A Hero of Our Time

Author: Barnes, Julian

Classic fiction (pre c 1945)

Published on 24 October 2024 by Quercus Publishing (riverrun) in the United Kingdom as part of 'the riverrun editions' series.

Paperback | 208 pages
129 x 198 x 17 | 152g

'I remain in unchanged admiration for this bold, headstrong, carefree undertaking, a first novel published when the author was twenty-five, which proved to be the first prose masterpiece in Russian' Julian Barnes from his preface.

Published in Russian in April 1840, A Hero of Our Time reached English in 1853, under the title 'Sketches of Life in the Caucasus, by a Russe.' Full of towering landscapes and local colour, it can be read as the travelogue of a poet and serving officer, but also as a portrait of the romantic as self-destructive anti-hero.

Vladimir Nabokov's translation of A Hero of Our Time was published in the United States in 1958, the same year as Lolita: world fame was about to overtake this committed Russian living in America.