Hero of Our Time

Mikhaïl Lermontov

Description

On his travels through the wild mountainous terrain of the Caucasus, the narrator of A Hero of Our Time chances upon the veteran soldier and storyteller Maxim Maximych, who relates to him the dubious exploits of his former comrade Pechorin. Engaging in various acts of duelling, contraband, abduction and seduction, Pechorin, an archetypal Byronic anti-hero, combines cynicism and arrogance with melancholy and sensitivity.Causing an uproar in Russia when it was first published in 1840, Lermontov's brilliant, seminal study of contemporary society and the nihilistic aspect of Romanticism - accompanied here by the unfinished novel Princess Ligovskaya - remains compelling to this day.

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781847492364
• Langue: English

Extrait

A Hero of Our Time
“Still just a boy, and he wrote A Hero of Our Tim e !”
Anton Chekhov
“No one in Russia has ever written such prose – so precise, so beautiful, so exquisite.”
Nikolai Gogol
“This study of a man – and a society – in crisis was to become one of the most important books of its time… I have read this novel several times, young and old, always hooked.”
Doris Lessing
“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.”
Vladimir Nabokov


alma classics


A Hero of Our Time
a nd
P rincess Ligovskaya
M ikhail Lermontov
Translated by Martin Parker and Neil Cornwell



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A Hero of Our Time first published in Russian in 1840
This translation first published by Progress Publishers in 1947
Neil Cornwell’s revised version of the 1947 translation first published by
Everyman in 1995
A newly revised version first published by Alma Classics Limited in 2009
This new Evergreen edition first published by Alma Books Ltd in 2016
Introduction, revised translation and notes © Neil Cornwell, 1995, 2009
Princess Ligovskaya first published in Russian in 1882
English language translation and notes © Neil Cornwell, 2009
Cover: nathanburtondesign.com
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
isbn : 978-1-84749-576-1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.



