Five-minute digest
A Hero of Our Time
Summary
A Hero of Our Time, published in 1840, is Mikhail Lermontov's only completed novel and one of the founding works of Russian prose fiction. It is made up of five linked stories about Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin, a young officer serving in the Caucasus, told from different points of view. In this 1912 English translation by J. H. Wisdom and Marr Murray the stories appear as Bela, Maksim Maksimych, Taman, The Fatalist and Princess Mary, followed by the author's preface to the second edition. In Bela, a travelling narrator hears from the kindly old staff captain Maksim Maksimych how Pechorin, stationed at a frontier fort, arranged the abduction of a local prince's daughter, Bela, by trading her brother a famous horse belonging to the bandit Kazbich. Pechorin wins Bela's love, soon tires of her, and she is mortally wounded by Kazbich. In Maksim Maksimych the narrator witnesses Pechorin meet his old comrade again and treat him with cold indifference, which deeply hurts the captain. The narrator then publishes extracts from Pechorin's journal. In Taman, Pechorin stumbles on a band of smugglers in a seaside town, and a girl tries to drown him. In Princess Mary, the longest story, set at the spa of Pyatigorsk, he amuses himself by making the young Princess Mary fall in love with him to spite his acquaintance Grushnitsky, while renewing an affair with Vera, a married woman he once loved. Grushnitsky and his friends plot against him; in a duel on a cliff edge Pechorin kills Grushnitsky, loses Vera, coldly rejects Mary, and is sent to a remote fort. In The Fatalist, a Serbian officer, Vulich, tests predestination by firing a pistol at his own head; it misfires, but he is killed that same night by a drunken Cossack, whom Pechorin then captures. In his preface Lermontov explains that his hero is a portrait of the vices of his generation, not of one man. The novel is a sharp psychological study of boredom, pride and wasted talent.
Top Lessons
The superfluous man
Pechorin has talent and energy but no purpose, so he turns them against other people.
Point of view
Lermontov shows Pechorin first through others' eyes and then through his own journal.
Fate and freedom
The Fatalist asks whether our deaths are written in advance.
Verified Quotes
“ambition is nothing more nor less than a thirst for power, and my chief pleasure is to make everything that surrounds me subject to my will.”
“And if predestination really exists, why are free will and reason granted us? Why are we obliged to render an account of our actions?”