Why do I show Pechorin through the eyes of different people. The character of Grigory Pechorin in the novel “Hero of Our Time”: positive and negative traits, pros and cons

Grigory Pechorin is the main character of the novel. A unique personality that no one has been able to fully understand. Such heroes are found in every time. Any reader will be able to recognize himself in him with all the vices characteristic of people and the desire to change the world.

The image and characterization of Pechorin in the novel “A Hero of Our Time” will help you understand what kind of person he really is. How the long-term influence of the surrounding world was able to leave its mark on the depth of character, turning the complex inner world of the main character upside down.

Pechorin's appearance

Looking at a young, handsome man, it is difficult to determine how old he really is. According to the author, no more than 25, but sometimes it seemed that Gregory was already over 30. Women liked him.

“...he was generally very handsome and had one of those original physiognomies that are especially popular with secular women...”

Slim. Superbly built. Athletic build.

“...of medium height, his slender, thin figure and broad shoulders proved his strong build...”

Blond. The hair was slightly curled. Dark mustache and eyebrows. When meeting him, everyone paid attention to his eyes. When Pechorin smiled, his gaze brown eyes remained cold.

"...they didn't laugh when he laughed..."

It was rare that anyone could bear his gaze; he was too heavy and unpleasant for his interlocutor.

The nose is slightly turned up. Snow-white teeth.

“...a slightly upturned nose, dazzling white teeth...”

The first wrinkles have already appeared on the forehead. Pechorin's gait is imposing, slightly lazy, careless. The hands, despite the strong figure, seemed small. The fingers are long, thin, characteristic of aristocrats.

Gregory dressed immaculately. The clothes are expensive, clean, well ironed. Pleasant aroma of perfume. The boots are cleaned to a shine.

Gregory's character

Gregory's appearance fully reflects internal state souls. Everything he does is imbued with a precise sequence of steps, cold prudence, through which emotions and feelings sometimes try to break through. Fearless and reckless, somewhere weak and defenseless, like a child. It is entirely created from continuous contradictions.

Grigory promised himself that he would never show his real face, forbidding him to show any feelings for anyone. He was disappointed in people. When he was real, without guile and pretense, they could not understand the depth of his soul, accusing him of non-existent vices and making claims.

“...everyone read on my face signs of bad feelings that were not there; but they were anticipated - and they were born. I was modest - I was accused of guile: I became secretive. I felt good and evil deeply; no one caressed me, everyone insulted me: I became vindictive; I was gloomy, - other children were cheerful and talkative; I felt superior to them - they put me lower. I became envious. I was ready to love the whole world, but no one understood me: and I learned to hate...”

Pechorin is constantly searching for himself. He rushes about, looking for the meaning of life, and does not find it. Rich and educated. A nobleman by birth, he is used to hanging out in high society, but he doesn’t like that kind of life. Gregory considered her empty and worthless. Good connoisseur female psychology. I could figure out each one and understand from the first minutes of the conversation what it was. Exhausted and devastated by social life, he tried to delve into science, but soon realized that power does not lie in knowledge, but in dexterity and luck.

Boredom was eating away at the man. Pechorin hoped that the melancholy would go away during the war, but he was wrong. Caucasian War brought another disappointment. Lack of demand in life led Pechorin to actions that defied explanation and logic.

Pechorin and love

The only woman he loved was Vera. He was ready for anything for her, but they were not destined to be together. Vera is a married woman.

Those rare meetings that they could afford compromised them too much in the eyes of others. The woman was forced to leave the city. It was not possible to catch up with my beloved. He only drove the horse to death in an attempt to stop and bring her back.

Pechorin did not take other women seriously. They are a cure for boredom, nothing more. Pawns in a game where he set the rules. Boring and uninteresting creatures made him even more despondent.

Attitude towards death

Pechorin is firmly convinced that everything in life is predetermined. But this does not mean that you need to sit and wait for death. We must move forward, and she herself will find the one she needs.

dream of becoming a corrector of human vices...

He just had fun drawing modern

a person as he understands him and, to his and yours

unfortunately, I met it too often.

