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Title: A Hero of Our Time (Penguin Classics) by Mikhail Lermontov, Paul Foote, I. P. Foote ISBN: 0-14-044795-4 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 02 October, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.37 (30 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Move Over Onegin: Enter Pechorin
Comment: A Hero of Our Time introduces a most memorable character, Pechorin, who, had the novella been named after him, would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Eugen Onegin in fame. He derives from the same tradition as Onegin, that of the 'superfluous' man, though he moves beyond his predecessor (and prefigures others) in the degree to which he reeks havoc on a personal level. The novella consists of stories only nominally connected, and it is fair to say that the second half is better than the first. The centrepiece is the diary of Pechorin which contains a full narrative of his 'adventures' at a small holiday town. It just has to be read to be believed: it is 'lady-killing' and 'white-anting' at its clinically destructive best. Readers of Eugen Onegin will notice similarities, though the prose form allows much deeper characterisation, for which one is certainly not sorry. Lovers of later 19th-century Russian literature will appreciate this book in its prefiguring of characters and of settings in, among others, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov. Lermontov died young and in a very Romantic fashion (a duel); one can only be sorry that he did not live to write more.
Rating: 5
Summary: Magnificent portrait of corruption of the 'hero' Pechorin
Comment: Lermontov died age 27 leaving a body of poems and one prose work, a loose collection of stories about his 'anti-hero' Pechorin in "A Hero of Our Times"
The novel presents the misadventures of a Tsarist officer through the account of his early friend and through Pechorin's own diary. Pechorin is an immoral man, personifying the corruption of the early nineteenth century military classes in Russia.
For the concentration of the evils of Pechorin, for his treachery and seduction, this is a surprisingly 'modern' book, though written in the 1840s.
I recommend it for its economy and the strength of its portrayal of Pechorin. By his early death, Russian literature was robbed of a writer who may have joined the pantheon of the great Tsarist novelists.
Rating: 5
Summary: Wicked Irony: An Anti-Hero for All Time
Comment: This was Lermontov's only novel, published a year before his death in a duel at the age of 27. Although it was written in the late 1830s, it is strikingly modern both in its structure and in its treatment of the hero.
In structure, the book consists of a collection of short stories and novellas rather than a single narrative. These stories, however, are linked in two ways. Firstly, all feature the same protagonist, Grigoriy Pechorin, a young officer serving with the Russian army in the Caucasus. Secondly, they are bound together by a complex framework featuring a single anonymous narrator (not to be identified with Lermontov himself), a traveller in the Caucasus. The first story, Bela, is supposedly told to this narrator by Maksim Maksimych, a brother-officer of Pechorin. The second, Maksim Maksimych, is related by the narrator himself and deals with a meeting between Pechorin and Maksim. The other three, Taman, Princess Mary and The Fatalist, are all told in Pechorin's own words, taken from his journal which has come into the narrator's hands after Pechorin's death.
It is the fourth tale, Princess Mary, which is the longest and the one which lies at the heart of the work. Bela and Taman are adventure stories with an exotic setting (the Caucasus had the same sort of appeal for nineteenth-century Russians as India had for their British contemporaries). Maksim Maksimych is a linking narrative, and the final story, The Fatalist is an unsettling, spooky treatment of the concepts of fate and predestination.
In Princess Mary, the mood changes abruptly from the romantic exoticism of the earlier stories. Pechorin is stationed in a fashionable spa town in the northern Caucasus. Here he has little to occupy his time, and becomes embroiled in liaisons with two women, the Mary of the title (the daughter of an aristocratic family), and Vera, a former mistress of his, now unhappily married to an older husband. As a result of these intrigues, Pechorin quarrels with Grushnitsky, a rival for Mary's affections, and the story culminates in a duel between the two men.
The loose, episodic structure of the novel must have seemed very radical to readers in the first half of the nineteenth century. Lermontov also seems to prefigure later developments in the novel in his treatment of the character of Pechorin, a cynical, amoral figure who does not conform to the normal nineteenth idea of a literary "hero". This may make the title of the book seem ironic. Lermontov himself recognises this when he invents a dialogue between his narrator and his imaginary readers. The narrator says that the title of the book would be his reply should anyone ask him for his opinion of Pechorin's character. "But that is wicked irony!" Lermontov imagines his readers replying, to which the narrator's only comment is "I don't know.....". The suggestion is thereby given that the title can be taken both in an ironic sense and also at face value.
In a limited sense, Pechorin can indeed be seen as a heroic figure. A common usage of the word "hero" (possibly its original usage) is a person of great bravery, and there is no doubt that, in his duel with Grushnitsky, Pechorin shows both physical courage and indifference to death. What he lacks is the moral stature of the true hero in the unqualified sense of the word. We may admire someone who shows courage in order to help others, or in the service of his country, or in defence of a moral principle. Although this is difficult for us to understand today, people in the nineteenth century (or at least the upper classes from which Lermontov came) may also have admired someone who was prepared to risk death in defence of his honour or the honour of a loved one. What does not seem admirable, either from the perspective of the nineteenth century or from that of the twenty-first, is a contempt for death arising out of boredom with life, and it is this boredom which is the motivation for many of Pechorin's actions. His pursuit of Mary and Vera (like his earlier relationship with the Caucasian girl Bela) is born not of love or affection for the women involved, or even of sexual desire, but rather of a lack of anything better with which to occupy himself. He fights the duel with Grushnitsky not out of a belief that some things are worth dying for, but rather out of a belief that nothing is worth living for.
If Pechorin is not a conventional hero, neither is he a conventional literary villain in the sense of a brutal or Machiavellian evildoer, whose evil serves as a contrast to the virtue of the hero or heroine. Although there is something demonic about him in the way he brings misery to others, he is not wholly evil. A surprising side of his character brought out in his journals is his sensitivity to the beauty of nature; vivid descriptions of Caucasian scenery alternate with details of squalid intrigues. This is more than the stock Romantic cliché about wild characters being drawn to wild scenery; Lermontov uses these passages to suggest that even Pechorin sometimes aspires to a better way of life. After the literally breathtaking description of his duel with Grushnitsky, Pechorin concludes the story of Princess Mary with an unexpectedly poetic image, comparing himself to a mariner who has become so used to storm and strife that he cannot abide a peaceful life ashore and who paces the beach, watching for the sail that will take him back to sea.
Although there are similar characters in Romantic fiction, such as Pushkin's Onegin, the restless, cynical Pechorin can also be seen as prefiguring the "outsider" anti-heroes of the literature of the mid-twentieth century. (Camus's Meursault and Osborne's Jimmy Porter are examples that come to mind). More than a century and a half after his creation, Pechorin still seems a very modern figure; an anti-hero for our times as much as his own. I finished the book with only two regrets; firstly, that Lermontov's untimely death prevented him from writing any more novels, and secondly that there do not currently seem to be any English versions of his poetry in print.
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