A number of features set A Hero of Our Time apart from the standard run of Russian classics. It's not very long at all, for one. It is a cycle of five linked short stories, each of which reveals a new facet of Pechorin, the protagonist, and shows his character in a different light. Four of the five stories would make interesting and satisfying reads on their own, and the novel taken as a whole therefore has an excellent and mostly unflagging momentum. Another feature which recommends it is its setting. Lermontov spares us from Petersberg and Moscow society, Russian countryside pastoralism, and small town intrigue. Instead we get the Caucauses, the Georgian military highway, and the colonial city of Pyatigorsk, giving the novel a feeling often pleasantly akin to British-in-India fiction à la Kipling, with a supporting cast of soldiers, expats, Crimean smugglers, Circassians and Daghestanis.
The short stories which comprise the novel are themselves pleasantly plot driven, but as a whole the novel is definitely a character study. It is also, for all its Byronic moments, a post-Romantic work, full of quite witty expressions of doubt as to the worth of great Romantic gestures, and also with questions as to the legitimacy of these doubts.
I said there were a lot of people who did talk like that and very likely some of them told the truth, but disenchantment, like any other fashion, having started off among the élite had now passed down to finish its days among the lower orders. I explained that now the people who suffered the most from boredom tried to keep their misfortune to themselves, as if it were some vice.The captain could not understand these subtleties. He shook his head.
'I suppose it was the French who started this fashion of being bored?' he said, smiling artfully.
'No, the English.'
'Aha, so that's it! They always were a drunken lot,' he retorted.
