A Hero of our Time, by Michail Lermontov

(Ein Held unserer Zeit)

Production: HR/SWR/DLR 2008
Adaptation for radio: Elisabeth Panknin
Speakers: Martin Engler, Gunter Schoß, Michael Rotschopf, Jeanette Spassova, et al.
Directed by: Oliver Sturm
Music: Andreas Bick
First broadcast: 30 March 2008

“The Hero of Our Time is, my good sirs, indeed a portrait, but not of a single person. It is a portrait of the vices of our whole generation in their ultimate development.” When Mikhail Lermontov wrote A Hero of Our Time, he was in his early twenties, a stranded soldier, banished to the Caucasus where most of the regiments were killed by disease and skirmishes with rebel mountain peoples. The five novellas that make up the book, told from three different points of view, revolve around the figure of a young officer, Grigoriy Aleksandrovich Pechorin, who embodies many characteristics of Lermontov himself. For the next generation of Russian writers, he became the model for the type of a “superfluous man”: “Nothing counts for me. I grow used to sorrow as easily as I do to pleasure, and my life gets emptier each day.”