4. The Story about the Young man

- Come in, please, Alexander Sergeyevich! Would you like to sit down? Would you like a glass of orange juice?

We are reading about your words to the Emperor Nicholas I. The words, wich were told just before end of your terrestrial way: "Tell the Emperor, I regret losing my life. Because I can't express to him my gratitude. I would be totally of his!"

Pushkin remained silent. A bit later he said:

- The boy will go toward outstanding success.

- Orphan, difficult the private life, not simple situation in the family. He was brought up by the grandmother ... It seems, these are your words: 'It's impossible to break an axe into two parts with a lash?'

- "The poet - or the no one!" - Alexander Pushkin has quoted a line from the poem.

The group of excursionists entered the hall where the portraits were arranged. Among others there was a self-portrait of Lermontov.

The guide told:

- Pushkin's death has terribly struck Lermontov. Lermontov revered the Pushkin's genius ...

Under influence of a true grief, fresh still, and the indignation excited in him by this scary murder, Lermontov in a short period, almost immediately, wrote a few stanzas, which were extended out widely in two days around the city. Since then, all who cherish the Russian word, learned the name of Lermontov.

- I read these verses to the count von Benckendorff, and we haven't found in them anything reprehensible, - Alexander Nikolaevich Mordvinov, the managing director of the Third Section of His Imperial Majesty's Own Chancellery has quietly commented on a situation from the portrait.

- Business was so, - V.P. Burnashev, one of participants of an excursion, has noticed, - Lermontov has written the poem, known to almost all Russia, on the death of Pushkin, the poem which has put suddenly him, our schoolmate, almost level with poet, he in the magnificent verses mourned now.

A people said to us that Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky appreciated these verses with special pleasure and he recognized in them not only rudiments, but all manifestation of mighty talent. The charm and musicality of versification have been recognized by experts as the phenomenon remarkable.

Whether the truth whether isn't present, I don't know, - it not that other as repetition of opinion, that the Emperor has read verses with attention. and he told: "This person, - who knows, - will replace Pushkin in the Russia!"

They said, - before accident with the additional verses, - that his highness the grand duke Michael Pavlovich has spoken of Lermontov so: "This unripe poet will give in the future a rich harvest of fruits". And then, laughing, he have added: "I will send him in a guardroom if he in head of a military unit will command in verses!".

Lermontov, always such a respectful to the grandmother, two times hardly constrained himself when the old woman said to him that the late Alexander Sergeyevich has sat not in his own (and not suitable) sledge, and, having sat down in them, wasn't able to operate dexterously the capricious horses rushing his up to that snowdrift, from which one road was only into a precipice.

Lermontov, of course, didn't argue with our old woman. He was only bitting his fingernails and left the house for the whole days.

The grandmother has noticed it, and, without a wishing to sadden the Mischa, didn't tell a word to him about secular rumors any more. And these rumors have influenced on Lermontov so strongly that he has got sick even.

The grandmother was frightened. The doctor recognized disorder of nerves and has advised to accept a good dose of the Valerian extract . The friend of all St. Petersburg, the kindest Nikolay Fedorovich Arendt has arrived. He, without prescribing any medicine, has quite calmed our whimsical patient with the conversation. Arendt told him all sad epic of those two with a half days from January 27 to January 29, during which Pushkin, wounded, felt a great pain. He everything, everything, everything that only occurred these days, hour an hour, on the dot, has told out for Lermontov, having respoken the words of Pushkin. Our friend has even more loved the idol after this frank message ofNikolay Fedorovich, the message, which has poured out from the kind soul not able to constrain the words.

Lermontov was under this impression when ours the relative N. A. S., a diplomat, serving under the superiors of Count Nesselrode, appeared to us. This relative was one of the representatives and members of our highest circle, and a gentleman in all the meaning of the word.

Having learned from the grandmother, - she was with the guests, - about Michel's disease, he has hurried to visit about him and has entered unexpectedly his room, minutes ten after Nikolay Fedorovich Arendt's departure. S. highly appreciated Lermontov's verses on the death of Pushkin. But only he said that in vain Michel, extolling the poet, has attached too strong significance to involuntary murderer. He as any noble person, after the fact that was between them, couldn't but to participate in a duel and but to shoot. "The honor obliges"!

Lermontov didn't want to hear it. He, grasping a sheet of paper, something quickly on it scrabbled by a pencil, breaking pencils one after another and and having damaged so with a half-dozen. The anger of him didn't know limits. He has angrily looked at S. and has thrown to him: "You, the sir, Pushkin's antipode, and I am not responsible for anything if you now don't leave from here". S. haven't forced itself to invite to an exit twice. And he left quickly, having told only: "But he just mad".

A quarter of hour later, Lermontov who has damaged so many pencils in time when here was S., and then was writing absolutely quietly clean off, have read me those verses with the first words: "And you, haughty descendants!" ['And you, the offspring arrogant'], - the verses in which there were such a lot of force.

And two or three days later almost all St. Petersburg read and knew "addition" to Lermontov's verses on the death of Pushkin. When the old woman the grandmother has learned about these verses, she tried in every way somehow as if it were false bank notes to withdraw them from the public circulation; but it was resolutely impossible: they extended with speed, and soon they were read already by all the Moscow where old men and old women, mainly in the Tverskaya street, declared them purely revolutionary and dangerous. Also the count von Benckendorff has read them ...

- Though we, the youth, didn't know properly, and there was nobody to explain: about whom it was talked in the stanza: "And you, by greedy crowd standing near a throne", etc., but after all we worried, came in a deep indignation ( - in relation to someone), we flared heartily, filled with heroic enthusiasm, ready, perhaps, on anything, - so the force of the Lermontov's verses raised us. The heat burning in these verses was so infectious. Hardly sometime in Russia verses made such enormous and universal impression. Unless 20 years earlier the "Woe from Wit", - V.V. Stasov, one of participants of excursion group, has spoken.