A Hero of Our Time

Paperback / softback

Main Details

Title A Hero of Our Time
Authors and Contributors      By (author) Mikhail Lermontov
Translated by Natasha Randall
Physical Properties
Format:Paperback / softback
Pages:208
Dimensions(mm): Height 128,Width 128
Category/GenreModern and contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
ISBN/Barcode 9780143105633
ClassificationsDewey:891.733
Audience
General

Publishing Details

Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Imprint Penguin Classics
Publication Date 27 August 2009
Publication Country United Kingdom

Description

A masterpiece of Russian prose, Lermontov's only novel was influential for many later nineteenth-century authors, including Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov. A brilliant new translation of a perennial favorite of Russian literature The first major Russian novel, A Hero of Our Time was both lauded and reviled upon publication. Its dissipated hero, twenty-five-year-old Pechorin, is a beautiful and magnetic but nihilistic young army officer, bored by life and indifferent to his many sexual conquests. Chronicling his unforgettable adventures in the Caucasus involving brigands, smugglers, soldiers, rivals, and lovers, this classic tale of alienation influenced Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov in Lermontov's own century, and finds its modern-day counterparts in Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, the novels of Chuck Palahniuk, and the films and plays of Neil LaBute.

Author Biography

Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841) was a Russian Romantic writer and poet. As a young man Lermontov was an officer in the guards, and was sent to fight in the Caucasus after insulting the tsar. His dramatic life ended after being shot down in a duel. Natasha Randall has published translations of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (shortlisted for the 2008 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize) and Osip Mandelstam's poetry as well as the work of contemporary writers Arkady Dragomoshchenko, Alexander Skidan, and Olga Zondberg. A frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times, she lives in London.

Reviews

"Natasha Randall's English, in her new translation, has exactly the right degree of loose velocity. . . . (Nabokov's version, the best-known older translation, is a bit more demure than Randall's, less savage.)" -James Wood, London Review of Books "[A] smart, spirited new translation." -The Boston Globe "One of the most vivid and persuasive portraits of the male ego ever put down on paper." -Neil LaBute, from the Foreword