Underground or a Hero of our Time (Андеграунд или Герой нашего времени)
by Vladimir Makanin
Synopsis
Makanin’s Underground, or A Hero of Our Time, shortlisted for the 1999 Russian Booker prize, is one of the author’s most lauded works. It is typical of Makanin’s oeuvre in that it combines stylistic verve—he blends realism with a narrative style akin to stream of consciousness—with a fundamental relationship to the Russian classics and a keen eye for story-telling.
The author takes us inside the mind of Petrovich, a writer and former member of the artistic underground. For Petrovich being a writer is less an occupation—he has not written in years—than a way of being: he not only recalls the protagonists of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time in his self-conscious disjunction from society, but also encapsulates the sense of dislocation felt by the post-perestroika intelligentsia.
Makanin interweaves the story of Petrovich’s descent into near-madness and life in a mental hospital with the tales of those he meets along the way, making Underground a unique insight into contemporary psychology, as well as a compelling literary novel.