SOURCE: Gilroy, Marie. “Understanding Irony.” In The Ironic Vision in Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, pp. 1-12. Birmingham Slavonic Monographs, no. 19. Birmingham: University of Birmingham, 1989.

In the following essay, Gilroy explains specific features of Romantic irony and discusses its use in A Hero of Our Time.

A word has the meaning someone has given to it. 

—Ludwig Wittgenstein

In A Hero of Our Time, hints that the novel should be read ironically are given both in the narrator's ‘Foreword to Pechorin's Journal’ and in Lermontov's own provocative ‘Preface’ to the second edition.¹ Yet generations of readers have been reluctant to accept such insinuations, either dismissing them altogether or simply ignoring them. Even among those who accept the implication of irony it seems ‘there is no great consensus about precisely in what way it is ironical’, according to C. J. G. Turner, an observation which then permits him...