Introduction
Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov (1814–41) was born into a respected (and once wealthy) family of the Russian gentry, with a father claiming descent from the Scottish family of Learmont, a member of which had arrived in Russia as a mercenary in the early seventeenth century. As Lermontov’s father was disapproved of by his in-laws, after the death of his mother (née Arseneva), when he was less than three years old, the young Mikhail was brought up by his maternal grandmother – with a quite lavish lifestyle, involving country estates and boyhood visits to the Caucasus.
The life of Mikhail Lermontov was short and tempestuous. His fate – determined by the vicious phenomenon of duelling – recapitulated, after just four years, that of his idol, Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837). In Lermontov’s case, death came from a duel in the Caucasus – the romantic setting of so much of his mature work; he was just three months short of twenty-seven.
Lermontov’s world was one of army life and society intrigue; the Hussars’ mess and the Caucasian fort alternated with the St Petersburg ballroom and the high-society spa scene of Pyatigorsk. The ambition to resign his commission and devote himself to a professional literary career remained unfulfilled at his death. Arrest, followed by a cold-blooded brand of exile to front-line military service in a deadly renewed colonial war (one which, incidentally and ironically, was to spring up yet again in the post-Soviet period), led to unexpected literary prowess, rather than to the inglorious demise in combat which had probably been the Tsar (Nicholas I)’s intention.
Benevolent influence in high places did not succeed in having Lermontov recalled to Russia from his second Caucasian exile (although he did have a brief St Petersburg leave early in 1841). However, his death itself, which came in July of that year, arose from a round of social scheming and personal mischief-making for which Lermontov himself appears to have been largely responsible. This was a scenario conceivably orchestrated by distant authorities, but more immediately wrought through a society poseur, and old personal foe of the writer, named Martynov – a figure ostensibly even more improbable than any portrayed in Lermontov’s own fiction – in circumstances by no means dissimilar to the duel precariously survived by Pechorin in A Hero of Our Time . “A dog’s death for a dog” was the reported reaction of Tsar Nicholas to this event.
Such were the ironies in the volatile career of Lermontov, who is usually ranked second only to Pushkin among nineteenth-century Russian poets, yet is even better known as the author of the first great Russian novel (or, at least, prose novel: Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin , completed nearly a decade earlier, being the celebrated “novel in verse”). Many Russians know by heart reams of Lermontov’s lyric poetry, much of it expounding on ill-starred love or premonitory death amid awesome Caucasian scenery, while his mature Caucasian narrative poems, The Demon and The Novice ( Mtsyri ), rank among the finest in the Russian language. However, it is Lermontov’s prose which, perhaps inevitably, travels best; moreover, his reputation in this field rests almost entirely on A Hero of Our Time (first published in 1840; second edition 1841), his only completed novel.
Lermontov was, potentially at least, the most Byronic figure in Russian literature. A social misfit and a natural rebel, he behaved arrogantly in society and struck an incongruous figure in military circles. Physically unprepossessing according to many contemporary accounts (like the early descriptions of his protagonist, Pechorin), he yet seems to have been endowed with a magnetism bordering on the demonic; hopelessly star-crossed in love for much of his adult life, he still managed to exploit his capacity to captivate women. In his youth, he had admired Napoleon, translated Byron’s verses from English and written his own bawdy poetry. From the barrack room he proceeded by storm to the literary salon. By the end of his brief career, he found himself squarely at the interface between romanticism and realism in Russian literature. This is nowhere more apparent than in the generic make-up of A Hero of Our Time .
Before coming to that, however, we should pause briefly to notice the formative stage at which Russian prose found itself in the 1830s. Russian literature had not yet given birth to what is now broadly understood as the nineteenth-century (or classical), largely realist, novel of Goncharov and Turgenev, of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Pushkin’s mature period had produced, his famous verse novel apart, masterly shorter prose works and a historical narrative, The Captain’s Daughter (set in the time of Catherine the Great). The inventive prose of Nikolai Gogol had yet to deliver its one sustained (if never completed) masterpiece, Dead Souls . The earlier imitation of French classicism and sentimentalism had eventually led to rudimentary Russian novels of a picaresque or Walter Scott-ish nature. However, the staple fare of Russian prose in this period was largely provided by romanticism in its various manifestations – the Gothic-fantastic or Hoffmannesque tale of mystery, or the exotic adventure story. In addition were to be found, in one mode or another, travel notes or letters and, of particular interest here, the newly flourishing form of the society tale.
If many, or all, of these ingredients were somehow to be combined, then in what better setting should this be contrived than the Caucasus? A Caucasian tradition in Russian writing had already been begun by Pushkin and by Alexander Marlinsky (an adventure and society-tale writer, and exiled participant in the Decembrist uprising of 1825, who disappeared, presumed killed in action, in the Caucasus in 1837). Lermontov’s boyhood Caucasian visits were followed by his military postings there. The expansionist colonial war, indeed, tied down large-scale forces of the Russian army on and off from 1802 until 1864. The final literary flourish from this bloody saga (not counting any late-twentieth-century and subsequent responses to the renewed phenomenon) came as late as 1904, with the publication of Tolstoy’s last great story, Hadji Murat .
One of the most striking formal features of A Hero of Our Time is its generic mix. It is made up, prefaces apart, of what appear to be five short stories: the question therefore arises as to their cyclical connection and the matter as to whether, or in what sense, they constitute a novel (on which commentators have had much to say). The division into Parts One and Two was (as Nabokov has put it) “purely fortuitous”, fixed by the 1841 editor and followed ever since. ‘The Author’s Preface’ (or foreword, added to the second edition as a corrective to certain reactions to the work) is purportedly Lermontov as himself, and has been regarded since as an integral part of the text. ‘Bela’ begins in the guise of Caucasian travel notes and turns, with a shift in narra tion, into an exotic oral narrative. ‘Maxim Maximych’ also begins as travel notes, but turns rather into the one narrative to provide the primary (travelling) narrator’s own relevant observations, his one overt contribution: a personal encounter with the hero. The remainder of the text comprises ‘Pechorin’s Journal’, consisting of three stories, or episodes. ‘Taman’ is a brief adventure, perhaps in part a parody of the supernatural tale. The longest story of the work, ‘Princess Mary’, is written in diary form, yet contrives to be possibly the finest example of the society tale in Russian literature. The final nar