A Hero of Our Time

On a ledge above a Caucasus ravine, Pechorin chooses the ground for a duel: whoever is hit must topple onto the rocks below. He is the most magnetic man in any room and the coldest, an officer who seduces, schemes, and breaks the people foolish enough to love him, then turns the same merciless eye on himself. The novel refuses to hand him over directly. We meet Pechorin first through an old soldier who adored him, glimpse him once on a mountain road, and only afterward are let into his journal, where the verdict is brutal: a brilliant man with nothing worth spending himself on, boredom curdled into cruelty. Lermontov called him a portrait assembled from the vices of an entire generation, and meant it as an accusation. Out of this restless, clear-eyed wreck the whole line of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky would come. Read it for the vertigo of recognizing yourself in a man you could never forgive.