M. Yu. Lermontov "Hero of Our Time"

Grigory Pechorin is a young man belonging to the generation of the 30s of the 19th century, a representative of the highest secular society. His “best” young years were spent, in his own words, in “a struggle with himself and the light.”

Pechorin - representative thinking people of his time, he has an undoubted mind and is critical of himself and the world. Pechorin's deep mind allows him to correctly judge people, and at the same time he is self-critical. He is cold, arrogant, but one cannot say that feelings are alien to him, and one cannot call him an infantile, weak-willed person. We learn that in his youth Pechorin “furiously enjoyed all the pleasures that can be obtained for money,” and... they “revolted” him. Then he went into big light, and soon he was also tired of society, and the love of secular beauties only irritated his imagination and pride, but his heart remained empty. Out of boredom, Pechorin began to read and study, but “he was also tired of science”; he realized that neither fame nor happiness depended on them at all, because “the most happy people- ignoramuses, and fame is luck, and to achieve it, you just need to be clever." He became bored again, and he went to the Caucasus. This was the best happy time his life. Pechorin sincerely hoped that “boredom does not live under Chechen bullets,” but again in vain - after a month he got used to their buzzing. Finally, having seen and fallen in love with Bela, he thought that this was an angel sent to him by “compassionate fate,” but he was mistaken again - “the savage’s love turned out to be in no way better than love noble lady,” and he soon grew tired of the mountain woman’s ignorance and simple-heartedness.

Pechorin's character is very contradictory. As the hero himself says: “My whole life has been nothing but a chain of sad and unsuccessful contradictions to my heart or mind.” Inconsistency manifests itself not only in the thoughts and actions of the hero. Lermontov, drawing a portrait of Pechorin, persistently emphasized the oddities in his appearance: he was already about thirty years old, and “there was something childish in his smile,” his eyes “didn’t laugh when he laughed... This is a sign or evil temper, or deep, constant sadness...", and "his gaze - short, but penetrating and heavy, left such an indifferently calm impression of an immodest question and could have seemed impudent if it had not been so indifferently calm." Gait Pechorina “was careless and lazy, but... he did not wave his arms - a sure sign of some secrecy of character.” On the one hand, Pechorin has a “strong build,” and on the other, “nervous weakness.”

Pechorin is a disappointed man who lives out of curiosity, skeptical about life and people, but at the same time his soul is in constant search. “I have an unhappy character,” he says, “whether my upbringing made me this way, whether God created me this way, I don’t know; I only know that if I am the cause of the misfortune of others, then I myself am no less unhappy.” This is a young man of the 30s, a time of rampant reaction, when Decembrist uprising was already suppressed. If Onegin could go to the Decembrists (as Pushkin thought to show in the tenth chapter of his novel), Pechorin was deprived of such an opportunity, and the revolutionary democrats as social force have not yet announced themselves. That’s why Belinsky emphasized that “Onegin is bored, and Pechorin suffers deeply... he fights to the death with life and forcibly wants to snatch his share from it...”

Pechorin denies love and happiness in family life, and in his relationships with women he is driven by vanity and ambition. “To arouse feelings of love, devotion and fear—isn’t this the first sign and the greatest triumph of power?” - says the hero. However, his attitude towards Vera indicates a capacity for deep feeling. Pechorin admits: “With the possibility of losing her forever, Vera became dearer to me than anything in the world - more valuable than life, honor, happiness!"

With a bitter feeling, Pechorin regards himself as " moral cripple", whose better half of his soul has "dried up, evaporated, died. He understands that he "had a high purpose", feels "in his soul... immense forces", but wastes his life on petty actions unworthy of him. The reason for his Pechorin sees tragedy in the fact that his “soul is spoiled by light.” “I am worthy of pity... my soul is spoiled by light, my imagination is restless, my heart is insatiable; “Everything is not enough for me: I get used to sadness just as easily as to pleasure, and my life becomes emptier day by day...”, says Pechorin to Maxim Maksimych. This means that he was never able to escape from the society surrounding his.

