What a fantastic find!

Lermontov is a poet at heart and his prose shows it. The story was unputdownable, but at the same time, made me imagine, think, and even learn some real-world wisdom.

Though he claimed that he was not using himself in the protagonist, he was subtly using the protagonist to express his own opinions. I know this because some of the things his protagonist was saying or thinking were almost similar to some ideas I had been entertaining, ideas that you can’t have unless you think them over for a very long time, and in response to vagaries of the social environment.

For instance, he was against the concept of “friendship” and called a dyadic friend relation as one between a slave and a master: this is what I had thought also but wasn’t so clear on the terminology; however, he also shows a longing for true friendship in certain places, such as when the older officer is looking for the protagonist after they meet again, and is heartbroken when the protagonist brushes him off. From this, it is easy to extrapolate that unless the friendship is really true, he won’t value it, and considers it a burden. Exactly what I had been thinking.

After I learning this novel was the only one he had written before his demise in a duel, I truly felt sorry the world lost such an excellent writer.