Mikhail Lermontov - A Hero of Our Time

"the last cloud...": from Pushkin's The Storm Cloud, 1835.

swelling of the glands.

we couldn't bear to use the term "lorgnette," a sort of magnifying spectacle often with a little handle, used to see at a distance, as at the opera or to make an impression on someone.

Nabokov notes the tendency as here to veer into the past tense as if someone – maybe Pechorin? – is trying out this character for a role in a play or a book.

French for love-letters.

cut very short.

"My friend, I hate men in order not to despise them – otherwise life would be too disgusting a farce."

"My friend, I despise women in order not to love them – otherwise life would be too ridiculous a melodrama."

handsome young man loved by Aphrodite in Greek legend.

a stock allusion to an old report that the Roman fortune-tellers who worked by examining animals' guts used to laugh in secret reference to their play-acting of predictions whenever two of them met.

this whole speech is one of the most revealing of Pechorin's character, according to psychoanalytic critics, who point out the obvious determination by Pechorin to hide as much of his true character as possible at the same time he claims that all is known.

the word is missing in Parker's text but we agree with Nabokov in replacing it here.

cherkeska , i.e., from the Cherkes.

balki , Turkic, like the Spanish barranco .

another reference to Chatsky, see below.

"My God, a Circassian (bandit)." "Fear not, ma'am, I am no more dangerous than your companion" (cavalier, gallant knight, meaning Grushnitsky). More polite French phrases follow in this story, such as "That's impossible," "Permit me," and so forth. Upper class Russians spoke French in formal society.

another spa to the west some ten miles.

since the Jews were not accepted in Russian society they had to work in such jobs as tailors.

a magazine meant to be taken seriously, edited by Osip Senkovsky, who, by the way, first reviewed this book rather favorably, but, after Lermontov's death, retracted his judgment and called it infantile.

economically too small a feudal estate with that many serfs or as they were called "souls".

famous Caucasian mineral water. In the Kabardian language, nart-sane means drink of the Narts, mythical giants or heroes.

actually, the imported American black locust tree, which has beautiful white flowers this time of year.

loosely from Chatsky , or Woe from Wit (1824, 1833), a comedy by Griboyedov that was banned by the censors for political reasons. This work seems to have begun the theme of the Russian "superfluous man" that is continued here and later by many others, including Turgenev and Dostoeyevsky.

from Eugene Onegin, appeared in 1828.

1581 Italian poem read in French versions in Russia. See online version.

the Russians had read a French version of The Vampire: A Tale, by John Polidori (1819).

read in French translation (though Lermontov knew some English).

whose fate the Roman augurs, or fortune-tellers, had fully predicted, as in "the ides of March".

the comedy (play) is over.

card game like bridge.

gambling card games.

chirir' , Caucasian new wine.

we've added "big book" here – it's our predestined fate, the mythical story that the author God has already assigned every detail to our mortal lives, and supposedly written it in a book available for consultation in heaven. Note the parallel to a similar expression at the start of this novel.

Another online edition of this work can be found at the University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center. That English translation, entitled "The Heart of a Russian," by J. H. Wisdom Marr Murray, N.Y.: Knopf, 1916, has a different order to the chapters and has heavy Victorian prose and sketchy footnotes. However, the edition, by Judy Boss, Carolyn Fay, and David Seaman, does have page numbers and a few color illustrations. We did not refer to it when doing this edition. A text-only versionof that translation was released in Project Gutenberg in May, 1997.

For further references, please see the books by Cornwell and Nabokov previously cited, as they contain notes, a map, chronologies, excerpts from critical material, and everything you need.