SOURCE: "A Hero of Our Time," in The Russian Novel, Frederick Muller, 1967, pp. 45-63.

In the following essay, Reeve discusses Lermontov's novel in the context of Russian literary developments of the period.

In Pushkin's poem "The Prophet," the I is the mediator and advocate to complete certain acts on our imagination's stage, as God is the agent who creates conditions favorable to the prophet's act of consummation of desire. By imitation the prophet re-creates the act of God. In the poem, Pushkin emphasizes not the agent (which the usual romantics did) but the act itself. His attitude toward the poem leads necessarily to the theater and to dramatic poetry. It leads to dramatic conceptualization of the world around oneself. Particulars of experience are not consciously sublimated, as Goethe has Faust get rid of them, or postponed, as Shelley often wanted to postpone them. They are understood to occur...