‘A Hero of Our Time’: A Study in Cynicism and Romantic Disillusionment

A review of ‘A Hero of Our Time’, by Mikhail Lermontov; 1840.

Celebrity culture started with Byron. After the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), he fast became ‘the most brilliant star in the dazzling world of Regency London,’ wrote Jerome McGann. But he wasn’t just a poet. He involved himself in liberal politics; he travelled; he had sex (and lots of it) with men and women; he ran up debts; he took part in revolutions. And he loved animals: the tomb of his dog Boatswain at Newstead Abbey is bigger than his own, and ends with the lovely couplet:’ To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise; / I never knew but one — and here he lies.’

Byron helped to inspire the vampire genre. He also gives us the ‘Byronic hero’: a moody, sensitive, cynical, sexy, solitary man. This trope finds its highest expression in Conrad, pirate hero of Byron’s The Corsair:

He knew himself a villain — but he deem’d

The rest no better than the thing he seem’d;

And scorn’d the best as hypocrites who hid

Those deeds the bolder spirit plainly did.

He knew himself detested, but he knew

The hearts that loath’d him, crouch’d and dreaded too.

Lone, wild, and strange, he stood alike exempt

From all affection and from all contempt:

But perhaps the exemplar of the Byronic hero appears in Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, a story that is both character study and critique of 19th-century Russian society. It deals with Pechorin, a young officer whose detached, selfish and cynical nature throws light on the shortcomings of the Romantic age. Written in a disjointed, episodic fashion, it combines psychological depth with biting social realism.

Byron helped to inspire the vampire genre. He also gives us the ‘Byronic hero’.

The tale unfolds through five loosely connected parts. Each offers a different perspective on Pechorin. These accounts, given by various characters and Pechorin himself, create a kind of mosaic of his personality. Pechorin is without doubt a charming and clever young man. But he is also deeply flawed. He uses his wits to manipulate others, sometimes out of boredom, often in a twisted search for meaning. In ‘Princess Mary’, Pechorin toys with the feelings of a noblewoman, ditching her the second she falls in love with him. He prefigures Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which the central character plays with the affections of the actress Sybil Vane. Pechorin is too ‘accustomed to indulge his self-love’.

Pechorin is an anti-hero, but also a man of his time. He is a ‘superfluous man’, a peculiarly Russian take on the Byronic hero seen first in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin but coined by Turgenev in his Diary of a Superfluous Man. Pechorin’s cynicism reflects the disillusionment of the Russian aristocracy in the 1830s. Heroism and nobility, for Pechorin, are empty virtues. Pechorin departs from Byron by stripping his brooding, inward-looking, morally ambiguous hero of any kind of romantic allure. Pechorin is not a likeable man; and his lack of purpose is a mirror for a society drifting without direction.

By presenting the parts of A Hero of Our Time out of chronological order, Lermentov gives us a puzzle to solve. His approach is effective. It points to Pechorin’s complexity, his many layers, inviting us to look at human beings (and, I would add, human nature) as comprising many parts. ‘I have an innate passion for contradiction,’ says Pechorin in his diary. ‘My whole life has been nothing but a series of melancholy and vain contradictions of heart or reason.’ (‘Contradiction,’ wrote Simone Weil, ‘is the criterion of the real.’) Pechorin’s journal entries in ‘The Fatalist’ are striking in their honesty, in revealing their author’s vulnerability and angst. And the backdrop for this intense portrait is the Caucasus, as wild and raw and untameable as Pechorin, and described with a poetic vividness:

‘Such a panorama I can hardly hope to see elsewhere. Beneath us lay the Koishaur Valley, intersected by the Aragva and another stream as if by two silve threads; a bluish mist was gliding along the valley, fleeing into the neighbouring defiles from the warm rays of the morning. To right and left the mountain crests, towering higher and higher, intersected each other and stretched out, covered with snows and thickets; in the distance were the same mountains, which now, however, had the appearance of two cliffs, on like to the other. And all these snows were burning in the crimson glow so merrily and so brightly that it seemed as though one could live in such a place for ever.’

Pechorin’s journal entries in ‘The Fatalist’ are striking in their honesty, in revealing their author’s vulnerability and angst.

What makes A Hero of Our Time so readable and indeed so remarkable is its unflinching depiction of flawed humanity. Lermontov does not ask us to like Pechorin (or, in fact, to dislike him) but rather, to understand him. His actions are cruel. But they stem from a deep dissatisfaction with life and himself. The novel asks questions: Can a man like Pechorin ever find peace? What should we do with such a man? Is this the endpoint of the Romantic liberal ideal, a kind of aimless narcissism? Is such a man doomed in the end to destroy everything he touches, including himself? Do we need myths—heroism, nobility–to dignify our existence, to make us something more than we are?

It must be said that at times, Pechorin’s nihilism feels repetitive. He does not grow; he does not change. That can be a problem in character-driven fiction: ‘in stories,’ says Salman Rushdie, ‘things happen’. This may turn you off. But the stagnation Lermentov depicts is intentional, for Pechorin is a product of a stagnant society. Lermontov frames Pechorin as an object of study, complex but static, not a traditional protagonist. This was bold for its time. It remains striking today.

So striking, perhaps, that in the end, A Hero of Our Time stands as one of the great masterpieces of psychological fiction, a precursor and complement too the great psychological works of Dostoevsky, whose fiction would inspire contemporary films like Taxi Driver and Joker. Lermontov aims to throw light on the frailty of ideals, the corrosive effects of disillusionment and isolation, and the timeless search for meaning in a chaotic world. Pechorin is fascinating : a ‘hero’ of his time in the sense of being a perfect expression of it—but, perhaps, of ours as well.