A Hero Of Our Time Book

Ask a Westerner about great Russian writers, and chances are you will hear the names of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy or Chekhov. But my mind instead immediately jumps to the earlier, more Romanticist generation of the early 19th century - Pushkin and Lermontov, two young geniuses, neither of whom has lived to see 40.
It's easy to forget how ridiculously young Lermontov was. Pushkin, Russia's greatest poet, was killed in a duel at only 37. Lermontov, the second-greatest, died in the same ridiculous way ' but at the age of only 26. And by that young age he already reached fame and recognition, having barely spread his literary wings.



(Funnily enough - in the saddest way possible - Lermontov himself wrote a passionate and angry poem Death of the Poet about Pushkin's death, condemning the societal scorn that pushed Pushkin to such an end - only to repeat the same fate himself. And both Pushkin and Lermontov have written and condemned pointless duel scenes in both of their greatest works - Pushkin in Eugene Onegin, Lermontov in this one, A Hero of Our Time. Writing the scathing Death of the Poet about Pushkin's death was what earned the young previously little-known writer both skyrocketing fame in the literary circles and displeasure of the Tsar, culminating in basically what amounted to the exile to serve in the army in the Caucasus mountains - the place where his masterpiece A Hero of Our Time is set and where a Lermontov himself eventually was killed.)
The Romanticism gave us the much loved and much hated Byronic hero - a noble solitary scoundrel, misunderstood, lonely and suffering, brooding and disillusioned, dark and alluring, haughty and cynical, yet charismatic and irresistible to women, painfully self-aware ' and blinding in his superiority to the otherwise banal and mediocre society. Countless characters were inspired by this ' just think of Eugene Onegin in Pushkin's novel, for instance. (The painful echoes of the allure of such heroes still are heard in so much of romance and young adult literature to this day.)

In A Hero of Our Time Lermontov portrays his stark disillusionment with such a Byronic hero, shocking and scandalizing society. You'd expect him to paint Pechorin in a more dramatic or sympathetic light ' given the inherent allure in such a character, especially to a very young writer who idolized Byron actually lived a life similar to that of a Byronic hero.
(Supposedly, Lermontov himself was not the nicest person. A very wealthy and spoiled young man, he was famous for seducing women and breaking their hearts, writing rambunctious and lurid poetry after joining a cadet school, a sharp and caustic wit that could border on casual cruelty, impressive intelligence bordering on cynical arrogance, and boundless bravery in war battles leaning towards careless recklessness. But again, the man was only 26 when he died, with no chance to ever reach maturity and wisdom of age, to outgrow the swagger stage of a young rich guy with all the life ahead of him.)
But there is no alluring glow to Pechorin's character. Pechorin is an appalling egotistical arrogant cynical fellow, an antihero surely, who still embodies the Byronic ideal perfectly, but in this case so appalling to the society still full of admiration for Byronic tragic antiheroes, that Lermontov in the foreword to the novel had to point out (translation is mine):
"[…] This is a portrait, indeed, but not of one man: it is a portrait comprised of the vices of our entire generation, in all of their form. You will tell me again that a man cannot be this bad, and I will tell you that if you could believe in the possibility of the existence of all the tragic and romantic scoundrels, why wouldn't you believe in the reality of Pechorin? If you enjoyed creations much more terrible and uglier, why would this character, even as an invention, not find mercy with you? Is it because that he carries more truth than you would have wished for?"
Pechorin certainly has a remarkable insight into his appalling character, and is quite contradictory in his complexity. He tends to be spot-on in astute recognition of human fallacies, which fuels his cynicism. He is very well-aware (and almost alarmed by) his purposelessness and a tendency towards self-destruction. His pride in his detachment and cynicism even briefly falters when his genuine feelings for Vera lead him on a mad gallop to reach her ' but that flame is extinguished quickly, and we know that from here on he goes on to carelessly destroy young Bela and her family.

