Ebook: The Fall

Some were dreadfully insulted, and quite seriously,
to have held up as a model such an immoral
character as A Hero of Our Time; others shrewdly
noticed that the author bad portrayed himself and
his acquaintances. • • • A Hero of Our Time, gentlemen,
is in fact a portrait, but not of an individual;
it is the aggregate of the vices of our whole generation
in their fullest expression.
—LERMONTOV