Mikhail Lermontov\'s a Hero of Our Time

Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time places a Russian piece of literature in the Western context of literary influences without sacrificing the Russian characteristics of the writing. At the time of its first publishing in Russia the critiques of Lermontov's short stories novel were mostly controversies over the real values of such a literary undertaking. Lermontov's novel, published in the 1830s, a period of confluences in international literature, when the romanticism was slowly dying out and the realism had not yet started to make statements, led to powerful reactions, especially at home.

Lermontov's antihero was in fact creating confusion: many were not able to understand him, others were not willing to see through, while still another part of the readers and critics alike were considering him a threat to the old values they had grown fond of. Buracek, a reputed professor of science and Lermontov's contemporary "considered the novel a product of Western decadent thought and viewed all characters save Maksim Maksimyk as cast in the image of the author himself. Only those, he maintained, in whom the religious spirit is extinct will enjoy this immoral hero of our time, despite the fact that he represents a mere aesthetic and psychological absurdity" (Heier, p. 36). Pechorin was hard to define and slipped through one's fingers every time someone tried to place him into a definite category.

The tile of the novel makes the contemporary reader ask him or herself how relevant is Pechorin in the context of the last past a hundred and seventy years. How relevant is Pechorin for our society and would he fit at all in today's Russia? Since the novel is still widely read, there must be something in its pages that makes the contemporary reader interested in those stories.

The first chapter of the first book, Bella, titled "The Heart of a Russian," introduces the first narrator, an army officer who travels through Georgia. He is getting to know the people and the places there and the indication of his notes on Georgia show that he is interested in the land as well as the people. His first encounter with the Ossetes, hired to take him and his luggage from one point to another across the country is not at all flattering for the latter. His first impressions joined with those of an older and more experienced in Caucasus matters fellow officer are quite against those inhabiting those parts of the Caucasus. The image his fellow officer is depicting is that of beasts impossible to civilize who do not even hold the merit of being fine warriors. These harsh judgments are destined to challenge the contemporary reader. First of all, history carries the image of the whole Russian peasantry in the 1940s as the majority exploited by the minority of land owners. Moreover, about a third of the peasants were serfs, the word defining another form of slavery. Russia, the country with aspirations of an empire never ceased to believe in its rights to rule over peoples that put together formed a continent. Russia, a country that today poses so many questions that are still to be answered, a country that would not let go of its right to control regions and peoples that were formerly part of the Soviet Union, needs to be understood in its complexities starting with its domestic and foreign relations.

The Fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union made the world hope that Russia will finally join the democratic world on its way to tip the balance toward the benefits freedom and capitalism in the context of globalization and against an increasingly stronger growing enemy: terrorism. The last twenty years witnessed a Russia that was torn apart by violence, the rise of the nationalistic political forces, the war in Chechnya, financial crisis, recentralization of power under Putin that started to look more like a czar that the head of the government of a democratic regime, support and opposition to the U.S. And EU foreign politics and armed interventions, blackmail through gas and oil prices of former Soviet republics that were supporting the Western powers etc.

Pechorin that Lermontov intended to be the essence of a lost generation could be another Byronic antihero living between tow eras, two millennia. He is young when the world changes suddenly, but he is not young enough to be able to shed the old values imbedded in him in the old world. He witnesses the clash of civilizations and of the old and new in front of his eyes and all he is capable of is to go with the current without really trying to make any opposition at all. He is able to see the flaws, but he is incapable of action. This is the model of those "lost generations" in periods of transition. They can be seen and heard of everywhere in the modern world, in the ex-communist East and Central European countries, in Russia and the former Soviet Republics.