A hero of our time
A hero of our time ( Russian Герой нашего времени ) is a literary work by Mikhail Lermontow that was created from 1837 to 1840 .
action
While climbing a mountain in the Caucasus , the first-person narrator meets the officer Maxim Maxymitsch, who reports on shared adventures with the protagonist Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin .
This young soldier made a strong impression on the officer . At the beginning he already seemed to him to be an eccentric. After a Muslim wedding, Pechorin kidnaps a horse to get to beautiful Bela. She is later murdered out of lust for revenge . After the initial enthusiasm, however, Pechorin's interest in the young girl quickly waned. Her death prevents a stronger manifestation of his weariness. His heart remains cold, his behavior indifferent and lethargic. He feels bored , ennui .
The narrator later meets Maxim Maxymitsch again. Pechorin also happens to arrive and behaves cool and bored. The narrator comes across Pechorin's diaries. These describe Pechorin's thoughts and experiences, for example as an officer in the small town of Tamanj, in which his belongings are stolen from him under mysterious and strange circumstances and he is almost drowned. The episode is clearly romantic. Darkness, fog and moonlight create the gruesome and fantastic scenery, the characters act unconsciously and sleepwalking .
In the story of Princess Mary, his character becomes more apparent and takes shape. He brings the simple-minded Gruschnitzkij out of the daughter of Princess Ligovskaya, Mary, who has completely fallen for Gruschnitzkij and who confesses her love to the cool, calculating Pechorin. A duel ensues in which Pechorin kills Gruschnitzkij. Pechorin confesses to the princess that he only played with her and that she is completely unable to marry. In the last entry in the diary, The Fatalist , a bet is described in which there is a negotiation between belief in fate ( predestination ) and human free will. This is decided in favor of fatalism , but not without an activist tendency: "It is my way of doubting everything: but this quality does not prevent me, where it is necessary to show decisiveness of character".
The protagonist
Pechorin is a pessimistic fatalist in the outward guise of a dandy . He is endowed with great consciousness and a high level of intelligence and hopes to be able to stifle the cyclical and mercilessly overwhelming boredom from the outside world.
Pechorin is deeply amoral and aware of his ominous and charismatic aura on other people. He uses these experiences to experience pleasure. However, these are only short-term hedonistic motives: “I have an unfortunate character [...]. If I am the cause of the unhappiness of others, I do not feel less unhappy myself ”. His will to power is self-referential, experienced as habit and exhausted in sadism . But the principle of amoral evil and causing suffering has an attractive effect on his fellow men, whom he constantly leads into ruin.
He calculates the effect of his existence precisely and systematically. His desire for freedom and the greatest possible contingency, resisting the eternal return, makes any relationship with people impossible. He is a deeply melancholy , hazy person. He struggles with fate, which determines him and does not allow him to act otherwise, and he is undecided about the meaning of his existence, which only appears to him in the form of habit and repetition. He is largely selfish and self-centered : "I can only look at the sufferings and joys of others in relation to myself, as a food that maintains my mental powers".
There is a split between his automated way of acting and his mind, which accepts nothing about a diffuse belief in fate and cannot adequately answer the question of meaning. The hero cannot be a hero in the conventional sense, he is a skeptical person who can only observe himself: “For a long time now I have no longer lived with my heart, but only with my head. I observe my own passions and actions and weigh them with the strictest curiosity, but without compassion ”. He despairs because of the eternal same and the dull, instinctual senselessness of his existence. In his inconstancy he longs for openness and freedom and cannot commit himself or recognize any principles.
The figure is to be understood as a type and combines time-specific characteristics from mentality and intellectual history factors.
Adaptations
A hero of our time, radio play based on the translation by Peter Urban, arrangement: Elisabeth Panknin , participants: Gunther Schoß, Michael Rotschopf, Maxim Kowalewski, Jeanette Spassova, Ingo Hülsmann , Donata Höffer, Linda Olsansky, composition: Andreas Bick, direction: Oliver Sturm , HR / SWR / DLF 2008, duration: approx. 70 ', first broadcast: April 6, 2008
In 2014, German director Kateryna Sokolova adapted Lermontov's novel for the stage. The play, which focuses on the plot of the longest novel, Princess Mary , premiered on May 28th at the Schauspielhaus Zurich in a production by Kateryna Sokolova. The production received generally positive applause, with particular emphasis on the fact that “neither the linguistic finesse nor the social paralysis” of the literary original had been lost.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b A hero of our time | Schauspielhaus Zurich. Retrieved April 7, 2017 .
- ↑ A hero of our time . In: Kateryna Sokolova . ( katerynasokolova.com [accessed April 7, 2017]).
- ^ Claudio Steiger: Lermontow novel in the theater chamber: Nihilism and honor . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . May 30, 2014, ISSN 0376-6829 ( nzz.ch [accessed April 7, 2017]).
- ↑ Brief & critical in May . In: Tages-Anzeiger, Tages-Anzeiger . May 30, 2014, ISSN 1422-9994 ( tagesanzeiger.ch [accessed April 7, 2017]).
- ↑ a b Brief & Critical in May . In: Basler Zeitung, Basler Zeitung . May 30, 2014, ISSN 1420-3006 ( bazonline.ch [accessed April 7, 2017]).