A Hero of Our Time

What It's About

Grigory Pechorin is a young Russian army officer posted to the Caucasus in the 1830s. He is clever, charming and bored, and he treats other people's feelings as amusements. The book is built from five linked tales: a Circassian girl and a captured heart, an old comrade's disappointment, a smugglers' den on the Black Sea coast, a spa-town romance and a duel, and a night-time wager with fate. The stories are not told in chronological order. A travelling narrator frames the first part, and the rest is drawn from Pechorin's own journal, so we see him through other people's eyes and then through his own unsparing self-analysis.

Key Concepts

Pechorin is a classic "superfluous man", a gifted, disillusioned figure with no worthy outlet for his energy, and he shows the influence of the Byronic hero. The book explores boredom, emotional detachment and the damage done by a person who analyses everything and commits to nothing. The final tale takes up fate versus free will. Its structure, which splits narrator from subject and moves between outer observation and inner confession, led many critics to call it the first Russian psychological novel.

Contemporary readers, including Tsar Nicholas I, were troubled by Pechorin and took him as an endorsement of cold, selfish behaviour. In a preface added to the second edition, the author insisted he was presenting a portrait of a generation's faults, not a model to admire.

About the Author

Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841) was a Russian Romantic poet and novelist, born in Moscow and raised largely by his grandmother. He served as an army officer, and his outspoken writing and a duel led to two exiles to the Caucasus, whose landscape and garrison life shaped his work. He was killed in a duel at the age of 26, and he is regarded as one of the most important voices in Russian literature after Pushkin.

About This Edition

This is a 1912 translation by Marr Murray and J. H. Wisdom.