Lermontov is by no means the best writer i have read as a part of my russian wintertime affairs, but it is impressive what he manages to do so early into the birth of the russian novel. In 1840 he manages to write a novel that plays with both chronology and genre. Writings of muscovite dandies, circassians who fall to the ground sobbing like a child when their horse is stolen and in the final story, a gambler testing his fate by putting a pistol to his forehead. All traced through the titular "hero" Grigory Pechorin