Author · 3 titles

Mikhail Lermontov

Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841) wrote as if time were already running out — and for him, it was. Soldier, exile, and the most important Russian poet after Pushkin, he packed a lifetime of intensity into a handful of years. A Hero of Our Time remains startlingly contemporary: its hero Pechorin is charming, cruel, and self-aware, a man who understands his own emptiness and cannot stop performing it. The Caucasus — its cliffs, its wars, its wild beauty — gave Lermontov both landscape and metaphor. His verse is passionate; his prose is surgical. Together they make a voice that still feels like someone you might meet, and regret meeting, today.

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