Lermontov A Hero of Our Time Reading Order

Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (1840) is the first great Russian psychological novel and one of the first psychological novels in any language — a work that Nabokov called 'the first Russian novel in the full sense of the word.' Its protagonist, Grigory Pechorin, is a young Russian officer stationed in the Caucasus who is intelligent, self-aware, attractive, and utterly unable to feel anything genuine — a man who seduces women and destroys men not out of malice but out of a constitutional incapacity for real engagement. The novel is structured as five loosely connected tales narrated from different distances and perspectives, moving backwards and forwards in time so that we encounter Pechorin in his effects before we know him in his causes. Lermontov gave Russian literature its second great superfluous man — sharper and more modern than Pushkin's Onegin, and already anticipating Dostoevsky's underground man.