Lermontov's "A Hero of Our Time"

As a consequence of my sui generous undergraduate education centered on Mathematics and English Literature the only novel I’ve ever read in the original Russian is Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time.  Though last week was a traveling weekend I managed to finish reading it again, this time in translation.

My sense is that most people in the west, if they know Russian literature at all, know Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Chekov or Pasternak but at best may have heard of Lermontov which is a great shame.  A Hero of Our Time, his only novel, is at once a complex psychological portrait of an appealing, and disturbing character, a brilliant picaresque and a visceral travel novel.  Pechorin, the protagonist, is more complicated, self-aware and interesting than Pushkin’s Onegin.  He poses much more interesting questions about psychology, friendship and societal structure.  And he travels through finely rendered extraordinary landscapes.

He is also much more relevant today.  Pechorin is a 19^th century Russian officer in the Caucasus, a region now bearing the weight of international strategy and politics once again.  More importantly, he is part of an imperial occupying force and experiences the ambivalence, ironies and danger that necessarily follow.  I found myself thinking about Phil Klay’s characters from Redeployment and how much they shared.  Lermontov’s expressive, clear and physical language foreshadowed Hemingway and they have much in common technically and aesthetically.

A big surprise for me was to discover how Lermontov had affected my own fiction.  As a Black Prince on Bloody Fields has merited some praise for how the character’s introspection is integrated with the action.  That came from Lermontov.

A Russian mini-series was made of the novel in 2006 and a central episode, Pechorin’s duel, is available on Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9Raf8_VJX0 .  It’s definitely worth a look.

Lermontov, a Russian military officer who had much in common with his protagonist, died in a duel when he was in his twenties, as did Évariste Galois.  A quote (my translation):

"Passions are just ideas at the moment of their birth."  - Lermontov