Hero of Our Time

Mikhail Lermontov, Natasha Randall, Natasha Randall, Natasha Randall

Book cover for Hero of Our Time
Book cover for Hero of Our Time

Hero of Our Time

Hero of Our Time

Mikhail Lermontov, Natasha Randall, Natasha Randall, Natasha Randall

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Description

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.

About the Author

Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841) made several journeys to the Caucasus before entering St, Petersburg Guards' school, where he began writing poetry and autobiographical dramas in prose. Influenced by Byron, he is renowned as Russia's one true Romantic poet. Lermontov greatly influenced Dostoyevsky and Blok; while Tolstoy and Chekhov regarded his prose as a model.

Natasha Randall (translator/introducer) 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.

Neil LaBute (foreword) is a film director, screenwriter and playwright. He is best known for his play and film In the Company of Men and his films Possession, The Shape of Things, and The Wicker Man.

Critical 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

Publishing Information

Publisher: Penguin Classics
Pub date: 2009-05-01
Length: 208 pages

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