Extract

I was ready to love the whole world, but no one understood me, and I learned to hate.

A Russian officer stationed in the Caucasus seduces women, manipulates friends, and courts death with the elegant indifference of a man who has concluded that nothing matters. Mikhail Lermontov's 1840 novel assembles the portrait of Pechorin through five loosely connected tales, each narrated from a different vantage, so that we circle this magnetic, destructive figure the way one circles a wound. We see Pechorin through others' eyes before we read his own journal, and what we find there is not remorse but a lucid, almost clinical self-awareness that changes nothing. Lermontov, himself killed in a duel at twenty-six, created the prototype of the superfluous man, whose intelligence serves only to illuminate his own emptiness.