"His Demon never laughs and never lies; he has something of the child-like in him. He is always genuine, as far removed as possible from Gogol's spirit of mischief or Dostoievsky's wicked, sneering Devil. Lèrmontov's Devil is beautiful, because he is not thought out, but suffered out by the poet himself; he is hardly a devil at all."
There is a legend that once there was a fight between God and Satan and some of the angels were undecided which side to take. In order to help them to make up their mind they were sent to be born on earth, where they should dwell for a little in a limited world: the soul of Lèrmontov had been in his past one of these. That is why his duality was always such a burden to him. This explains many queer things about Lèrmontov: his amazingly deep passion for a girl of nine when he was ten ("I did not know whence she came") and his having drawn a detailed picture of his death many times before his final duel: most strange of all is Merejkòvski's idea that Lèrmontov remembered the future of eternity. Pushkin is the day-luminary of Russian poetry and Lèrmontov is the night-luminary: "It is high time to rise after our final stage of humility and start on our last revolt, and remember that besides Pushkin we have Lèrmontov and his message to the world.... Because in the end Satan will make peace with God."
He owed nothing to his contemporaries, little to his predecessors and still less to foreign models.
As a schoolboy he imitated Byron, merely echoes these, however, of his reading. Shelley urged him as Byron urged Pushkin to emulation, not imitation. His pride and obstinacy if nothing else would have made him carve out his own path: he chose the narrow path of romance, the Turner method rather than the Constable in his depictions of landscape, as may be seen in Mtsysi, the story of a Circassian orphan educated in a convent, who has ungovernable longings for freedom: he escapes, loses his way in the forest and is brought back after three days, dying from exhaustion and starvation. The greater portion of the poem is given up to his confession: he then tells how insatiable were his desires to seek out his own home and people: he describes his wanderings, hearing the song of a girl ... seeing at nightfall the light of a dwelling-place twinkling like a fallen star, but afraid to seek it. He then kills a panther and in the morning finds a way out of the woods and lies exhausted in the grass under the blinding sun of noon. He then fancies in his delirium that he is lying at the bottom of a deep stream; the fish sing to him in a voice so unearthly that he is enticed and allured as if the fish were the Erl-King's daughter.
In The Testament he rises to an unadorned realism that is little short of magic in its poignancy:
"'I want to be alone with you,
A moment quite alone.
The minutes left to me are few,
They say I'll soon be gone.
And you'll be going home on leave,
Then say ... but why? I do believe
There's not a soul who'll greatly care
To hear about me over there.
And yet if someone asks you there,
Let us suppose they do—
Tell them a bullet hit me here,
The chest—and it went through.
And say I died, and for the Tsar,
And say what fools the doctors are:—
And that I shook you by the hand,
And thought about my native land.
My father and my mother, too!
They may be dead by now:
To tell the truth, it wouldn't do
To grieve them anyhow.
If one of them is living, say
I'm bad at writing home and they
Have sent me to the front, you see—
And that they needn't wait for me.
We had a neighbour, as you know,
And you remember, I
And she ... How very long ago
It is we said good-bye.
She won't ask after me, nor care,
But tell her everything, don't spare
Her empty heart; and let her cry:—
To her it doesn't signify.'"
It is such a poem that led Baring to apply to Lèrmontov what Arnold said about Byron and Wordsworth: "there are moments when Nature takes the pen from his hand and writes for him." When one passes in review the vast output of his short life, we are struck by the lyrical inspiration, the strength and intensity, the concentration of his power, the wealth of his imagination, his gorgeous colouring and maintained high level.