Hero of Our Time - Softcover

The first major Russian novel, A Hero of Our Time was both lauded and reviled upon publication. Its dissipated hero, 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.

Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov was born in Moscow on October 3, 1814 (according to the old calendar used in Russia until the Revolution). His early poetry was inspired by the beautiful nature of Caucasus, stories heard about the Caucasian War and long trips taken across all of Russia on horse. Among the works that he read in school (in four different languages) were those of Shakespeare, Schiller, Walter Scott, Thomas Moore and George Byron. He became the leading Russian Romantic poet. Lermontov suddenly became widely known for a piece of poetry which he wrote on the occasion of Pushkin's death (1837). A great poet, as well as a lover of liberty and a foe of oppression, was revealed at once in his powerful verses. In a few days all St. Petersburg, and very soon all educated in Russia, knew this verses by heart; they circulated in thousand s of manuscripts copies. The first major prose novel in Russian literature and chief source of the Russian tradition in 19th century literature, 'A Hero of Our Time' (1840) was to have a profound influence on later Russian writers. Its use of a non-chronological and multifaceted narrative structure influenced such later Russian authors as Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy and presaged the antiheroes and antinovels of 20th-century fiction.