A Hero of Our Time

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Mikhail Lermontov finished writing his novel, A Hero of Our Time, at roughly the same age that I was working in a Blockbuster video store and annually flunking a remedial math course in college. I may have those dates wrong, but it’s pretty darn close. I’m one of those people who often compares their artistic progress to the work of a few of their literary heroes, and Lermontov was one of them. Georg Büchner was another, and he had written all of his works and was dead by twenty-three (he also found the time to become a medical doctor, but that’s just plain annoying). Orson Welles terrified America by roughly that same age with his War of the Worlds radio broadcast and had also made what most critics describe as “the best film ever made” (Citizen Kane) by twenty-six. If I’m not mistaken, I think I passed that math class at about the same age.

Lermontov, of course, didn’t live long after the publication of his first prose work (a bullet in a duel saw to that), but he effectively helped chart the course for the modern Russian novel with one stroke. Like a few others—Shakespeare being perhaps the godfather of the bunch—Lermontov began writing in a psychological manner before the term really had any weight to it and well before Freud started seeing the word sex floating in every cup of coffee (and still had the use of his own jaw). One could carry on at some length and gush intellectually about all of Lermontov’s influences and influential works, but most of you would know that I simply looked him up on Wikipedia and that I’m really just reciting somebody else’s research back to you.

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