ABSTRACT
Alexander sergeyevitch pushkin is the central figure of the entire Russian literature since Peter the Great. Pushkin's first attempt in prose, The Negro of Peter the Great, was inspired by the Waverley Novels. It was the beginning of a fine historical narrative with the author's Abyssinian great-grandfather as the central figure. Pushkin never went beyond the first seven chapters, but they are enough to show his essentially realistic and visual gift. This comes out in his naturalness, in his disciplined lucidity, as well as in his portraiture. Yet however great the influence of Pushkin's prose may have been, his famous novel in verse, Evgeny Onegin, proved even more important. A Hero of Our Time is an analytical novel, written by Pushkin's successor, the poet Mikhail Y. Lermontov. This work is Lermontov's chief contribution to fiction. Lermontov's prose is more temperamental, more spontaneous, than the overdisciplined prose of Pushkin.
