Pushkin. One is inclined to say, "If only he had lived later or longer"; yet it may be doubted whether, had he been born in a more favourable epoch, either earlier in the milder régime of Alexander I, or later, in the enthusiastic epoch of the reforms, he would have been a happier man and produced finer work.
The curious thing is that his work does not reveal an overwhelming pessimism like Leopardi's, an accent of revolt like Musset's, or of combat like Byron's; but rather it testifies to a fundamental indifference to life, a concentrated pride. If it be true that you can roughly divide the Russian temperament into two types--the type of the pure fool, such as Dostoyevsky's _Idiot_, and a type of unconquerable pride, such as Lucifer--then Lermontov is certainly a fine example of the second type. You feel that he will never submit or yield; but then he died young; and the Russian poets often changed, and not infrequently adopted a compromise which was the same thing as submission.
Lermontov was, like Pushkin, essentially a lyric poet, still more subjective, and profoundly self-centred. His attempts at the drama (imitations of Schiller and an attempt at the manner of Griboyedov) were failures. But, unlike Pushkin, he was a true romantic; and his work proves to us how essentially different a thing Russian romanticism is from French, German or English romanticism. He began with astonishing precocity to write verse when he was twelve. His earliest efforts were in French. He then began to imitate Pushkin. While at the Cadet School he wrote a series of cleverly written, more or less indecent, and more or less Byronic--the Byron of _Beppo_--tales in verse, describing his love adventures, and episodes of garrison life. What brought him fame was his "Ode on the Death of Pushkin," which, although unjustified by the actual facts--he represents Pushkin as the victim of a bloodthirsty society--strikes strong and bitter chords. Here, without any doubt, are "thoughts that breathe and words that burn"--