All these inconsistencies and contradictions in appearance and behavior reflect the personal tragedy of the hero and do not allow him to live life to the fullest, but they also reflect the tragedy of an entire generation of that time. Lermontov, in the preface to his novel, wrote that Pechorin is “a portrait made up of the vices of our entire generation, in their full development,” and his tragedy is that such people “are not capable of great sacrifices either for the good of humanity, or even for my own... happiness." Pechorin's diary, which presents a whole gallery of images of young people of the 30s of the 19th century, more than once confirms Lermontov's thoughts reflected in the Duma. This generation is “shamefully towards good and evil”, indifferent, languishing under the burden of “knowledge and doubt”, loving and hating by chance, as if doomed “to grow old in inaction”, “without sacrificing anything, neither malice nor love...” But in the person of Pechorin not only appears before us peculiar person, typical for its era. This is a personality formed by this century, and in no other era could such a person appear. All the features, all the advantages and disadvantages of his time are concentrated in him.

So who is he – the main character of Lermontov’s novel “A Hero of Our Time”? This is an extraordinary and at the same time ambiguous personality, and what immediately catches your eye are the traits inherent in Byronic hero: loneliness, pride, disappointment with life, indifference or contempt of society. When remembering Pechorin, the character in the novel is often used with the epithet strange.
He best characterizes himself: “I have an unhappy character: it was my upbringing that made me this way, or God created me this way, I don’t know, I only know that when I cause misfortune to other people, then I myself am no less unhappy. Of course, this is a bad consolation for them - but the point is that this is how it is. First in my youth, from the moment I renounced the guardianship of my relatives, I began to madly enjoy all the pleasures independent life, which could be obtained for money, and, of course, I was tired of it all. Then I went into Big world, and soon I was tired of high society too; I fell in love with various secular beauties, and they loved me - but their love only teased my pride and imagination, and my heart remained empty... I began to read a lot, study - but I was also tired of science; I saw that neither happiness nor fame depended on them... Soon I was transferred to the Caucasus: it was the happiest time in my life... I harbored the hope that boredom cannot live under Chechen bullets - in vain: after a month I I’m already used to their ringing...”
How much disappointment there is in this monologue, how much cold skepticism about oneself! No wonder their king felt that Lermontov had diagnosed everything Russian society, called the novel a bad work by a bad author. However, many contemporaries heard the word of truth and felt in the image of Pechorin those feelings that were closely or otherwise inherent in themselves.
Pechorin seems to be haunted by an evil fate: his relationships with people only make them unhappy. For everyone with whom he communicates, this ends badly: for the smugglers, Vera, Grushnitsky, Mary, Maxim Maksimych, Bela. And he sincerely wonders why this is so. Pechorin is not passive, by the end of the story he acts, but more and more of his reasoning appears in the novel in relation to this property. Such reflections even come to the fore in the stories “Princess Mary” and “Fatalist” (precisely in the second part of the novel). His dissatisfaction with himself is intensified by the fact that behind his essence he is not at all evil person. He has no bad intentions towards each of the characters (Mary, Maxim Maksimych, Bela, Grushnitsky). Moreover, he is often driven even by noble impulses (for example, he seeks to protect Mary from Grushnitsky’s gossip).
However, this relationship does not bring anything good to anyone. Grushnitsky, who first reached out to his experienced comrade, dies. Although Pechorin suspected that Grushnitsky did not like him, because he unraveled the secret of this mysterious person(...I understood him, and for this he disliked me, even outwardly, we are in good relations). Also destroyed family world Faith; death became salvation for Bella, and Mary’s sincere heart was broken by Pechorin’s cold indifference.
In his Novel, Lermontov refuses to judge the heroes and correct them: “Just don’t think that after this, the author of this novel had at least some proud dream of taking the post of corrector of human vices. He just had fun pretending modern man the way he sees it!” Most likely, this position is consonant with the position of the author himself, who only “voiced the defects,” so to speak, “made a diagnosis,” but does not take upon himself the responsibility to treat it.
However, Pechorin’s main personal tragedy is that, even knowing the causes of his “illness,” it does not save him from the hero himself, because, as he himself says: “Am I a fool or a villain, I don’t know; but the truth is that I also deserve regret... My soul has been spoiled by the world, my irrepressible imagination, my insatiable heart; There’s always not enough for me: I get used to sadness as quickly as I do to pleasure, and my life is becoming empty day after day; There is only one way left for me: to travel.” And not the most tragic question is that Pechorin poses to himself: “Why do they hate me?” Strange as it may sound, but when I analyze the image of Pechorin in the novel “A Hero of Our Time,” many see a part of themselves in him.

