Lermontov was born in Moscow to a respectable noble family of the Tula Governorate, and grew up in the village of Tarkhany (in the Penza Governorate), which now preserves his remains. According to one disputed and uncorroborated theory his paternal family was believed to have descended from the Scottish Learmonths, one of whom settled in Russia in the early 17th century, during the reign of Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov. The legendary Scottish poet Thomas the Rhymer (Thomas Learmonth) is claimed to be a relative of Lermontov. However this claim has been neither proved nor disproved, and thus remains a legend.

Lermontov's father, Yuri Lermontov, like his father before him, was a military man. Having moved up the ranks to captain, he married the sixteen year old Mariya Arsenyeva, to the great dismay of her mother, Yelizaveta Alekseyevna. A year after the marriage, on the night of October 3 (Old Style), 1814, Mariya Arsenieva gave birth to Mikhail Lermontov. According to tradition, soon after his birth, some discord between Lermontov's father and grandmother erupted, and unable to bear it, Mariya Arsenieva fell ill and died in 1817. After the daughter's death, Yelizaveta Alekseyevna devoted all her love to her grandson, always in fear that his father might move away with him. Either because of this pampering or continuing family tension or both, Lermontov as a child developed a fearful and arrogant temper, which he took out on the servants, and vandalising his grandmother's garden.

As a small boy Lermontov listened to stories about the outlaws of the Volga region, about their great bravery and wild country life. When he was ten, Mikhail fell sick, and Yelizaveta Alekseyevna took him to the Caucasus for its better climate, the origins of his love for this region.

The intellectual atmosphere in which he grew up was similar to that experienced by Pushkin, though the domination of French had begun to give way to a preference for English, and Lamartine shared popularity with Byron. In his early childhood Lermontov was educated by a Frenchman named Gendrot. Yelizaveta Alekseyevna felt that this was not sufficient and decided to take Lermontov to Moscow, to prepare for gymnasium. In Moscow, Lermontov was introduced to Goethe and Schiller by a German pedagogue, Levy, and shortly afterwards, in 1828, he entered the gymnasium. He showed himself to be an exceptional student. Also at the gymnasium he became acquainted with the poetry of Pushkin and Zhukovsky, and one of his friends, Katerina Hvostovaya, later described him as "married to a hefty volume of Byron". This friend had at one time been an object of Lermontov's affection, and to her he dedicated some of his earliest poems, "????? (? ???? ??????? ??????)" (The Beggar). At that time, along with his poetic passion, Lermontov also developed an inclination for poisonous wit, and cruel and sardonic humor. His ability to draw caricatures was matched by his ability to pin someone down with a well aimed epigram or nickname.

After the academic gymnasium, in August 1830, Lermontov entered Moscow University. That same summer the final, tragic act of the family discord played itself out. Having been deeply struck by his son's alienation, Yuri Lermontov left the Arseniev house for good, only to die a short time later. His father's death on such a note was a terrible loss for Mikhail, and is reflected in his poems: "Forgive me, Will we Meet Again?" and "The Terrible Fate of Father and Son".

Lermontov's career at the university was short-lived. He attended lectures faithfully, but he would often read a book in the corner of the auditorium, and rarely took part in student life. A prank pulled by a group of students against one of the professors named Malov brought his time at the University to an end. Several biographers see this incident as the reason for Mikhail's departure.

The events at the University led Lermontov to seriously reconsider his career choice. From 1830 to 1834 he attended the cadets school in Saint Petersburg, and in due course he became an officer in the guards. At that time he began writing poetry. He also took a keen interest in Russian history and medieval epics, which would be reflected in the Song of the Merchant Kalashnikov, his long poem Borodino, poems addressed to the city of Moscow, and a series of popular ballads.

To express his own and the nation's anger at the loss of Pushkin (1837) the young soldier wrote a passionate poem, Death of the Poet, ... the latter part of which is explicitly addressed to the inner circles at the court, though not to the Tsar himself. The poem all but accuses the powerful "pillars" of Russian high society of complicity in Pushkin's death. Without mincing words, it portrays that society as a cabal of self-interested venomous wretches "huddling about the throne in a greedy throng", "the hangmen who kill liberty, genius, and glory" about to suffer the apocalyptic judgment of God.

The tsar, however, seems to have found more impertinence than inspiration in the address, for Lermontov was forthwith exiled to the Caucasus as an officer in the dragoons. He had been in the Caucasus with his grandmother as a boy of ten, and he found himself at home, with feelings deeper than those of childhood recollection. The stern and rocky virtues of the mountain tribesmen against whom he had to fight, no less than the scenery of the rocks and of the mountains themselves, were close to his heart; the tsar had exiled him to his native land.

Lermontov visited Saint Petersburg in 1838 and 1839, and his indignant observations of the aristocratic milieu, wherein fashionable ladies welcomed him as a celebrity, occasioned his play Masquerade. His unreciprocated attachment to Varvara Lopukhina was recorded in the novel Princess Ligovskaya, which he never finished. His duel with a son of the French ambassador led to Lermontov being returned to the army fighting the war in the Caucasus, where he distinguished himself in hand-to-hand combat near the Valerik River.

By 1839 he completed his most important novel, A Hero of Our Time, which prophetically describes a duel like the one in which he would eventually lose his life.

On July 25, 1841, at Pyatigorsk, fellow army officer Nikolay Martynov, who felt hurt by one of Lermontov's jokes, challenged Lermontov to a duel. The duel took place two days later at the foot of Mashuk mountain. Lermontov was killed by Martynov's first shot. Several of his verses were posthumously discovered in his notebook.

Lermontov's poetic development was unusual. His earliest unpublished poems that he circulated in manuscript through his friends in the military were pornographic in the extreme, with elements of sadism. His subsequent reputation was clouded by this, so much so that admission of familiarity with Lermontov's poetry was not permissible for any young upper-class woman for a good part of the 19th century. These poems were published only once, in 1936, as part of a scholarly edition of Lermontov's complete works (edited by Irakly Andronikov).

During his lifetime, Lermontov published only one slender collection of poems (1840). Three volumes, much mutilated by censorship, were published a year after his death. His short poems range from indignantly patriotic pieces like Fatherland to the pantheistic glorification of living nature (e.g., Alone I set out on the road ...) Lermontov's early verse has been termed by some puerile, for despite his dexterous command of the language, it usually appeals more to adolescents than to adults. But like Percy Bysshe Shelley, with whom he is often compared, he attempted to analyse and bring to light the deeper reasons for this metaphysical discontent with society and himself. His poem "Mtsyri" ("The Novice") tells the story of a young man who finds that dangerous freedom is vastly preferable to protected servitude.

Both his patriotic and pantheistic poems had enormous influence on later Russian literature. Boris Pasternak, for instance, dedicated his 1917 poetic collection of signal importance to the memory of Lermontov's Demon, a long poem featuring some of the most mellifluous lines in the language, which Lermontov rewrote several times. The poem, which celebrates the carnal passions of the "eternal spirit of atheism" to a "maid of mountains", was banned from publication for decades. Anton Rubinstein's lush opera on the same subject was also banned by censors who deemed it sacrilegious and stupid.

Lermontov's major works, which can be readily quoted from memory by many Russians, suffer to other readers from poor quality or scarcity of translations - Lermontov therefore, remains largely unknown to English-speaking readers, save for his novel A Hero of Our Times.

Lermontov's Cossack Lullaby "went the whole round: from the original folklore source to literature, and from literature to the living folklore. ... For one and a half centuries people have performed these literary lullabies in real lulling situations [in Russia]."

A minor planet 2222 Lermontov discovered in 1977 by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh is named after him.