[1][2] Young Yuri Volin has to make a difficult choice between staying with his rich, overprotective grandmother and departing to Germany with his financially struggling father.

Two possible candidates have been suggested, a distant cousin Anna Stolypina and Yekaterina Sushkova, but no conclusive evidence has been put forward to back either claim.

Some critics noted similarities with Vissarion Belinsky drama Dmitry Kalinin (1830-1831), both protagonists professing ideas which were popular with the Russian student circles of the time, including those of Saint-Simon, expressed in his Nouveau Christianisme (1825).

[1] According to critic N.M. Vladimirskaya, Yuri Volin is not so much a self-portrait, as the young author's attempt to draw a psychological portrait of his generation, as he saw it, stricken by turmoil and depression which set after the 1825 Decembrist revolt.

Housemaid Darya Grigoryevna Sokolova (née Kurtina) and servant Andrey Ivanovich Sokolov (here - Ivan) were real people too, although the extent to which the former had been responsible for the boy's troubles in reality remained unclear.

Most of the sources, though, cite a more trivial cause for Lermontov's departure: the elitist boarding-school was to be transformed into an ordinary gymnasium and many parents chose to withdraw their children from what they saw now as a downgraded school.