“The Hero of Our Time” in the Garden of Forking Paths

Abstract. The article opens the journal issue, in which the leading theme is the historical and sociocultural transformations of the concept “the hero of our / his time”. Literary allusion referring to the novel by M. Lermontov allows to articulate the problem of a hero and his era, generation, milieu (or time, environment, group, who chose this or that person as “their” hero) in all variety of semantic shades: on the one hand – the literal understanding of the hero as leader, standard-bearer, “regent of dreams”, an extraordinary charismatic personality capable to “infect” others with conviction in the rightness of his mission and to lead them; on the other hand – to the “reduced” ironic, sarcastic or even inflammatory, “trickster” interpretation of this image. It is supposed to pay special attention to the problem of the dialectic interdependence of the two sides in the contradictory tandem of the hero and his time, environment, historical context: not only an outstanding personality emblematizes the era or even really influences the vector of historical development, but also the time, society, mass media, groups, and parties create their heroes.

Keywords: the hero of our / his time, monomyth, extraordinary personality, charisma, sociocultural context, antihero, trickster.