A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov

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.

“The witticisms of the local dandies didn't make her laugh.”

“I am very pleased. I love enemies, though not in the Christian way. They amuse me, excite my blood. Being always on one's guard, catching every glance, the significance of every word, guessing at intentions, frustrating their plots, pretending to be tricked, and suddenly, with a shove, upturning the whole enormous and arduously built edifice of their cunning and schemes—that's what I call life.”

“At that moment, he raised his eyes—I was standing in the doorway opposite him. He blushed horribly. I walked up to him and said slowly and distinctly: “I am very sorry to have come in after you have already given your honest word in the confirmation of this disgusting slander. My presence saves you from further depravity.”“

“It is a gate formed by nature; it rises up on a high hill, and through it the setting sun throws its last flaming glance to the world.”

———-

“It is a pivotal book that sits on the cusp between Romanticism and Realism, at a moment when Russian literature was forging its path from poetry to the novel.”

“A Hero of Our Time possesses three of the most central characteristics of the Russian novel: 1) psychological analysis; 2) concern with ideas; 3) sociopolitical and ethical awareness. None of these features is the exclusive property of the novel in Russia, but the intensity with which they are engaged does help define the Russian novel and differentiate it from the novel elsewhere.”

“Pechorin is a literary prototype of the “superfluous man” of Russian literature; he is another version of the Byronic antihero; and he is an early model of what would later become a nihilist.”

“The absence of the author, in the sense of a guiding point of view, is a fundamental—and distinctly modern—feature of A Hero of Our Time. Instead, the values of the text are nicely balanced, leaving the reader free to be primarily repelled by the immorality of Pechorin, or fascinated by his personality . . .”

“... duels were meant to be the stuff of honor and heroics, and yet so many duels in Russia at the time were fought over petty disagreements—if not out of sheer boredom. More heroes doing unheroic things in an age of cynicism.”

I wish I had read this book when I was a little younger. The descriptions of the Caucasuses make this book fantastic for Slavophile in me - experiencing Russia as the Southern, confusing place of my childhood, that is not at all a European country. Parts of Act II appear to be the literary predecessor to Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, except our protagonist here is a bit more philosophically consistent and not so pathetically pitiful.