A Hero of Our Time/ The Demon

This volume features new translations of two timeless — yet eminently readable — Russian classics by the Romantic poet Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841), who, alongside Pushkin, was a major figure of Russia’s literary Golden Age, and a founder of modern Russian literature as we now know it. The dubious “heroes” of the two works presented here — the seductive Demon, and the infamous “Hero of Our Time” Pechorin — proved especially influential as archetypes for a long line of tortured, brooding, “superfluous,” and profoundly conflicted — or downright evil — characters in the Russian tradition. Reading these two works in tandem is therefore particularly revealing: in this volume, The Demon (which tells of a beautiful Georgian princess’s seduction by a demon) is presented as a kind of poetic overture to the masterfully paced prose of A Hero of Our Time (which features everything from kidnapping, horse thievery, gunfights and duels, to existential meditations on life’s meaning and predetermination). Finally, two lyric poems — “The Angel” (one of Lermontov’s earliest) and “A Dream” (one of his last, written not long before his death in a duel at the age of 26) — round out this collection of outstanding Russian prose and poetry from one of its greatest and most fascinating writers.