A Hero of Our Time (1840) is Russia’s first fully realized psychological novel. Lermontov’s Pechorin — a young Russian officer stationed in the Caucasus — is charming, brilliant, self-aware, and destructive: the archetypal “superfluous man” who cannot find a purpose worthy of his abilities and leaves wreckage in his wake. The novel’s innovative structure, told through several perspectives, adds to its unsettling power.
Published just a year before Lermontov’s own death in a duel at 26, the novel reads as a searching self-examination as much as a portrait of a generation. Download the free EPUB and meet one of literature’s most compellingly dangerous protagonists.