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A Hero of Our Time

A Hero of Our Time

REVISED EDITION

Mikhail Lermontov - Author

Paul Foote - Translator

Paperback | $15.00 | add to cart | view cart
ISBN 9780140447958 | 208 pages | 01 Oct 2001 | Penguin Classics | 5.07 x 7.79in | 18 - AND UP
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The first example of the psychological novel in Russia, A Hero of Our Time influenced Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov, and other great nineteenth-century masters that followed. Its hero, Pechorin, is Byronic in his wasted gifts, his cynicism, and his desire for any kind of action-good or ill-that will stave off boredom. Outraging many critics when it was first published in 1840, A Hero of Our Time follows Pechorin as he embarks on an exciting adventure involving brigands, smugglers, soldiers, rivals, and lovers.

This edition includes a new introduction, chronology, suggestions for further reading, maps, and full explanatory notes.


@BAMF Who is that sublime woman? She is perfect. Oh, excellent: Grushinsky seems to like her. I’m going to cock-block him. How typically me.

My plan to seduce her is simple: act like I always have better things to do, insult her, and act as though I have nothing left to live for.

Apparently she’s begging for an introduction? I wonder if this kind of thing works in real life?

From Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less

"Natasha Randall's English, in her new translation, has exactly the right degree of loose velocity. . . . (Nabokov's version, the best-known older translation, is a bit more demure than Randall's, less savage.)"
-James Wood, London Review of Books

"[A] smart, spirited new translation."
-The Boston Globe

"One of the most vivid and persuasive portraits of the male ego ever put down on paper."
-Neil LaBute, from the Foreword