A Hero of Our Time cover art

A Hero of Our Time

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A Hero of Our Time

By: Mikhail Lermontov
Narrated by: Clive Chafer
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About this listen

First published in Russia as Geroy Nashego Vremeni, A Hero of Our Time is set in the Russian Caucasus in the 1830s.

In A Hero of Our Time, Grigory Pechorin is a bored, self-centered, and cynical young army officer who believes in nothing. With impunity he toys with the love of women and the goodwill of men. He is brave, determined, and willful, but his wasted energy and potential ultimately result in tragedy.

This psychologically probing portrait of a disillusioned 19th-century aristocrat and its use of a nonchronological and multifaceted narrative structure influenced such later Russian authors as Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy and presaged the antiheroes and antinovels of 20th-century fiction.

Public Domain (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc. Classics Linguistics Social Sciences Russia
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It is easy to think that classic Russian literature starts and ends with the greats such as Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Bulgakov and Turgenev, Before all these there was Mikhail Lemontov (1814 - 1841) and A Hero of Our Time is his best known work and tells the swashbuckling story of army officer Grigory Pechorin and his challenges and conquests. This is all Boys Own stuff and Pechorin comes over as a proto-Flashman type character. The strength of this book is the beautiful descriptions of the Caucuses rather than the simplistic plot line and this certainly must have been an inspiration for the great Russian writers of the later part of the nineteenth century.

Swashbuckling in the Caucuses

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Template for Brett Ellis’s American Psycho? Interesting parallels, a character mocking of the world’s conventions and self-delusions, handsome and charming but with a viciously cruel streak, and lastly here in AHOOT the characters soul and sensitivity are shown through their appreciation of the landscape, in AP it’s through his understanding of the depths of pop music. Both books suggest a talented intelligent human thwarted by societies limitations.

Template for Brett Ellis’s American Psycho?

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Terrible narration, it sounds like an American teenager who adds a questioning inflection to every sentence. Once noticed it becomes unlistenable.

Terrible narration

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The narrator has that irritating modern way of making every sentence seem pregnant with meaning, with a sort of rise and fall on its final syllable. Plus in the first three minutes he pronounced "moustache" and "lieutenant" the American way, which for an English narrator is unacceptable. I stopped there and won't be continuing.

Narration poor

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