A Hero of Our Time

by Mikhail Lermontov

Our audience is still so young and ingenuous that it does not understand a fairy tale unless it finds a moral for it at the end. It cannot guess the jokes or sense the irony; it is simply badly educated. It still does not know that in a proper society and a proper book, outright abuse has no place; that modern education has invented a much keener weapon which is almost invisible and nonetheless deadly, and which, under the cloak of flattery, can deliver an irresistible and accurate blow. Our audience is like the country bumpkin who listens to a conversation between two diplomats serving enemy courts and is left confident that each is deceiving his own government in favor of the fondest mutual friendship.