SOURCE: "Fate and Narrative Structure in Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time," in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. XXXII, No. 4, Winter, 1990, pp. 485-505.

In the following essay, Kesler examines A Hero of Our Time as a "critique of both the romantic hero and those circumstances of literary production that produced and destroyed the romantic movement" in Russian literature.

Budet i togo, chto bolezn ukazana. a kak ee izlechit—eto uzh bog znaetl (Let it suffice that the malady has been diagnosed—heaven alone knows how to cure it!)

The thematic importance of the concept of fate in the Russian novel is widely acknowledged, but what is the importance of fate when viewed within the context of literary history? To what extent was the novel itself fated, by its own particular structure and the conditions under which it emerges, to employ just such a concept? Lermontov's A...