A Hero of Our Time

A Hero of Our Time (1840) is widely regarded as the first great Russian novel and one of the most original and influential works of 19th-century European fiction. Written by Mikhail Lermontov at the age of twenty-five—just a year before his death in a duel—the novel presents the character of Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin, a young Russian officer stationed in the Caucasus, through five interlocking stories told from shifting perspectives. Pechorin is brilliant, magnetic, and utterly destructive: he seduces women, manipulates friends, courts danger, and ruins lives—not from malice but from a profound, restless boredom that nothing can cure.

The novel’s fragmented, non-chronological structure was revolutionary for its time. We first see Pechorin through the eyes of others—the gruff old soldier Maksim Maksimych, a traveling narrator—before finally entering his own diary, where the full depth of his self-awareness and self-contempt is revealed. From the dramatic mountain passes of the Caucasus to the intrigues of a fashionable spa town, Lermontov created the definitive portrait of the “superfluous man”—the archetype that would haunt Russian literature through Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and beyond. Nabokov called it “the first Russian novel worthy of the name.”