A Hero of Our Time

A Hero of Our Time is a masterpiece of Russian literature that has influenced generations of readers and writers. Vladamir Nabokov’s translation, introduction, and notes make this the best edition of the novel available in English. Published in 1840, a year before Lermontov’s tragic death in a duel, the novel was a sensation with a generation that identified with the hero, Pechorin, who feels that life has robbed him of the possibility of noble passion. As Nabokov writes in his introduction, “Lermontov managed to create a fictional person whose romantic dash and cynicism, tigerlike suppleness and eagle eye, hot blood and cool head, tenderness and taciturnity, elegance and brutality, delicacy of perception and harsh passion to dominate, ruthlessness and awareness of it, are of lasting appeal to readers of all countries and centuries.” The dissipated hero of this novel, twenty-five-year-old Pechorin, is a beautiful and magnetic but nihilistic young army officer, bored by life and indifferent to his many sexual conquests. Chronicling his unforgettable adventures in the Caucasus involving brigands, smugglers, soldiers, rivals, and lovers, this classic tale of alienation influenced Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov in Lermontov’s own century, and finds its modern-day counterparts in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, the novels of Chuck Palahniuk, and the films and plays of Neil LaBute.

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