Many Russians know by heart reams of Lermontov's lyric poetry, much of it expounding on ill-starred love or premonitory death amid awesome Caucasian scenery, while his mature Caucasian narrative poems, The Demon [Demon] and The Novice [Mtsyri], rank among the finest of their genre in the Russian language. However, it is Lermontov's prose which, perhaps inevitably, travels best in translation; and, moreover, his reputation in this field rests almost entirely on A Hero of Our Time [Geroi nashego vremeni], first published in 1840 (second edition 1841), his only completed novel.
Depicted in A Hero of Our Time as a man virtually of no biography, the protagonist Pechorin's “whole life” is said by the travelling narrator to exist in another “fat notebook” (Lermontov, p. 51). Perhaps not this exact “notebook”, since it had been written earlier...
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Citation: Cornwell, Neil. "Kniaginia Ligovskaia". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 23 June 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=26813, accessed 09 June 2026.]
