[4.5] Each time I've started reading A Hero of Our Time - and there have been three or four - it's been tremendous fun. This is partly due to the playful self-awareness and utterly modern attitude of the second and third sentences, which shine through in every translation I've tried, and in this version mention:
one valise of average size, half-filled with my travel notes about Georgia. The majority of these luckily for you, were lost; but the valise with the rest of my things, luckily for me, remained intact.
I know these days that 'postmodernity' is about as old as the novel itself (a look at reviews of [author:Steven Moore|16001]'s histories of the novel will help), but meeting phrases like these, sparkling out from the dust of 200 years, still brings nearly the same surprise and delight as I got twenty years ago from discovering [book:The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner|87580].
Despite my enthusiasm, each previous time I began to read A Hero of Our Time, I was waylaid by things I can no longer remember, and got nowhere near finishing the book. But now I have finished it, and straight away went back to re-read various bits and pieces. (There are few books I like enough to bother doing this. It's also a testament to it that I started again from the beginning so many times. I usually avoid doing this when picking up a book after a gap, so I don't have to read the same chapters again and can get to the end more quickly.)
Hero isn't like the typical Anglophone idea of a Russian classic: a giant, complex opera or symphony (i.e. a Tolstoy doorstopper). It's short, immediate, and full of escapades and scrapes: an old-fashioned boys' own adventure. (Neil LaBute's foreword to this Penguin Classics edition rightly compares Pechorin to Flashman, and dreams up a meeting for the two characters during the Crimean War, which I, for one, would really like to read.) Bring the expectations you'd bring to Verne or Conan Doyle, rather than those for high literature, and you'll get more out of it.
The British boys' own adventure isn't just an adventure story, though, it's a document of Empire, colonialism and imperialist attitudes, and the same goes for A Hero of Our Time in the Russian context. For some reason, it's very unusual in mass media to hear Russia (or the Soviets) described as a colonial and imperial power in the same way that Western European countries are - this understanding of the country seems mostly confined to academic works. Perhaps, because Russia was appropriating territories contiguous to its own borders - many of which it still rules - while Britain was spreading pink over the global map to the Americas, Asia and Africa, it just isn't as obvious to the general public. A few months ago, I was browsing [book:Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy|1181367]; I thought reading fiction would be an enjoyable and inexpensive way to learn a bit more about Imperial Russian colonialism - and there among the most significant works was Lermontov and A Hero of Our Time, so I picked up the book again, and found myself noticing sentences I would once not have looked at so intently: all these characterisations of 'Asiatics', Cossacks, warlords and their families. I might otherwise have read them with the same well-it's-not-great-but-it's-old resignation as I'd have brought to a 19th-century Londoner's stereotyping of locals during his journey to the north of England, and not filed alongside British Empire-builders' depictions of India with the Said-Orientalism toolkit etc. (Not that one couldn't also apply that to regional and class snobbery, actually.) My desire to hear more about the place and time, and the relative unfamiliarity (only, for comparison, having the memory of a few documentaries and newspaper articles from and about the 1990s-present) meant it was fascinating to an extent that similar stuff about the British Raj - a backdrop to dozens of novels, films and TV series since childhood - wouldn't be now.
(An interesting-looking book of stories about Russian colonialism from the Georgian side: [book:The Prose of the Mountains|28089291] )
As in British Imperialist literature, there are colonising protagonists who partly identify themselves with the colonised region and go native when it suits them (of course Pechorin can be mistaken for a Circassian), and there is a great aesthetic love of the landscape they've been sent to tame. Lermontov was also a painter, and it shows in the gorgeous extended descriptions of scenery. Natasha Randall's introduction says these can occasionally be repetitive, but I was enjoying wandering around in them way too much to notice.
In the last few years, I've read too many articles by women who identify with female supporting characters in fiction that has sexist male protagonists, and it's too current a subject to ignore in 2018 - so I should mention that the reader who identifies primarily with them here is unlikely to enjoy A Hero of Our Time so much. I'm not sure it would even be possible to identify with them in the first half - they are not so much characters as dolls or pets exemplifying desirable qualities of the era (there's also a Bond Girl), and the average contemporary Western reader has such a different background and emotional history that they are unlikely to truly fathom Bela, the kidnapped daughter of a Circassian warlord, and who has lived all her life in a culture in which such snatchings are commonplace, any more than Lermontov/Pechorin did. In the second half of the book (about social intrigue rather than derring-do), aristocratic Russian ladies from Moscow and St. Petersburg get more page time, and are evidently trying to negotiate their own emotions, and the double standards and conflicting expectations of their milieu and the Romantic period, where medieval courtly love style tendencies and expectations of respectable marriage coexist with a fashion for Byronic bad boys, and behaviours like pickup-artist style negging. I would guess that much ink has been spilled already on the similarities between Vera, Pechorin's former lover, and Anna Karenina.
