SOURCE: "The Hero and the Age," in Lermontov, Bowes & Bowes, 1959, pp. 76-91.

Lavrin is an Austrian-born British critic, essayist, and biographer. He is best known for his studies of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Russian literature. In such works as An Introduction to the Russian Novel (1942), he combines literary criticism with an exploration into the psychological and philosophical background of an author. In the following excerpt from his book-length study of Lermontov, Lavrin analyzes A Hero of Our Time and places Lermontov's novel within the Russian literary tradition.

If the 1820's were the 'Golden Age' of Russian poetry, the following decade marked the gradual rise of Russian prose. The late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century prose of Karamzin and his contemporaries sounded archaic at a time when France could boast of Balzac, England of Dickens and Thackeray, and Germany of the young Heine. So it was in the 1830's that Russian prose...