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Image of Pechorin

A short essay on literature on the topic “Hero of our time: the image of Grigory Pechorin in the composition of the novel” with quotes from the text for grade 9. Pechorin in the system of images: how does he relate to other characters?

"Hero of Our Time" - one of the first Russians psychological novels. Having appeared in print, it immediately caused a public outcry. the main task novel - revealing the soul of the main character, Grigory Pechorin, in relationships with various personalities, in acute conflict situations. This is the reason for the special composition of the novel: what is important here is not chronological accuracy, but the readers’ recognition of the character.

Grigory Pechorin is a Russian officer serving in the Caucasus. He represents the image of a “superfluous person”: lonely, misunderstood, who has not found his own path, and therefore unhappy.

The character is revealed gradually, its features are not on the surface. That is why at first we see the hero through “other people’s” eyes: his colleague Maxim Maksimych and the narrator-traveler, from external image Let's move on to the secrets of the soul. Pechorin is not deprived of appearance: he is not doll-like handsome, but interesting (“... he was generally very good-looking and had one of those original physiognomies that secular women especially like...”), his facial features are correct. Everything - from his hands to his hair color - expresses thoroughbred and aristocratic character in the hero (“Despite the light color of his hair, his mustache and eyebrows were black - a sign of breed in a person, just like the black mane and black tail of a white horse...” and “ ...his stained gloves seemed deliberately tailored to fit his small aristocratic hand, and when he took off one glove, I was surprised at the thinness of his pale fingers." The eyes immediately reflect Pechorin’s personality: they never laugh, they have a steely shine, an attentive, studying gaze.

As presented by Maxim Maksimych, the main character appears as a cold, calculating person who destroys other people’s lives at his own whim. So he stole the beautiful Bela from his native village, made her fall in love with him, then she got bored, he began to neglect the girl he previously loved. As a result, Bela died, and Pechorin did not shed a single tear. Of course, we understand that the difference in the characters of the simple-hearted Maxim Maksimych and the restrained Pechorin, who suffered silently and deeply, plays a role here. After all, as we learn later, Bela was the last thread connecting the hero with the world, his last hope.

In “Pechorin's Journal” we are transported into the thoughts of the hero, we see everything through the prism of his perception. In “Taman” we see the adventurous beginning of Pechorin’s character. His thirst for adventure and desire to overcome boredom overshadow even his keen mind and observation, which is why he goes with a mysterious girl, wittily named by him Ondine, to night walk. Pechorin almost dies, because he finds out that he ended up with smugglers. The hero stirred up a nest of criminals and destroyed a long-term way of life. For the first time the motif of fatality is heard.

“Princess Mary” is the largest part of the novel. Several aspects of the hero are shown here. Pechorin is a friend in his relationship with Doctor Werner (the main character does not believe in friendship, therefore he distances himself from Werner, despite his internal friendly attitude). Pechorin is a rival in a conflict with Grushnitsky (the main character places honor highly, does not allow himself to be laughed at, he is immeasurably stronger and higher than the enemy, but also more ruthless). Pechorin is the conqueror of hearts in his relationship with Princess Mary (he decided to seduce the girl in order to annoy Grushnitsky, amuses himself and laughs at her, soon develops sympathy for the heroine, but cannot lose his freedom and ruin Mary’s life with his presence). Pechorin is a passionate lover in his relationship with Vera (it is in front of her that he does not play a role, she has known and understood him for a long time, the loss of Vera is the main and most serious shock in the hero’s life). In all guises, Pechorin is the “axe of fate”; he left a tragic mark on the life of every hero (and even ended Grushnitsky’s life completely).

