Mikhail Lermontov

Lermontov was a cavalry officer whose fiery poem denouncing high society for causing Pushkin's death circulated in secret and got him exiled to the Caucasus, the frontier war zone that would furnish the landscape and violence of his own fiction.

A Hero of Our Time, structured as five loosely linked stories moving backward and forward through time, gave Russian literature its first true anti-hero: Pechorin, brilliant, bored, and casually cruel, ruins the women and rivals around him without ever quite locating a reason to stop. Lermontov insisted in a preface that the novel was a diagnosis, 'a portrait built of the vices of our whole generation,' not a confession.

He died as he had almost predicted: killed in a duel at twenty-six by a former friend he'd needled once too often, at a resort town in the same Caucasus his fiction had made legendary, not five years after Pushkin's own duel.