Doctoral Fellow in Research Area 4: "Literary Currencies"

July–December 2025

Negativity as Temporality in A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov

This aim of this project is to analyze Lermontov’s only completed prose work, A Hero of Our Time (1840), in light of its correlation between negativity and social experience.

Negativity is understood through the aesthetic and ethical concepts of irony and melancholy, while social experience is explored through mechanisms explicated by Brazilian Critical Theory and by Boris Eikhenbaum in his writings on Lermontov’s works. The project will analyze the novel's construction, demonstrating how it presents a time devoid of meaning, blocked from significant personal or collective transformations. This aligns it with a series of other contemporary works and their similarly named heroes, as well as with post-Napoleonic Europe and more specifically with the Russian context post-1815 and 1825.

The research interrogates how a work such as A Hero of Our Time can weave a temporality marked by an absence of meaning, creating a community based on this temporal experience. The title of the work itself signifies its central position. This temporal void is not only linked to its own time but also to other eras marked by emptiness, as evidenced by the long history of melancholy. Even within the context of the first half of the 19th century, however, we can easily recognise a phenomenon that transcends borders and that is inseparable from displacement and exile (e.g. Chateaubriand’s René or Byron’s Childe Harold), akin to a disease, as Musset would say, or to Napoleon, himself a reader of Goethe’s Werther.

Pedro Augusto Pinto is a PhD candidate in Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Sao Paulo (USP, Brazil), with internships at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg (Germany) and Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris, France), and holds a Master’s degree in Russian Culture and Literature as well as a Bachelor’s degree in History from that same university, having conducted a research internship at the Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow – Russia) and academic exchanges at Lomonosov Moscow State University (Russia) and St. Mary’s University College (London, UK). Pinto has served as a researcher at the José Bonifácio Chair of the Institute of International Relations at the University of São Paulo (IRI-USP) and is currently a member of the Northwestern University Research Initiative for the Study of Russian Philosophy and Religious Thought at Northwestern University (Illinois - USA). Since 2015, he has focused his research on the works of Mikhail Lermontov, particularly his lyrical poetry, analyzing it through the lenses of cultural history and the social history of literature. His research interests also extend to the history of imperial Russia and modern history, Romanticism and the connections between literature and psychoanalysis.