A masterpiece of Russian prose, Lermontov's only novel was influential for many later nineteenth-century authors, including Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov. It features Pechorin who is a dangerous man, Byronic in his wasted gifts and his cynicism, and desperate for any kind of action that will stave off boredom.

A brilliant new translation of a perennial favorite of Russian literature

The first major Russian novel, A Hero of Our Time was both lauded and reviled upon publication. Its dissipated hero, twenty-five-year-old Pechorin, is a beautiful and magnetic but nihilistic young army officer, bored by life and indifferent to his many sexual conquests. Chronicling his unforgettable adventures in the Caucasus involving brigands, smugglers, soldiers, rivals, and lovers, this classic tale of alienation influenced Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov in Lermontov's own century, and finds its modern-day counterparts in Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, the novels of Chuck Palahniuk, and the films and plays of Neil LaBute.

"Natasha Randall's English, in her new translation, has exactly the right degree of loose velocity. . . . (Nabokov's version, the best-known older translation, is a bit more demure than Randall's, less savage.)" —James Wood, London Review of Books 

"[A] smart, spirited new translation." —The Boston Globe 

"One of the most vivid and persuasive portraits of the male ego ever put down on paper." —Neil LaBute, from the Foreword