Is This It?

On Mikhail Lermontov's "A Hero of Our Time"

Modernity rears its abject little head in all sorts of unexpected places; as soon as one wants to confidently say that a character in a novel or epic poem is one of the earliest examples of modernism we have, someone else finds an even older text, from 300 years earlier, where someone else records that feeling: god, this is all so boring; oh, I think I want to die rather than keep this charade of life and society going; oh, I think I’ll say the opposite of what I mean instead. Mikhail Lermontov’s 1839 novel A Hero of Our Time is usually paired alongside Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1833) as a progenitor of Russian modernism: there’s no Oblomov, no Bazarov, no Raskalnikov or Underground Man without Onegin or Lermontov’s ‘heroic’ Pechorin. Lermontov, unlike Pushkin, wrote prose, and so his book – his first and only novel before an untimely death by duel – is the true first Russian step out of the era of Romantic verse and into the grimy world of the Realist novel. What’s funny to see, upon actually reading the novel¹ and not just reading about it as an influence for other, later novels, is how fully formed Pechorin is as a modern (anti)hero from the jump. It’s not something that comes in flashes, not a spare moment where an otherwise genuine Pechorin has a brief modern thought; Pechorin is from the outset a man who thinks the entire trapping of the Romantic plot is frankly ridiculous. Circumstance has made him into a relatively low level military officer in the Caucasian mountain range; rather than take that position at all seriously, rather than having any belief in a higher purpose, Pechorin mostly just wants to goof off. Go hunting, chase women, meddle in society, have some fun out in the sticks. It’s not quite as meta as Don Quixote (yes, a modern character appearing some 200 years before Pechorin), but there is a still a sense that Pechorin knows he’s a character in what should be a story of chivalry, derring-do and romance, and thinks that all that stuff is actually pretty stupid. He’s not a nihilist, but his pursuit of libertine pleasure approaches nihilism in its lack of concern for others; you can see why it outraged his contemporaries (Tsar Alexander II, for one, wrote in a letter to his wife that “the author suffers from a most depraved spirit, and his talents are pathetic”) and how it seeped its way into those later characters and totemic figures within the Russian novel. For all its influence, though, A Hero of Our Time itself remains its own strange little thing, a disordered, ahead of its time novel of irony-poisoned malfeasance draped in the grand natural setting of a bucolic adventure tale.