1840A Hero of Our Time
Mikhail Lermontov
Lermontov's portrait of the bored, brilliant, destructive Pechorin plays out across the Russian Caucasus of the 1830s. Its heart is the spa society of Pyatigorsk and Kislovodsk, where Pechorin toys with Princess Mary and kills the vain Grushnitsky in a duel on Mount Mashuk, the very mountain where Lermontov himself would die in a duel a year after the book appeared. Two further tales range out to the smugglers' port of Taman on the Black Sea and to a frontier fort on the Georgian Military Road.
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