It's interesting how the best-regarded work of the man usually thought of as a poet is a slim novel written in prose. But really, the prose is ridiculously unbelievably poetic, so perhaps it's not strange at all.
"The dancing choirs of the stars were interwoven in wondrous patterns on the distant horizon, and, one after another, they flickered out as the wan resplendence of the east suffused the dark, lilac vault of heaven, gradually illuminating the steep mountain slopes, covered with the virgin snows. To right and left loomed grim and mysterious chasms, and masses of mist, eddying and coiling like snakes, were creeping thither along the furrows of the neighbouring cliffs, as though sentient and fearful of the approach of day."

This book is told in five parts, told out of chronologic order:

- It opens with "Bela", where our narrator, while traveling through the Caucasus in the middle of the Russian multi-decade expansion to that territory, known collectively as the Caucasian Wars, meets an old army man Maxim Maximych, who tells him a story of his younger officer friend Grigory Pechorin, a world-weary rich man of twenty-five or so, and his kidnapping and seduction of a young local girl Bela five years prior, followed by the tragic end of this romance shortly before Pechorin would have been tired of this conquest.

- Then we move on to "Maxim Maximych", a short piece where the narrator meets Pechorin himself (and what an unpleasant figure Pechorin turns out to be!) and comes into possession of Pechorin's travel journals.

Three excerpts from these journals conclude the novel, after a brief interlude informing the reader that by now Pechorin is dead:
- "Taman", where pre-Caucasus Pechorin poetically runs afoul of a small band of smugglers;
- "Princess Mary", a long section chronologically preceding the events of "Bela", where Pechorin tells us of his cruel courtship of a young noble woman done at the request of a married woman whom he actually loves, ending tragically for a former friend, the girl and Pechorin himself, who may or may not have actually fallen in some sort of love;
- and finally, "The Fatalist", a short piece on the inevitability and predetermination of destiny and death.
"On reading over these notes, I have become convinced of the sincerity of the man who has so unsparingly exposed to view his own weaknesses and vices. The history of a man's soul, even the pettiest soul, is hardly less interesting and useful than the history of a whole people; especially when the former is the result of the observations of a mature mind upon itself, and has been written without any egoistical desire of arousing sympathy or astonishment. Rousseau's Confessions has precisely this defect'he read it to his friends."
Putting Pechorin aside (which would undoubtedly injure his vanity and pride), another protagonist of the novel is the setting - the majestic Caucasus Mountains, where he spent a large part of his life, a lot of it in military service punctuated by leisurely pursuits, the place where he ultimately lost his own life in ridiculous unnecessary duel.
"What a glorious place that valley is! On every hand are inaccessible mountains, steep, yellow slopes scored by water-channels, and reddish rocks draped with green ivy and crowned with clusters of plane-trees. Yonder, at an immense height, is the golden fringe of the snow. Down below rolls the River Aragva, which, after bursting noisily forth from the dark and misty depths of the gorge, with an unnamed stream clasped in its embrace, stretches out like a thread of silver, its waters glistening like a snake with flashing scales."

"A childish feeling, I admit, but, when we retire from the conventions of society and draw close to nature, we involuntarily become as children: each attribute acquired by experience falls away from the soul, which becomes anew such as it was once and will surely be again. He whose lot it has been, as mine has been, to wander over the desolate mountains, long, long to observe their fantastic shapes, greedily to gulp down the life-giving air diffused through their ravines'he, of course, will understand my desire to communicate, to narrate, to sketch those magic pictures."
The ridiculous duel that cost Mikhail Lermontov his life at age twenty-six robbed literature of a budding genius. I can only imagine how interesting his voice would have been as a mature writer, a man with more life to experience, more illusions to be shattered, more mountains to climb.

I first read it while in elementary school, not understanding anything about it but persevering with weird childish stubbornness. Since then I've read it a few more times, each time appreciating Lermontov's astute understanding of human nature more and more. And now I am a decade older than Lermontov ever had a chance to be, and I still find it utterly brilliant.