LaBute - famous in the late 90s for his films about what's now called toxic masculinity - considers Pechorin to be a sociopath. And I have to say that certain of Pechorin's social manipulations, his nerve, and his occasional moments of introspection and doubt, closely resemble someone I used to know who described himself as a sociopath. I'm not talking serial killer bad (nor gloating at length over destroying people in the manner of Valmont in [book:Les Liaisons Dangereuses|49540], another character LaBute mentions) - more like Tony in Skins: an arrogant, clever, socially connected, player of games, sometimes very hurtful, and sometimes also useful and supportive when it suits. Given Pechorin's level of reflectiveness, you wonder how much of this arsery he might grow out of: possibly some, but not 100%. The energy and likeability with which Pechorin is presented shows realistically how such a person seems to acquaintances (of which they have a great many) until they do something too awful - and how they get on in life, in a way that the later tendency to present such personalities as sinister unreliable narrators really doesn't. (LaBute also does that thing, pretty much universal in New Lad-era media and later 20th century litfic, of presenting highly egotistical and difficult characters as universally, typically male, as if men's personalities did not, in fact, vary as much as women's.)
Randall, drawing attention to the psychological realism rather than to labels, compares A Hero of Our Time with [book:The Confession of a Child of the Century|16282313], another personal favourite of mine - although very different in its emotional intensity and not such an easy read - which is again remarkable in presenting the inner world of a difficult character without judgement, to an extent that modern works rarely do. The period when both books were written, the cusp between Romanticism and the fashion for realist fiction (a time also, importantly, before the codification of psychology and the rise of psychology-as-morality) seems to have been especially productive for this.
The lightness with which Pechorin's games are presented makes it clearer how he experiences them - they are not related with that heavy-handed insinuation that characterises later fiction about questionable individuals - and the narrative sometimes bestowed strange flashes of insight beyond the words on the page. I suddenly understood how hunting would be exciting because it would be different every time, moving through the landscape on different routes decided by another creature, different weather and sounds, not knowing where the quarry would go, different from the relatively fixed possibilities in, for example, gaming. Passages which could have been commonplace are elevated: something that in the hands of many later writers would have been a dyspeptic, predictable rant against astrology is here a poetic consideration of how 'we' see ourselves compared with how our ancestors saw themselves and their lives.
The structure is odd - the book ends abruptly, inside a framed narrative, and it's understandable that some readers would knock a star off for this, but the aytypicality of this in a 19th century novel felt interesting in itself. It helped to understand that this is actually a collection of short stories about one character and his world, previously published separately - it was even suggested that Lermontov might have written more about Pechorin had he lived longer - and the introduction's listing of the sequence in which the episodes happen prompted me to look over them again in that order for an altered perspective.
Even the title has more to give than I expected. A hero as in a (potential) war hero; a hero as in a Byronic hero (not necessarily approved of by those in the 19th century establishment who esteemed of the former), the implied question mark at the end - these could be obvious from reading the blurb. A facet added by contemporary Western life (especially outside the US) where warfare has not been part of most people's lives for a couple of generations, is the suspicion in some quarters of those who have killed or are prepared to kill repeatedly in the armed services: might it actually require a dark-triad sort of antisocial personality? Is that what a lot of 'heroes', especially old-fashioned heroes, really are?
A Hero of Our Time is a classic partly because of its place in the history of the Russian novel, as a bridge from Pushkin to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the Golden Age - and I admit that a bit of my enjoyment was from seeing it in this light (it was probably good to read it after W&P, AK, C&P and EO) and in relation to English literature (having seen it argued that Constance Garnett's translations of later Russian greats effectively prompted the incorporation of the country's major writers into the English canon). But mostly I found it to be something which, having read most of the 'easy' English classics a long time ago, I don't really expect any more from books of this age: an enjoyable, light adventure story with intriguing character portrait.
(finished & reviewed Sept 2018; the review on Goodreads.)
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