A Hero of Our Time

Erscheinungsjahr 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3351-8
Verlag: Northwestern University Press

Buch, Englisch, 208 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 128 mm x 195 mm, Gewicht: 193 g

Reihe: Northwestern World Classics

Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time was the first modern Russian novel. Published in 1840, it set a model of penetrating observation and psychological depth that would come to typify Russian literature. Its “hero,” Grigorii Pechorin, also establisheda character type that became known in Russian fiction as “the superfluous man”—widely familiar from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. At once driven by pride and wracked by selfdoubt, both shockingly self-revealing and blindly self-deceived,he flounders to affirm himself in a social world he despises yet yearns to dominate. Pechorin is a troubling and unforgettable character. And A Hero of Our Time, which has provoked much controversy, is a novel not only central to Russian literature butfundamental to the Western literary tradition of the antihero.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lermontov, Mikhail

Über Autor(innen)

Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841), soldier, socialite, and author, gained early fame as a lyric poet in the Byronic vein. He then wrote a few works of prose and drama. But he won historical renown as author of his only novel, A Hero of Our Time, published a year before he was killed in a duel.

Elizabeth Cheresh Allen is a professor of Russian and comparative literature at Bryn Mawr College, USA and the author of, among other works, A Fallen Idol Is Still a God: Lermontov and the Quandaries of Cultural Transition.