A Hero of Our Time: Introduction by T. J. Binyon(Everyman's Library Classics Series)

A stunning collector’s hardcover edition of Mikhail Lermontov’s classic of Russian literature.

In its adventurous happenings—its abductions, duels, and sexual intrigues—A Hero of Our Time looks backward to the tales of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, so beloved by Russian society in the 1820s and ’30s. In the character of its protagonist, Pechorin—the archetypal Russian antihero—Lermontov’s novel looks forward to the subsequent glories of a Russian literature that it helped, in great measure, to make possible.

This edition includes a Translator’s Foreword by Vladimir Nabokov, who translated the novel in collaboration with his son, Dmitri Nabokov.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a jacket. Everyman’s Library Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

About the Author :
MIKHAIL LERMONTOV was born in Moscow in 1814. Influential as a poet, novelist, and visual artist, Lermontov died in 1941 at the age of 26.

VLADIMIR NABOKOV was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1899. After studying French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, he launched his literary career in Berlin and Paris. In 1940 he moved to the United States, here he achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator. Lolita, arguably his most famous novel, was first published, by the Olympia Press, Paris, on September 15, 1955, and became a controversial success. Nabokov died in Montreux Switzerland in 1977.

Review :
“In [A Hero of Our Time], Lermontov managed to create a fictional person whose romantic dash to cynicism, tiger-like suppleness and eagle eye, hot blood and cool head, tenderness and taciturnity, elegance and brutality, delicacy of perception and harsh passion to dominate, ruthlessness and awareness of it, are of lasting appeal to readers of all countries and centuries.”—from the Translator’s Foreword by Vladimir Nabokov

“[Lermontov’s] technique is surprisingly sophisticated, given the late development of the novel in Russian literature. Lermontov does not only dislocate chronology to achieve [his] result; in equally brilliant fashion he reinforces the effect by employing different contemporary literary genres…to create, in the end, a unified whole.”—from the Introduction by T. J. Binyon