HERO OF OUR TIME, A ( (Geroy nosh ego uremeni'). Lermontov intended to rep resent Pechorin, the °hero" of this novel, as a type oT cultured men of the thirties, by taking himself as a partial example of that class. His obligation to Pushkin's Eugeni Onyegin is ex pressed in the very name of the chief char acter, which is derived from the river Pechora, as Pushkin derived his from the river Onyega, wherefore the critic Byelinski said that the two characters did not differ from each other more than did these two rivers. Pechorin is a blasé, but in contradistinction to Onyegin he is filled with ambition and the love of power. He spurns the official career, which alone was then open to men of the upper classes, and directs all his energies to the conquest of women's hearts. In the thirties the critics dwelt on the reflective sides of Pechorin, his melancholy, in trospection and despair ; that is, they saw in him a member of the Byronic crew, so numerous in the literatures of that period. But, in the light of the later, more positive evolution of the in tellectuals in Russia, the modern critics point out the fact that Pechorin belongs to the class of unsuccessful, useless men who made social progress impossible. They look upon him as a
literary specimen illustrating certain psycho pathological defects common to men of the first half of the 19th century.
The novel contains also a series of positive characters, such as the mountaineers who are untouched by civilization and the simple-minded, faithful Maksim Maksimich and Bela. All these are described with rare accuracy and are totally devoid of melodramatic characterization. It is chiefly the romantic element of the novel in its exotic setting in the Caucasus that has attracted the Western readers to it, hence the considerable number of translations, especially in English, where we have the abbreviated ones by Theresa Pulszky (London 1854), by R. I. Lipmann (London 1887), and by J. H. Wisdom and Marr Murray, 'The Heart of a (London 1912, and New York 1916); and the anonymous ones, 'Sketches of Russian Life in the Caucasus' (London 1853), and 'A Hero of Our Own Times' (London 1854).
Leo WIENER.