A Hero of Our Time By Mikhail Lermontov Paperback – November 20, 2017

The book itself is awesome! The way it is narrated, the way the story is told, is truly unique. The Kindle version is hard to navigate though. There is no table of contents, no way to jump around. The book was written and published at the end of Russian Romanticism, and the move towards realism is obvious. The author himself had a very interesting life. I liked this book much more than I had expected to.

I love books set in this time period (War and Peace is one of my favorite books) and this book lived up to my expectations. I loved the characters, the drama, and of course, the romanticism of this period, which the author laid out beautifully. Perchorin is the ultimate playboy, officer, aloof man of stature that everyone thinks of when they think of this period, and he does it so well throughout the book. The first 40-50 pages are not the world's greatest, but trust me, it's worth sinking your teeth into if you like the kind of upper-crust military types and the drama of their social circles.

This review is for this edition of the book only, not for the actual story. The Formatting is bad. The table of contents, the footnotes and the font are all incredibly amateur. The book size is bad, for only 82 pages I expected it to be shorter and more compact. The cover is blurry on the front, definitely a low res jpg that was just slapped on the front. There's not even any page numbers!

If Pushkin created the Superfluous Man genre with Eugene Onegin, Lermontov perfected it with the character of Pechorin in A Hero or Our Time. The work is in fact two different stories, both of which eventually meld together to explain the deplorable weaknesses and magnificent virtues of the Russian nobility of the nineteenth century. of

Lermontov is a sleeper by which I mean that he is lesser known and read outside Russia than other immortals. This novel was recommended to me by a Russian friend from Georgia and I was delighted to find a germinal work influenced greatly by Pushkin and Lord Byron. I read Hero of Our Time after Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. Both Puskin and Lermontov were mad for Byron's poetry as he had earned a certain rock star status. Pushkin was intrigued by blending poetry into the novel as a literary structure in Eugene Onegin. Lermontov's hero, Pechorin, and Pushkin's Onegin have much in common -- both are lovers named after Russian rivers. They both achieve the character type which became known as the "superfluous man" -- an intellect with charisma who finds his gifts are insufficient to influence his world in the way he has imagined. He becomes an outcast or misfit, in a sense, operating outside the conventions of morality and society -- disdainful of both -- with a clear sense of the futility and absurdity of his life. In Pechorin's case the young soldier chooses to influence his life but does so without hope. Perchorin's superfluous man emerges the underground man of Dostoyevski. This perspective is expressed multifariously in the next century in Camus' Stranger, the characters who in habit Beckett's tragicomedies and in the invisible man of Ralph Ellsion. Perhaps his experience in the Russian military created this sense of despair. His exile to the Caucasus Mountain between the Black and Caspian Seas ultimately had an uplifting affect upon Lermontov from the sheer beauty of the landscape which is memorably described in this novel. Like Pushkin, Lermontov was killed in a duel, in the latter's case at the tender age of 26. Chekhov was said to have remarked, "Still a boy and he wrote that." Lermontov is a must read to understand how the superfluous man personified in Lermontov has so influenced writers of diverse genres who followed him.

To further appreciate the point of view of 19th century Russians and their sharp divisions of class, if not race and definitely also of religion, read this work by Mikhail Lermontov. As with "Tales from the Underground" and Pushkin and Tolstoy and "Fathers and Sons," etc., we see enduring themes of man's communication with an understanding of other men. Curiosity is the joy. Russian literature of this time is so much based on empathy, which is much more important to have than sympathy, which can be superficial. Ernest Gaines once promoted Russian literature to see these interactions as universal and fundamental. The way 21st century Americans text and tweet and selfie and post, barely able to communicate face to face without saying "like" and "awesome" and "you know" ad nauseam, they need to listen to Gaines and to read these Russian greats, virtuosos that they are.Once you get past the establishment of the narrator, the translator will bridge you through to the "psychology" of this novel and you will recognize the times have changed and our methods of interaction have deteriorated, but what we wish to encounter when we meet strangers and old friends has not changed. Instead of being lost in a different century with a foreign people, the themes will rise to the top, no different from the best Shakespeare.

You can view this as a travelogue of the Russian mountains and people, or you can read it as a novel about a man who is bored with life.The "hero" is a well-to-do man who is bored with life and joins the army as an officer on the frontier in hopes that the danger will give him some excitement. Even bullets whizzing by his head became boring. The tragedy is that his thoughtless interactions with others lead to their ruin.This is an important work of Russian literature, and of world literature.

And that's enough for me! Sad he's not as well-known as is Chekhov or even Turgenev. There's just something hip about his phrasing--plus rather cavalier. The bits he interjects re: Feminine Psychology anticipate Karen Horney's work. Lermontov's ace! Start with Princess Mary chapter. Be wowed.