The Spaniards, a tragedy in five acts, was written by the fifteen-year-old Mikhail Lermontov in 1830. He wrote his tragedy The Spaniards at his ’dacha’, near Moscow, in the estate of Serednikovo, which belonged to Dmitry Stolypin, the brother of his grandmother Elizaveta Arsenieva.
Mikhail Lermontov chose Spain as the setting for his first tragedy. At the beginning of the 19th century, interest in this country arose in Russia in connection with the Spanish resistance to Napoleon and the Spanish revolution of 1820. Additionally, Mikhail Lermontov believed that his family was related to the Spanish statesman of the turn of the 16th—17th centuries, Duke of Lerma.
The artist and illustrator Iuliia Kursheva, a teacher at the St Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design, prepared unique illustrations for this early work by Mikhail Lermontov.
