SOURCE: "Lermontov: A Hero of Our Time," in The Voice of a Giant: Essays on Seven Russian Prose Classics, edited by Roger Cockrell and David Richards, University of Exeter, 1985, pp. 15-25.

Richards is an English educator and critic specializing in Russian literature. In the following essay, Richards examines the episodic structure of Lermontov's novel, comparing and contrasting it with other nineteenth-century Russian novels and with the more familiar pattern of traditional English and French novels of the same period.

Critics nearly always call Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time a novel, but in its general shape the work does not conform with the familiar pattern which we see in the traditional English or French nineteenth-century novel from writers such as Stendhal and Balzac, George Eliot and Hardy, or in a Russian work like, say, Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. Consider the shape of Fathers and Sons. First of all...