A Hero of Our Time

Mikhail Lermontov’s pioneering psychological novel, “A Hero of Our Time”, is probably his most impactful work, one which influenced the works of other great Russian authors such as Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. The novel’s narrative is the story of Pechorin a young officer in the army whose story is told in five non-chronological parts. Drawing upon his own experiences in the military, Lermontov creates a fascinating anti-hero in Pechorin, a man who is intelligent, calculating, manipulative, emotionally unavailable, arrogant, cynical, nihilistic, yet also sensitive. The principal accomplishment of “A Hero of Our Time” is the introduction of the Byronic anti-hero to Russian literature, a departure from the traditional idealized protagonist of the Romantic period which signifies a pivotal move towards the realism of the Modernist literary movement. As Lermontov describes in his preface: “Pechorin, gentlemen, is in fact a portrait, but not of one man only: he is a composite portrait, made up of all the vices which flourish, full-grown, amongst the present generation. You will tell me, as you have told me before, that no man can be so bad as this; and my reply will be: ‘If you believe that such persons as the villains of tragedy and romance could exist in real life, why can you not believe in the reality of Pechorin?’” This edition includes a biographical afterword.