A Hero of our Time - Mikhail Lermontov
The Hero of our Time is, my good sirs, indeed a portrait, but not of a single person. It is the portrait of the vices of our whole generation in their ultimate development.
Pechorin is not your typical hero. Infact he might be amongst the most villainous of characters in the whole of literature, because his acts of treachery and betrayal are conducted not with a selfish motive that can be understood, but rather with a nonchalant attitude that is frightening. That this work was greeted with mass outrage by critics, after its first publication in 1840, is therefore unsurprising. What is surprising however, is that this brief psychological sketch, still manages to ensnare the reader’s mind and with great precision and effectiveness paint the picture of a man who very well might be a product of his generation rather than an aberration.
There is not much to write about the plot; primarily because the book lacks one. It is rather a collection of snippets from the life of the main character. The book in short is not about the plot; it is about Pechorin, its protagonist. It starts with the narrator hearing a story about Pechorin from a fellow traveler in Caucasus. The next episode is the narrator himself meeting Pechorin in person and the final parts are snippets from Pechorin’s diary. The reader thus gets a 360 degree view of the character. As far as I know it is the most complete character description in literature encompassing the first, second and third person’s viewpoints. Readers often complain about one dimensional characters; A Hero of our Time is an exercise in creating a multidimensional one.
Pechorin is the quintessential Byronic hero; someone who is “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. The second and third person viewpoints sketch out the essence of his character for the reader. However, it is in the first person description, that we realize what is it like to be such a character. It is often said that once the problem is known it is an easier problem to fix it. Pechorin diaries show the mind of tormented character, who knows what is wrong and how is it that he has reached this wrong state, but is utterly unconcerned by this apparently wrong state and the consequences of this wrong action. Is this what Lermontov calls “the portrait of vices of out generation in their ultimate development”? But the most damning critique of the societal norms is that in spite of his character flaws and its causes, Pechorin remains a human capable of feeling love, grief, longing and desire.
The way the character is developed reminded me of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg and Viper’s Tangle by Francois Mauriac. Also those who will see shades of Pechorin in Turgenev’s Bazarov (Fathers and Sons) or Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment) are not alone. After reading this work, I am fairly sure all that came after it could not remain unaffected by this great piece of literature.