“Fatalist” is the most philosophical chapter of the novel, in which the hero is asked eternal questions fate, predestination, one’s place in the world. It is the latter that he does not find. His large-scale personality does not find real meaning in all of life; he needs great achievements, but everyday life is all around him. Awareness of his own uselessness leads Pechorin to own death in the future, he has nothing to live for.

The main character of the novel “A Hero of Our Time” truly reflected the era: this generation is lost, disappointed, its best representatives have faded away without finding their way. A personality like Pechorin is rare. He really charms and can lead, his nobility, subtle mind, observation - these are the qualities that readers should learn from.

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The image of Pechorin in the novel by M. Yu. Lermontov “Hero of Our Time”

The novel “A Hero of Our Time” was written in 1838-1840 of the 19th century. This was the era of the most severe political reaction that began in the country after the defeat of the Decembrists. In his work, the author recreated in the image of Pechorin, the main character of the novel, a typical character of the 30s of the 19th century.

Pechorin - educated socialite with a critical mind, dissatisfied with life and not seeing any possibility for himself to be happy. It continues the gallery of “extra people” opened by Evgeny Onegin of Pushkin. Belinsky noted that the idea of ​​​​portraying a hero of his time in a novel did not belong exclusively to Lermontov, since at that moment Karamzin’s “Knight of Our Time” already existed. Belinsky also pointed out that many writers of the early 19th century came up with such an idea.

Pechorin is called a “strange man” in the novel, which is what almost all the other characters talk about him. The definition of “strange” takes on the connotation of a term behind which stands a certain type of character and personality type, and is broader and more capacious than the definition of “an extra person.” There were “strange people” of this kind before Pechorin, for example in the story “A Walk Around Moscow” and in “Essay on an Eccentric” by Ryleev.

Lermontov, creating “A Hero of Our Time,” said that he “had fun drawing a portrait of a modern person the way he understands him and has actually met him.” Unlike Pushkin, he focuses on inner world of his heroes and states in the “Preface to Pechorin’s Journal” that “the history of the human soul, even the smallest soul, is almost more interesting and useful than the history of an entire people.” The desire to reveal the hero’s inner world was also reflected in the composition: the novel begins, as it were, from the middle of the story and is consistently brought to the end of Pechorin’s life. Thus, the reader knows in advance that Pechorin’s “mad race” for life is doomed to failure. Pechorin follows the path that his romantic predecessors took, thereby showing the failure of their romantic ideals. Pechorin ends up from the “civilized” world into the world of “children of nature”, to the Caucasus, but even there he turns out to be a stranger, “ extra person”, and, apart from suffering and confusion, brings nothing: he becomes an indirect culprit in the death of Bela, upsets the lives of “honest smugglers”, because of him the fate of Princess Mary collapses.

The structure of “A Hero of Our Time” is fragmentary, so the novel is a system of disparate episodes-narratives, united common hero- Pechorin. Such a composition is deeply meaningful: it reflects the fragmentation of the protagonist’s life, his lack of any goal, any unifying principle. The hero's life passes at crossroads in an eternal search for the meaning of human existence and happiness. Pechorin is on the road almost all the time. “This is a world on the road,” Gogol said about “A Hero of Our Time.”

In the way Lermontov portrays the main character, one can feel the desire to give him a social characterization. Pechorin is a product and victim of the Nicholas era in one person, “whose soul is corrupted by the light and torn into two halves, the better of which dried up and died,” while the other “lived at the service of everyone.” There is also something in this character that takes him beyond the boundaries of sociality, that is, Lermontov reveals in his hero also universal principles that do not depend on the era and time. In this sense, the task that Lermontov sets for himself is comparable to the task of Dostoevsky: “With all realism, find a person in a person.” Lermontov in the novel pays a lot of attention to depicting not only the consciousness, but also the self-awareness of the hero. Intense psychological analysis is the “disease of the century,” but also a necessary form of self-knowledge for a developed personality. The fact that Pechorin constantly reflects on his actions, analyzes his feelings, is evidence that we are dealing with an extraordinary personality; The hero of Lermontov's novel is a personality in the highest sense of the word. We can make a comparison with Pushkin’s novel “Eugene Onegin”. Pechorin, also being a “superfluous man,” differs from Onegin not only in his temperament, not only in his depth of thought, but also in the degree of self-awareness, his attitude to the world. Pechorin is more of a thinker and ideologist than Onegin. In this sense, he is a hero of his time. The effectiveness of Pechorin, which Lermontov emphasizes, is explained, first of all, by the degree of development of this hero: he is well educated, has a good understanding of people, knows their weaknesses, but uses this knowledge for his own purposes. Pechorin's trouble is that his independent self-awareness and will turn into individualism. In his opposition to reality, he proceeds only from his “I”. He is not just an egoist, he is an egocentric. Pechorin is an activist not only by nature, but also by conviction. He himself points out that “in whose head more ideas are born, he acts more than others.”

