A Hero of Our Time

The main character steals and seduces girls, gets involved with smugglers, kills a rival, travels to a distant and exotic country, Persia, and dies there. Can this brief summary of an adventure novel relate to the work of M.Yu. Lermontov, «A Hero of Our Time», which is familiar to everyone from school and caused yawns in literature classes? Yet some chapters of this classic novel remind us of «The Three Musketeers»! It is no wonder that Alexandre Dumas admired this novel and even published its French translation in his magazine «Musketeer». If today we look at the prose written by Lermontov, which has long been part of the school curriculum, through the eyes of Alexandre Dumas - we will find in this work all the components of captivating reading: highlanders, exoticism, beauties, and a charismatic hero inclined to self-analysis. Dear adults! Forget, like a bad dream, the dull school analysis of Pechorin's character and read this novel together with your children about a young man who has just crossed the twenty-year mark, like the author himself, a free, sometimes reckless idealist. This book is worth it.