Death of the Poet

Pyotr Vyazemsky described the reaction of Arendt to the death of Pushkin:[2] Arendt, who had seen many deaths in his life, on the battlefields and in sickbeds, departed with tears in his eyes from his bedside and said that he had never seen anything like it, such patience with such suffering.On February 7, Lermontov added an acerbic final sixteen lines (beginning "And you, the arrogant descendants of infamous scoundrels...") to the poem.

These lines called for divine justice upon the heads of the "greedy horde" of the court aristocracy, whom Lermontov condemned as executioners of freedom and the true culprits of the tragedy.

Those final sixteen lines were regarded by the authorities as seditious free thinking, and Lermontov was arrested.

The first publication (a German translation under the title "Lermontov's lament at the grave of Alexander Pushkin") was in 1852 in Friedrich von Bodenstedt's Mikhail Lermontoff's Poetic Legacy.

The first published English translation (under the title "On the death of Pushkin") was in 1856, in Alexander Herzen's London periodical Polar Star.