Mikhail Lermontov (1814 – 1841)
Russian Romantic writer and poet, sometimes called "the poet of the Caucasus.
Many a calm river begins as a turbulent waterfall, yet none hurtles and foams all the way to the sea.
Women love only those whom they do not know!
A childish feeling, I admit, but, when we retire from the conventions of society and draw close to nature, we involuntarily become children: each attribute acquired by experience falls away from the soul, which becomes anew such as it was once and will surely be again.
I am like a mariner born and bred on board a buccaneer brig whose soul has become so inured to storm and strife that if cast ashore he would weary and languish no matter how alluring the shady groves and how bright the gentle sun.
In simple hearts the feeling for the beauty and grandeur of nature is a hundred-fold stronger and more vivid than in us, ecstatic composers of narratives in words and on paper.
And I, as I lived, in an alien land
Will die a slave and an orphan.
Russian ladies, for the most part, cherish only Platonic love, without mingling any thought of matrimony with it; and Platonic love is exceedingly embarrassing.
Exchange I would for one short day,
For less, for but one hour amid
The jagged rocks where play I did,
A child, if 'twere but offered me,
Both Heaven and eternity!
I want to reconcile myself with heaven,
I want to love, I want to pray,
I want to believe in good.
...man, this ruler over general evil,
With a perfidious heart, with a lying tongue...
Of two friends, one is always the slave of the other, although frequently neither acknowledges the fact to himself.
What good are the passions? For sooner or later their sweet sickness ends when reason speaks up;
And life, if surveyed with cold-blooded regard is stupid and empty — a joke.
The history of a man's soul, even the pettiest soul, is hardly less interesting and useful than the history of a whole people; especially when the former is the result of the observations of a mature mind upon itself, and has been written without any egotistical desire of arousing sympathy or astonishment. Rousseau's Confessions has precisely this defect – he read it to his friends.
No, it is not you I love so ardently,
The glitter of your beauty is not for me:
I love in you my past suffering
And my perished youth.
What is this eternity to me without you?
What is the infinity of my domains?
Empty ringing words,
A spacious temple — without a divinity!
I was involuntarily struck by the aptitude which the Russian displays for accommodating himself to the customs of the people in whose midst he happens to be living. I know not whether this mental quality is deserving of censure or commendation, but it proves the incredible pliancy of his mind and the presence of that clear common sense which pardons evil wherever it sees that evil is inevitable or impossible of annihilation.
And everything that he saw before him
He despised or hated.
In people's eyes I read
Pages of malice and sin.
I little lived and was not free
Two captive lives can never be
To tortured free one half as good
I would exchange them if I could.
The chain of young life is broken,
The journey is ended, the hour has struck, it is time to leave,
Time to go where there is no future,
No past, no eternity, no years;
Where there are no expectations, no passions,
No bitter tears, no fame, no honour;
Where memory sleeps deeply
And the heart in its narrow coffin home
Does not feel the worm gnawing it.