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A Hero of Our Time

Mikhail Lermontov - Author

Natasha Randall - Translator

Natasha Randall - Introduction by

Natasha Randall - Notes by

Neil Labute - Foreword by

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ISBN 9781101054093 | 208 pages | 26 May 2009 | Penguin Classics | 18 - AND UP
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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.


@BAMF Who is that sublime woman? She is perfect. Oh, excellent: Grushinsky seems to like her. I’m going to cock-block him. How typically me.

My plan to seduce her is simple: act like I always have better things to do, insult her, and act as though I have nothing left to live for.

Apparently she’s begging for an introduction? I wonder if this kind of thing works in real life?

From Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less

"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

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