Written Fates: The Life and Death of Mikhail Lermontov
When fiction and reality merge
The date is February 8th, 1837. A cold wind blows over the banks of the Black River outside a darkening Saint Petersburg.
Evening approaches as two men walk through the snow towards each other, pistols in hand. On one side advances Georges-Charles de Heeckeren d’Anthès, a 25-year-old debonair French aristocrat. Opposing him is 37-year-old Alexander Pushkin. A rumored affair between the Frenchman and Pushkin’s wife was the duel’s justification.
Pushkin had written about duels, he had dreamt about them, and being the impulsive man he was he had lived his share, few materializing in combat, none shedding blood. February 8th would change that as the poet was shot through the pelvis, ebbing into the sea of timelessness two days later.
In a subtle deviation from the duel in the poet’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, in which the titular Byronic dandy slays a young poet; Pushkin the older poet, would perish to a younger dandy.
His death became a national spectacle, sending ripples through Russian literature for the next century as he became a martyr to the poetic, inscribed on the painting of Romanticism and Russian Literature.
