A Hero of Our Time

Pechorin is a young officer posted to the Caucasus: bored, brilliant, and dangerous to everyone near him. Lermontov assembles the portrait out of five loosely linked episodes told from shifting vantage points, so the reader meets him first through an old soldier’s gossip, then through a traveler’s eyes, and only later through his own journals, where the cruelty and the self-knowledge sit side by side. He seduces, duels, and gambles less for pleasure than to feel anything at all. Published in 1840, a year before Lermontov died in a duel of his own, the novel gave Russian literature its first genuine psychological hero and set the pattern for the superfluous man his successors would inherit. Free PDF and EPUB edition available here.