Not only did he “insult all this world” in his poems before, but now he made sure from the inside that “nowhere is there so much meanness and ridiculousness.” However, the great world and, above all, the crowned one paid him in the same way. It is not known what the retired major Bakhmetyev thought of Lermontov’s death in the duel, but Nicholas First muttered in a mundane way: “Death to a dog”, but in public he said: “Gentlemen, I have received news that the one who could replace Pushkin has been killed.” Six years later, there was another duel where Sofia Bakhmetyeva’s brother was killed, trying to defend the honor of his well-educated, but untimely pregnant sister.

      VII

      Mask, I love you. Achilles’ heel. The saving hope. Precious needs of the heart. We are a single link in an infinite chain. Overcoming doubt. The transformation of love. About the rebirth of Don Juan. Poets and philosophers. Illusions of the romantic ideal. The first dimension of Russian love

      Ten years after Lermontov’s death, a well-read woman who knows fourteen foreign languages, femininely charming and independent in her way of life, a distant relative of the kidnapper of Lermontov’s love, enters the society of Russian literati and the final scene of romantic love for the first time. And again there was not without a ball, this time a masquerade ball. Sophia Bakhmetyeva, hiding her face with a mask, managed to enchant two outstanding people, not alien to poetic inspiration, with a conversation at once. During the following meeting and chat over tea, one of them – Ivan Turgenev – was disappointed to see “the face of a Chukhonian soldier in a skirt,” while the other – Alexey Tolstoy – was carried away and fell passionately in love.

      It would be simplistic to suppose that Alexey Konstantinovich Tolstoy – a thirty-four-year-old handsome man, naturally strong, gifted with an exceptional memory, torn between writing and court service and a friend of the imperial family – had merely overcome the difficulty, already noted by Lermontov’s Pechorin, of “falling in love only with a quality of soul”. In the poem dedicated to this fateful encounter, other motifs covered by mystery can also be discerned: