person

Mikhail Lermontov

Lermontov

Russian Romantic poet and novelist (1814-1841), author of A Hero of Our Time, cited alongside Pushkin as an emblem of the great writers the play's minor characters are pointedly not.

Reading notes

Poems and Dubia (school-age and disputed juvenilia) §490 Believe me -- happiness is only there, / Where we are loved, where we are trusted
A genuine couplet from Lermontov, quoted straight as an epigraph-like offering before Chekhov's own ironic gloss reverses its sentiment in the following lines.
Departed from Moscow: §14 Lermontov
Russian Romantic poet and novelist, named second in Velichkov's absurd self-ranking of literary greatness -- the joke being that an illiterate man who needs others to read his own lines aloud presumes to rank himself among Russia's greatest writers.
On the Road §1 A little golden cloud had found its bed
The epigraph (sections 1-3) quotes, verbatim and with attribution, the opening couplet of Lermontov's 1841 lyric "The Cliff" ("Утёс"): a golden cloud spends one night on the breast of a giant crag, then moves on at dawn, leaving the crag to weep alone. The poem supplies the story's central figure for the one-night encounter between Likharev and Ilovaiskaya, and is echoed directly in the closing image of Likharev, snow-covered, coming to resemble "a white crag" (section 112).
To K. S. Barantsevich, 12 August 1888. Sumy. §8 Lermontov's words
Chekhov borrows the phrase "the defiles of Daryal" directly from Lermontov, whose poetry (including "Tamara") fixed the Daryal Gorge in the Russian literary imagination.
To A. S. Suvorin, 18 November 1888. Moscow. §7 In a word, "but he, rebellious, seeks the storm!"
A quoted line from Lermontov's 1832 poem "Парус" ("The Sail"), used by Chekhov as a familiar literary tag for his own restless mood rather than as a citation requiring further sourcing; see the corresponding allusions entry for the full citation.
To Ye. K. Sakharova, 13 January 1889. Moscow. §4 Lermontov once said
Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841), Russian Romantic poet, already established elsewhere in this corpus; Chekhov quotes him without naming the poem.
To P. A. Sergeyenko, 6 March 1889. Moscow. §7 Lermontov
Mikhail Lermontov, invoked here by his early death at twenty-eight and comparatively vast output as a rebuke to Chekhov's own sense that he does not write enough.
To A. S. Suvorin, 22 January 1892. Moscow. §8 с каждого можно купца Калашникова писать
Chekhov invokes Stepan Kalashnikov, the young merchant hero of Mikhail Lermontov's narrative poem "Песня про царя Ивана Васильевича, молодого опричника и удалого купца Калашникова" ("The Song of the Merchant Kalashnikov," 1837) -- a figure of stylized folk-epic manly beauty and dignity who dies defending his wife's honor in a fistfight before Ivan the Terrible. The name functions here as a byword for a strikingly handsome, powerfully built Russian man of the people, not as commentary on Lermontov's poem itself; see the allusions file for the literary-quotation record.
A Case from Practice §76 Lermontov
Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841), the Russian Romantic poet and novelist, author of the narrative poem The Demon that Liza cites; naming him casually, as a fact of ordinary reading, is part of how the story marks her as an educated, isolated young woman.
Three Sisters §493 Lermontov's temperament
Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841), Russia's great Romantic poet, killed at twenty-six in a duel provoked by his own quarrelsome vanity; Solyony's repeated claim to resemble him in temperament and looks is a piece of vain self-fashioning that becomes grimly literal when Solyony likewise kills a rival in a duel.
Three Sisters §921 he, rebellious, seeks the storm, as if in storms there were peace
A line from Mikhail Lermontov's short lyric "The Sail" (Парус, 1832), in which a lone sail on a stormy sea becomes an emblem of restless, self-destructive yearning; Solyony's quotation of it just before his duel with Tuzenbach makes explicit the Romantic, Lermontov-modeled self-image he has been cultivating throughout the play.
Trifon §2 Lermontov
Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841), Russian Romantic poet; the story's epigraph, "And I don't regret the past at all," is drawn from his verse.
Artists' Wives §144 Lermantoff
Mikhail Lermontov, the Russian Romantic poet and novelist, dead since 1841; like the Derzhavin cameo, his invented visit to Lisbon is part of the sketch's playful chronological nonsense.