Grigory Pechorin is a bored, self-centered, and cynical young army officer who believes in nothing.
He is brave, determined, and willful, but his energies and potential are wasted. This psychologically
probing portrait of a disillusioned 19th-century aristocrat and its use of a nonchronological
and multifaceted narrative structure, influenced such later Russian authors as Fyodor
Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy and presaged the antiheroes and antinovels of 20th-century fiction.