As a person, Pechorin is broader than the social roles offered to him, he rejects all the social frameworks prepared for him, tries to guess his high purpose, but at the same time he is very skeptical about his chances in the fight against the surrounding society. He reasons: “Many people, starting life, want to end it, like Byron or Alexander the Great, and yet remain titular advisers.”

The hero is not shown anywhere in the performance of his official duties, but, nevertheless, he is very active in life. Using the example of Pechorin, for the first time in Russian literature we meet a hero who directly poses the pressing questions of human existence. These are questions about the goal, about the meaning of a person’s life, about his purpose. This is confirmed by the hero’s reasoning before the duel with Grushnitsky and in the story “Fatalist”.

One of the goals that the hero undoubtedly realizes is understanding the nature and capabilities of man. This explains the chain of psychological and moral experiments of Pechorin on himself and on others: Princess Mary, Grushnitsky, Vulich. In achieving this goal, he acts persistently and persistently.

In revealing the image of his hero, Lermontov subordinates traditions. He experiences Pechorin with two feelings: friendship and love. The hero cannot stand either one or the other; Pechorin is disappointed in the love of the Circassian Bela, saying on this occasion that “the love of a savage is not much better than the love of a noble lady; the ignorance and simple-heartedness of one are just as annoying as the coquetry of the other.” Pechorin is also incapable of friendship, of deep sincere feeling, believing that of two friends, one is always the slave of the other. In his relationship with Werner, he is not satisfied with either the role of a master or the role of a slave.

The last story “Fatalist” takes on special significance in Pechorin’s perception of life. Throughout the entire narrative, the hero constantly tests his fate (under the bullets of Chechens, in a duel with Grushnitsky, in the story “Taman” with an undine), but this is most expressively shown in “Fatalist.” This is one of the most ideologically rich and intense stories in the novel. It consists of three episodes that either deny or confirm the existence of predestination in human life. If we talk about the hero’s fatalism, then he should be called an effective fatalist. Without denying the presence of forces that largely determine a person’s life and behavior, Pechorin is not inclined to deprive him of free will on this basis. This is confirmed by how he throws himself out the window towards the Cossack killer. At first glance, this is reckless, but Pechorin acts quite deliberately. This is not Vulich’s blind risk, but meaningful human courage.

The main content of the stories about Pechorin is the story of his resistance to circumstances and fate. Circumstances and fate ultimately turned out to be stronger than Pechorin. His energy is poured into empty action. The hero's actions are most often selfish and cruel. Pechorin appears in the novel as an established character with a tragic fate. The fact that Lermontov focuses on the psychological revelation of the image of his hero raises in a new way the question of a person’s moral responsibility for his choice life path and for your actions.

In the way Lermontov showed Pechorin, he marked new stage in the development of Russian society and Russian literature. If Onegin captures the process of transformation of an aristocrat into a personality, then “A Hero of Our Time” shows the tragedy of an already established personality, doomed to live under the conditions of the Nicholas reaction. Pechorin turns out to be broader than the content that is embedded in his image. In this sense, Lermontov anticipates Dostoevsky. Lermontov's innovation lies in the fact that before us is a strong, remarkable personality who cannot find a place or purpose in life, is alien to the surrounding society, and internally contradictory.

The fate of Pechorin as one of the characteristic types of his time, despite his potential heroism, was tragically hopeless. Lermontov, as a realist writer, showed this in his novel “A Hero of Our Time.”