In the minds of readers and researchers, Lermontov has acquired a reputation as a “mysterious poet.” This opinion has grounds, but they do not lie in any special “mystery” of creativity and biography, but in the relative paucity of information that modern science has about Lermontov. If the chronicle of Pushkin’s life and work - a systematic collection of biographical, historical and literary information about the poet - for the first twenty-seven years of his life takes up about 900 printed pages, then about Lermontov there is four times less such information and it is less valuable in content. Pushkin's correspondence for the years 1814–1827 totals more than 350 letters; Lermontov's correspondence for the years 1827–1841 is a little more than 60 and is almost devoid of literary topics. Both creative and everyday connections of Lermontov appear to the researcher and reader as if they were broken or, on the contrary, appearing as if by themselves, without visible causes and effects. In this apparent historical and literary vacuum, Lermontov’s creativity, unusual in its intensity, develops: in less than thirteen years of literary work, he wrote more than 400 poems, about 30 poems, 6 dramas and 3 novels, one of which is “A Hero of Our Time.”