Mikhail Lermontov wrote A Hero of Our Time at twenty-five — and was killed in a duel at twenty-six. In that single year he became a classic.
He was born in Moscow in 1814. His mother died early, and his father ceded his upbringing to his grandmother. The Caucasus entered his life in childhood — first for his health, later as a place of exile. Pushkin's Prisoner of the Caucasus, read as a boy, was never forgotten.
Mtsyri, The Demon, Masquerade — Romantic poems and dramas. And A Hero of Our Time, with Pechorin, the superfluous man who wrecks everything around him not out of malice but out of emptiness.
His first exile came for Death of the Poet, his verses on the death of Pushkin. The second, for a duel. In the Caucasus, at Pyatigorsk, he quarrelled with Martynov. A duel. He was killed on the spot.