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A Hero of Our Time and Princess Ligovskaya

By Mikhail Lermontov

Translated by Martin Parker and Neil Cornwell

ISBN: 9781847495761

236 pages

RRP: Original price was: £7.99.Current price is: £6.39.

On his travels through the wild mountainous terrain of the Caucasus, the narrator of A Hero of Our Time chances upon the veteran soldier and storyteller Maxim Maximych, who relates to him the dubious exploits of his former comrade Pechorin. Engaging in various acts of duelling, contraband, abduction and seduction, Pechorin, an archetypal Byronic anti-hero, combines cynicism and arrogance with melancholy and sensitivity.

Causing an uproar in Russia when it was first published in 1840, Lermontov’s brilliant, seminal study of contemporary society and the nihilistic aspect of Romanticism – accompanied here by the unfinished novel Princess Ligovskaya – remains compelling to this day.

Part of Alma Classics Evergreens Series

REVIEWS

  • This study of a man – and a society – in crisis was to become one of the most important books of its time… I have read this novel several times, young and old, always hooked

    Doris Lessing

  • In A Hero of Our Time, Lermontov managed to create a fictional person whose romantic dash to cynicism, tiger-like suppleness and eagle eye, hot blood and cool head, tenderness and taciturnity, elegance and brutality, delicacy of perception and harsh passion to dominate, ruthlessness and awareness of it, are of lasting appeal to readers of all countries and centuries.

    Vladimir Nobokov

Mikhail Lermontov

A soldier in the Russian army stationed in the Caucasus, Mikhail Lermontov (1814–41) became a hugely famous and influential Romantic poet. His life was cut short in a duel with a fellow officer.

OUR IMPRINTS