A Hero of Our Time

Praise

“In [A Hero of Our Time], Lermontov managed to create a fictional person whose romantic dash to cynicism, tiger-like suppleness and eagle eye, hot blood and cool head, tenderness and taciturnity, elegance and brutality, delicacy of perception and harsh passion to dominate, ruthlessness and awareness of it, are of lasting appeal to readers of all countries and centuries.”—from the Translator’s Foreword by Vladimir Nabokov

“[Lermontov’s] technique is surprisingly sophisticated, given the late development of the novel in Russian literature. Lermontov does not only dislocate chronology to achieve [his] result; in equally brilliant fashion he reinforces the effect by employing different contemporary literary genres…to create, in the end, a unified whole.”—from the Introduction by T. J. Binyon