Lermontov A Hero of Our Time

About A Hero of Our Time

Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (1840) is the first great Russian psychological novel — a work Nabokov called 'the first Russian novel in the full sense of the word.' Its protagonist Pechorin, a young Russian officer in the Caucasus, is intelligent, self-aware, attractive, and constitutionally incapable of genuine feeling — the second great superfluous man, sharper and more modern than Pushkin's Onegin. Structured as five interlocking tales told from different temporal and narrative distances, the novel withholds Pechorin's own perspective until the reader has already seen him through others' eyes. Lermontov was killed in a duel at twenty-six; A Hero of Our Time is his only completed novel and one of the most influential in Russian literature, standing between Pushkin's Onegin and Dostoevsky's underground man.