In 'A Hero of Our Time', what is the name of the protagonist?

The protagonist of Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time is Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin. He is a brilliant, restless, and deeply contradictory officer whose actions drive the novel’s linked stories.

Pechorin is a classic Byronic hero and an example of the Russian “superfluous man,” a gifted individual unable to find meaningful purpose in his society. He pursues adventure, romance, and emotional control, but his boredom and cynicism repeatedly harm the people around him. The stories involving Bela, Princess Mary, Vera, and Grushnitsky reveal both his intelligence and his destructive self-awareness.

The novel was written in 1839, published in 1840, and revised in 1841. Its unusual chronology is part of its design: readers encounter some consequences before learning the events that caused them. The distractors are protagonists from other major Russian works: Oblomov from Goncharov, Bazarov from Turgenev, and Onegin from Pushkin.