Paul Foote Knihy

In its adventurous happenings-its abductions, duels, and sexual intrigues-"A Hero of Our Time" looks backward to the tales of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, so beloved by Russian society in the 1820s and '30s. In the character of its protagonist, Pechorin-the archetypal Russian antihero-Lermontov's novel looks forward to the subsequent glories of a Russian literature that it helped, in great measure, to make possible. This edition includes a Translator's Foreword by Vladimir Nabokov, who translated the novel in collaboration with his son, Dmitri Nabokov.

These three stories were begun in the 1890s during the period when Tolstoy, tormented by questions of religion and morality, undertook literature almost as a guilty pleasure. He none the less put his highest art into them and only twinges of dogma. Both Father Sergius and Master and Man are preoccupied with material desires - for the flesh in one instance and in the other for money - although the first story, involving a dashing young officer turned monk, also bears out Tolstoy's assertion that 'the struggle with lust is...only a stage; the main struggle is with worldly fame'. Hadji Murat stands apart in that Tolstoy lost all compulsion to moralize and going back to the Caucasus where he spent his young manhood, gives us in a soldier-traitor one of his most memorable heroes.