SOURCE: "Fatalism in A Hero of Our Time: Cause or Commonplace?" in The Supernatural in Slavic and Baltic Literature: Essays in Honor of Victor Terras, edited by Amy Mandelker and Roberta Reeder, Slavica Publishers Inc., 1988, pp. 83-101.

In the following essay, Rosenshield examines the theme of fate as a supernatural power determining the course of human life in A Hero of Our Times.

With the possible exception of the works of Dostoevskij the supernatural plays almost no role in the nineteenth-century Russian "realistic" novel. Having their roots in social reality and common, everyday experience, the novel as a genre and realism as a literary movement usually treat areas of life which do not provide fertile ground for the exploration of the supernatural. One has to go back to the first great prose Russian novel, Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (1837-1840), perhaps because it is still very much...