Product Description
In five linked episodes, Lermontov builds up the portrait of a man caught up in and expressing the sickness of his times. A marvelous novel and an early landmark in Russian literature, A Hero of Our Time served as an inspiration for many later Russian authors, including Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky…. More >>
I couldn’t understand a word of this. This is as unintelligible as something by Joyce or Dickens. The author needed to take ENGLISH AND GRAMMAR 101 again. It appears he failed the first time. Take my advice: if you are looking for someone with a mastery of an English language that you can understand, read Emile Gaboriau.
Rating: 1 / 5
I couldn’t understand a word of this. This is as unintelligible as something by Joyce or Dickens. The author needed to take ENGLISH AND GRAMMAR 101 again. It appears he failed the first time. Take my advice: if you are looking for someone with a mastery of an English language that you can understand, read Emile Gaboriau.
Rating: 1 / 5
“A Hero of Our Time” is widely held to be a crucial text in the development of the Russian nineteenth century novel, up to Turgenev and Dostoeyvsky. The hero of the title, an enigmatical figure called Pechorin, seems calculated by Lermontov to reflect the characteristics of the typical young aristocrats of his generation. He is cynical, but very heroic, possessed of reserves of willpower, but, at the same time, vulnerable — a patently Byronic rebel with his egoism, his aloofness, his restlessness. However, it is the author Lermontov presented under the thinnest of disguises (Lermontov himself died young, in a duel in true Romantic fashion). The novel is divided into several stories, with a tenuous thread of connection running through them, dealing with the themes of friendship, love and predestination. The best sections are the first and final story, “Vulich”, which is a clever tale about fate. The prose, however, is rather rocky (or is it the translation?)
Rating: 3 / 5
I read ‘Bela’ and ‘Taman’ as a second year student of Russian 40 yrs. ago, and read so badly (along with inadequate basis for judgement) that I failed to realize that I was perhaps reading the best travel writing of all time. I reread the book recently because of my interest in Caucasian peoples, due to contact with interesting and friendly Chechnyan refugess in Europe, but with whom we cannot speak enough due to having forgotten what little Russian I had learned. For a recent version of people, life and war in the Caucasus, see Aukai Collins’ “My Jihad”, and Robert Pelton Jones’ “The World’s Most Dangerous Places” (Jones is mentioned in Collins’ book). Collins’ book sheds light on the tribal appeal of Islam to angry, disenherited people (he was converted to Islam while in prison), and reminds superficially of what we’ve read about Zarqawi’s conversion to Jihad and his early days, although Collins (known as Abu Mujahid in the first Chechnyn war, but not to be confused with a terrorist with the same name) never accepted terrorism while the latter has embraced it fully.
Rating: 5 / 5
This semi-autobiographical novel is strongly influenced by the romanticism of Byron. Lermontov is one of the greatest Russian writers of prose and poetry. After writing this novel, he would soon perish (at the age of 27) in a brutal duel he fought at the mountains of North Caucasus.
Rating: 4 / 5
I read ‘Bela’ and ‘Taman’ as a second year student of Russian 40 yrs. ago, and read so badly (along with inadequate basis for judgement) that I failed to realize that I was perhaps reading the best travel writing of all time. I reread the book recently because of my interest in Caucasian peoples, due to contact with interesting and friendly Chechnyan refugess in Europe, but with whom we cannot speak enough due to having forgotten what little Russian I had learned. For a recent version of people, life and war in the Caucasus, see Aukai Collins’ “My Jihad”, and Robert Pelton Jones’ “The World’s Most Dangerous Places” (Jones is mentioned in Collins’ book). Collins’ book sheds light on the tribal appeal of Islam to angry, disenherited people (he was converted to Islam while in prison), and reminds superficially of what we’ve read about Zarqawi’s conversion to Jihad and his early days, although Collins (known as Abu Mujahid in the first Chechnyn war, but not to be confused with a terrorist with the same name) never accepted terrorism while the latter has embraced it fully.
Rating: 5 / 5