The early stages of Lermontov's literary development have not been fully examined. Usually the study of it begins in 1828, which dates back to the poet’s first literary experiments; but by this time he already had sufficiently wide reading and more or less established literary likes and dislikes. At the Moscow University Noble Boarding School, he immediately finds himself in an environment that lives by literary interests; his closest teachers - Raich, Merzlyakov, Pavlov, Zinoviev - were direct participants in fierce magazine battles, defenders of certain aesthetic programs. In the literary consciousness of the young poet, various poetic schools coexist, associate, and compete. But among this complex, sometimes contradictory and hardly fully conscious complex of literary attractions and repulsions, a tendency towards some kind of self-determination is already emerging.