About the book
A Hero of Our Time / translated by J. H. Wisdom and Marr Murray
Novel by Mikhail Lermontov, published in Russian in 1840 as Geroy nashego vremeni. Its psychologically probing portrait of a disillusioned 19th-century aristocrat and its use of a nonchronological and multifaceted narrative structure influenced such later Russian authors as Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy and presaged the antiheroes and antinovels of 20th-century fiction. The novel is set in the Russian Caucasus in the 1830s. Grigory Pechorin is a bored, self-centered, and cynical young army officer who believes in nothing. With impunity he toys with the love of women and the goodwill of men. He is brave, determined, and willful, but his energies and potential are wasted, and he dies in a duel. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
In five linked episodes, Lermontov builds up the portrait of a man caught up in and expressing the sickness of his times. A marvelous novel and an early landmark in Russian literature, A Hero of Our Time served as an inspiration for many later Russian authors, including Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
Mikhail Lermontov, 1814-1841
Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov (?????´? ?´?????? ??´??????? Russian pronunciation: (October 15 [O.S. October 3] 1814 – July 27 [O.S. July 15] 1841), a Russian Romantic writer, poet and painter, sometimes called "the poet of the Caucasus", was the most important Russian poet after Alexander Pushkin's death. His influence on later Russian literature is still felt in modern times, not only through his poetry, but also by his prose.
Lermontov was born in Moscow to a respectable noble family of the Tula Governorate, and grew up in the village of Tarkhany (in the Penza Governorate), which now preserves his remains. According to one disputed and uncorroborated theory his paternal family was believed to have descended from the Scottish Learmonths, one of whom settled in Russia in the early 17th century, during the reign of Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov. The legendary Scottish poet Thomas the Rhymer (Thomas Learmonth) is claimed to be a relative of Lermontov. However this claim has been neither proved nor disproved, and thus remains a legend.[1]
Lermontov's father, Yuri Lermontov, like his father before him, was a military man. Having moved up the ranks to captain, he married the sixteen year old Mariya Arsenyeva, to the great dismay of her mother, Yelizaveta Alekseyevna. A year after the marriage, on the night of October 3 (Old Style), 1814, Mariya Arsenieva gave birth to Mikhail Lermontov. According to tradition, soon after his birth, some discord between Lermontov's father and grandmother erupted, and unable to bear it, Mariya Arsenieva fell ill and died in 1817. After the daughter's death, Yelizaveta Alekseyevna devoted all her love to her grandson, always in fear that his father might move away with him. Either because of this pampering or continuing family tension or both, Lermontov as a child developed a fearful and arrogant temper, which he took out on the servants, and vandalising his grandmother's garden.
