At the age of nineteen he was commissioned and gazetted in the Life Guard Hussars, already the author of The Demon, though that poem was still in manuscript. A satirical comedy was censored, and other poems began to appear in the reviews, so that not only the literary circles but Society looked with keen expectation for something good at his hands.
One of his poems in particular at this time attracted attention: it is the author's prayer in dedicating a girl to the Virgin. It was so sincere and simple in its religious tone that some of his critics declared that it was merely a pose of his. They failed to realise that his sanctuary was his supreme elation of love for a girl who answered his feelings by friendship. Lèrmontov loathed the idea of the marriage bond—real love was to him something far higher: his Vàrenka, who married another, was his kindred spirit. She it was whom he dedicated to the Virgin, and this relationship finds expression in several of his poems.
For five years he remained in his regiment, and during this time translated Byron, Heine and Goethe ... then in 1837 came the blow of Pushkin's death, which stung Lèrmontov to such a pitch of fury that he wrote his immortal ode, On the Death of Pushkin, which became at once known and repeated throughout the length and breadth of Russia by people who repeated it to, and copied it from, one another:
"And you, the proud and shameless progeny
Of fathers famous for their infamy,
You, who with servile heel have trampled down
The fragments of great names laid low by chance,
You, hungry crowd that swarms about the throne,
Butchers of freedom, and genius, and glory,
You hide behind the shelter of the law,
Before you, right and justice must be dumb!
But, parasites of vice, there's God's assize;
There is an awful court of law that waits.
You cannot reach it with the sound of gold;
It knows your thoughts beforehand and your deeds;
And vainly you shall call the lying witness;
That shall not help you any more;
And not with all the filth of all your gore
Shall you wash out the poet's righteous blood."
For this daring outburst he was arrested, tried and banished to the Caucasus, which again acted, as in his childhood, as a direct inspiration. New poems came flying to Petrograd full of human passions, and descriptions of a Nature prodigal and passionate as her devoted lover. No geography book could ever give such a vivid picture of the Caucasus as Lèrmontov's verse and prose. As the Arabs say: "They turn our hearing into seeing." Fame at last descended upon him. Then appeared the "Song of the Tsar Ivàn Vasìlyevich, the young Opriknik, and the Brave Merchant Kalàshinkov," in which the Opriknik insults the merchant's wife, and the merchant challenges him to fight with his fists, kills him and is executed for it. The poem is written as a folk-song, in the style of the Byliny: as an epic there is nothing in modern Russian literature to compare with it for simplicity, appropriateness of tone, vividness, truth to nature and terseness.
Every line begins with an anapæst, followed by some odd dactyls, and ends in a dactyl unrhymed. It has been translated by Madame Voynich admirably, and is published by Elkin Mathews.
While in the Caucasus, his age being now twenty-three, Lèrmontov finished The Demon, on which he had been at work for so long.
The personality of this Demon, the Spirit of Exile, is quite different from the Satanic Mephistopheles or Lucifer. With all his contempt for Earth, Lèrmontov's Demon is fascinating in every way. He is always musing over his former days in Heaven, and vainly seeking some relief in the desert of time and space into which he is cast out alone; he is the embodiment of the idea of loneliness in a proud soul. His sudden love for the Grùzian girl Tamàra inflames him with the desire of abandoning his pride, of opening his heart to Good, of making peace with Heaven ... we are never allowed to forget that the Angel and the Demon had been brothers. Moved by his love, the Demon is on the verge of humility and of opening his heart to Goodness when his pride and hatred return upon him, due entirely to the tone of enmity which the Angel adopts on meeting him. The Angel is a good hater and thorough in his scornfulness. Being Tamàra's celestial guardian, he becomes quite human and understandable when he meets the Demon (whom he might have conquered by greeting him with Heavenly grace) with icy contempt and threats. Here we have a perfect delineation of the kinship between the spirits of good and evil.
The Demon's wooing of Tamàra is irresistibly bewitching, one of the most passionate love declarations ever written, in couplets of sonorous iambics that glow like jewels and tremble like the strings of a harp. Tamàra yields to him (what human girl could have done otherwise?) and forfeits her life, but her soul is borne off to Heaven by the Angel: by death she has expiated her offence, and the Demon is left as before desolate in a loveless universe.
Owing to his grandmother's persistence Lèrmontov was recalled before one of his five years' exile had elapsed, and we see him again in Petrograd with his old regiment, a tremendous source of interest to all society, half of whom hated, while half loved him.