A Hero of Our Time

Book summary

In the Caucasus of the 1830s, several voices describe the same man: Pechorin, a Russian officer, brilliant and destructive. An old captain recounts the abduction of a Circassian girl, and the traveller who hears him later reads his notebooks. They tell of a season at the spa where Pechorin courts a princess out of boredom, and of a duel he conducts like an experiment. The novel explores boredom and what a generation does with unused strength. Lermontov assembles a broken portrait where the order of the stories matters as much as the events.