Lermontov was twenty-five when he published this novel, twenty-six when he was killed in a duel. Pechorin, his protagonist, is the first great superfluous man of Russian literature: brilliant, bored, destructive, and self-aware enough to narrate his own corruption. The novel's fragmented structure mirrors its hero's fractured psychology. Pushkin admired it; Dostoevsky learned from it; Nabokov translated it. Lermontov died before he could write anything else of comparable ambition. This remains his testament, as alive and troubling as when it was written.