A Hero of Our Time

'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.

Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841) was a Russian Romantic writer, poet and painter. Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) was an expatriate Russian and Russian-American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Julian Barnes is the author of several books of stories, essays, a translation of Alphonse Daudet's In the Land of Pain, and numerous novels, including the 2011 Man Booker Prize winning novel The Sense of an Ending.