SOURCE: "Artistic Maturity: 1837-1841," in Mikhail Lermontov, Southern Illinois University Press, 1962, pp. 63-74.

In the essay below, Mersereau treats the themes of Lermontov's mature verse.

The choice of the year 1837 as the beginning of Lermontov's last period of creative activity has a certain logic, for that year brought about not only drastic developments in the poet's personal fate but was marked by his arrival at complete artistic maturity. Everything he wrote after that date bears the stamp of perfection, and it is upon these works that his reputation is almost exclusively founded.

In attempting to define the essence of Lermontov's mature art, scholars and commentators have come forth with a number of generalizations, most of which are true in some respects but far from sufficiently comprehensive. He has been called the poet of negation, doubt, despair, solitude, protest, and tendency, and, conversely, the poet of resignation, religiosity, and...