A Hero of Our Time

Translated from the Russian by Elizabeth Cheresh Allen

Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time was the first modern Russian novel. Published in 1840, it set a model of penetrating observation and psychological depth that would come to typify Russian literature. Its ＂hero,＂ Grigorii Pechorin, also established a character type that became known in Russian fiction as ＂the superfluous man＂--widely familiar from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. At once driven by pride and wracked by self-doubt, both shockingly self-revealing and blindly self-deceived, he flounders to affirm himself in a social world he despises yet yearns to dominate. Pechorin is a troubling and unforgettable character. And A Hero of Our Time, which has provoked much controversy, is a novel not only central to Russian literature but fundamental to the Western literary tradition of the antihero.

MIKHAIL LERMONTOV (1814-1841), soldier, socialite, and author, gained early fame as a lyric poet in the Byronic vein. He then wrote a few works of prose and drama. But he won historical renown as author of his only novel, A Hero of Our Time, published a year before he was killed in a duel.

ELIZABETH CHERESH ALLENis a professor of Russian and comparative literature at Bryn Mawr College and the author of, among other works, A Fallen Idol Is Still a God: Lermontov and the Quandaries of Cultural Transition.