SOURCE: "The Lermontov Mirage," in Russian Review, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1945, pp. 31-9.

In the following excerpt, Nabokov reviews Lermontov's contributions to Russian poetry.

Michael Lermontov was born when Pushkin was a lad of fifteen and he died four years after Pushkin's death, that is, at the quite ridiculous age of twenty-seven. Like Pushkin he was killed in a duel, but his duel was not the inevitable sequel of a tangled tragedy as in Pushkin's case. It belonged rather to that trivial type which in the eighteen-thirties and forties so often turned hot friendship into cold murder—a phenomenon of temperature rather than of ethics.

You must imagine him as a sturdy, shortish, rather shabbylooking Russian army officer with a singularly pale and smooth forehead, queer velvety eyes that "seemed to absorb light instead of emitting it," and a jerky manner in his demeanor and speech. Following both a Byronic...