A Hero of Our Time
Mikhail Lermontov, 1840
A bored young officer drifts through the Caucasus, charming and wrecking the people he meets, in a novel that invented the modern antihero.
Mikhail Lermontov
1814–1841
Lermontov was exiled to the Caucasus, the novel's setting, and was killed in a duel at twenty-six, a year after it appeared.
Feels like morality, curiosity and unease.
The guilt of being the stone thrown into someone else’s quiet well.
The blind boy did not pick it up. Yanko took his seat in the boat; the wind was blowing from the shore; they hoisted the little sail and sped rapidly away. For a long time the white sail gleamed in the moonlight amid the dark waves. Still the blind boy remained seated upon the shore, and then I heard something which sounded like sobbing. The blind boy was, in fact, weeping, and for a long, long time his tears flowed... I grew heavy-hearted. For what reason should fate have thrown me into the peaceful circle of honourable smugglers? Like a stone cast into a smooth well, I had disturbed their quietude, and I barely escaped going to the bottom like a stone. Books by Mikhail Lermontov
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