A Hero of Our Time. Collected Works

Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov is a younger contemporary of Pushkin and the second greatest figure in Russian poetry of the 19th century after him. In 2024, we will celebrate the 210th anniversary of the poet's birth. Fate allowed him to live only 26 years and just 13 years to enter the history of world literature. Lermontov's creative evolution was rapid. The romantic hero of his youthful lyrics challenges the entire world: "I was born so that the whole world would be a spectator of my triumph or my ruin..." In his later poems, the poet speaks on behalf of a generation. Having overcome romantic rhetoric and summarizing the most important artistic discoveries of his time, Lermontov essentially summarized the golden age of Russian poetry and opened new horizons for it. This edition includes poems from 1828 to 1841, the poems "Mtsyri," "Demon," "The Song of Tsar Kalashnikov," and others, the play "Masquerade," as well as the novel "A Hero of Our Time," which marked the beginning of the era of Russian psychological prose. The book includes illustrations by artists from the 19th to the early 20th century, masters of book graphics — M. A. Zichy, V. A. Polyakov, K. A. Trutovsky, and others.