A Hero of Our Time
SynopsisPlot
Its hero, Pechorin, is Byronic in his wasted gifts, his cynicism, and his desire for any kind of action-good or ill-that will stave off boredom. Outraging many critics when it was first published in 1840, A Hero of Our Time follows Pechorin as he embarks on an exciting adventure involving brigands, smugglers, soldiers, rivals, and lovers. This edition includes a new introduction, chronology, suggestions for further reading, maps, and full explanatory notes.
Story
About this book
A Hero of Our Time, first published in 1840, is a novel by Mikhail Lermontov structured as a series of linked stories rather than a single continuous narrative. The central figure, Pechorin, is a young Russian officer stationed in the Caucasus whose intelligence and energy find no worthwhile outlet. He drifts through encounters with soldiers, smugglers, rival officers, and lovers, treating each situation as an experiment or distraction. The novel presents his actions through several different narrators and viewpoints, so the reader pieces together his character gradually rather than receiving a single authoritative portrait.
Pechorin belongs to a recognizable literary type sometimes called the Byronic hero: gifted, restless, self-aware, and destructive to those around him. Lermontov uses this figure to examine a specific social problem. In the Russia of the 1830s, educated young men with few channels for meaningful action could turn inward, becoming manipulative or indifferent. The title itself carries an ironic edge, since Pechorin is heroic only in the sense that he represents his generation.
The novel's structure, moving between travel journal, diary, and third-person account, was unusual for Russian fiction at the time. Lermontov completed it shortly before his death in a duel in 1841, at the age of twenty-six.
