Hero of Our Time

Mikhail Lermontov was born in 1814 and made several journies to the Caucasus before entering St Petersburg Guards' school where he began writing poetry and autobiographical dramas in prose. He died in a duel in 1841. Influenced by Byron, he is renowned as Russia's one true Romantic poet. Paul Foote was, until his retirement, a University Lecturer in Russian and Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford. He has translated works by Tolstoy and Saltykov-Shchedrin.

"Natasha Randall's English, in her new translation, has exactly the right degree of loose velocity. . . . (Nabokov's version, the best-known older translation, is a bit more demure than Randall's, less savage.)" -James Wood, London Review of Books "[A] smart, spirited new translation." -The Boston Globe "One of the most vivid and persuasive portraits of the male ego ever put down on paper." -Neil LaBute, from the Foreword