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.

Either because of this pampering or continuing family tension or boththe young Lermontov developed a fearful and arrogant temper which he took out on the servants and in vandalising his grandmother's garden. Lermontov's duel with a son of the French ambassador led to him being returned to the army fighting the war in the Caucasus where he distinguiMikhail Lermontovd himself in hand-to-hand combat at the Battle of the Valerik River the basis for his poem Valerik. He had been in the Caucasus with his grandmother as a boy of ten and he felt himself at home with emotions deeper than those of childhood recollection.

S. July 15] 1841) a Russian Romantic writer poet and painter sometimes called "the poet of the Caucasus" became the most important Russian poet after Alexander Pushkin's death in 1837.