10 Celebrities Who Were Murdered By Their Own Fans

When Mikhail Lermontov earned himself exile in the Caucasus in 1837 for his elegy, Death Of A Poet, he had no idea he would meet the same end as the subject of his poem four short years later. Pushkin was shot in a duel. Lermontov, a Romantic poet himself and the father of the Russian psychological novel, would follow his friend and hero to the grave in 1841.

In 1841 while in the town of Pyatigorsk in the Caucasus, Lermontov took to ruthlessly mocking an old friend, Nikolai Martynov. Martynov and Lermontov were both officers in the Imperial Russian Army. They had known each other at least as far back as 1832 when they both attended military school in St Petersburg.

Martynov asked his old friend not to mock him in front of the ladies but Lermontov ignored him. Martynov did what all aristocrats did back then when they felt that their honour was slighted: he challenged Lermontov to a duel. The poet accepted.

Lermontov was said to have been nonchalant about the duel. Many duels back then were cancelled. There is no exhaustive list about all of Lermontov's duels but his more famous friend, Alexander Pushkin, made more than 20 challenges to duels and received seven challenges himself. Only four of these resulted in actual duelling, including the fatal last one. In Lermontov's case, Martynov didn't feel very forgiving. When the day came, he shot straight at the poet's heart, killing him on the spot.