A Hero of Our Time: Lermontov's Caucasus

The book opens in the mountains: the narrator climbs to the summit of Mount Gut, and the old staff-captain begins the story of Bela. Further on he points out a hill with "the black outline of a stone cross" on its summit, called Krestov. The pass really is named for a stone cross set up in 1824, which Lermontov himself saw on his way through.

"Taman is the nastiest little hole of all the seaports of Russia," Pechorin begins. Billeted in a hut at the edge of town, he finds only a boy who turns out to be blind from birth. By morning he has been robbed by the blind boy and "all but drowned by an eighteen-year-old girl", and he leaves at the first chance. Taman is the setting of the chapter that bears its name.

Location precision: The tale names the town but not the hut; the pin marks Taman itself.

The longest tale, Princess Mary, is Pechorin's diary and opens on 11th May: he has taken lodgings at the foot of Mount Mashuk, so high up that in a storm "the clouds will descend on to the roof". The pin marks the real little house in Pyatigorsk that Lermontov rented in May 1841, two rooms looking onto the garden, now a memorial museum. It is the author's address, not Pechorin's, but the same mountain looks down on both.

Location precision: The novel gives only a house at the foot of Mashuk; the pin marks Lermontov's own rented house.

Visitor guidance: Lermontov's little house is part of the Lermontov museum-reserve in Pyatigorsk.

On his first morning Pechorin walks up to the Elizaveta spring, where the whole spa society gathers, and surveys the crowd with contempt. On the steep cliff above, the pavilion called the Aeolian Harp is crowded with scenery-lovers aiming their telescopes at Elbrus. The small stone pavilion, built in the classical style by the Bernardacci brothers in 1828, still stands and is one of Pyatigorsk's best-known sights.

Visitor guidance: The pavilion is a short walk from the centre of Pyatigorsk.

By 18th June Pechorin has followed Vera and her husband to Kislovodsk, where he sees her "at the well and out walking" and signals to her with a lorgnette from his window. The spring is Narzan, whose first wooden well went up in 1823. The stone Narzan Gallery on the site was completed in 1853, after the novel's time, and still stands, so the pin marks the spring rather than the book's exact well.

Location precision: The novel names the Narzan well; the gallery on the pin is a later building at the same spring.

Visitor guidance: The Narzan Gallery still stands in Kislovodsk.

On 24th June a cavalcade rides out three versts from Kislovodsk, to a rock gate in the gorge of the Podkumok, to watch the sunset through it. "Not one of them was thinking about the sun," Pechorin notes; he rides beside Princess Mary and fords the river with her on the way home. The Ring is a natural cave arch 8 to 10 metres across, a regional nature monument since 1961.

Visitor guidance: The rock is on the edge of Kislovodsk and is a protected monument, so keep to the paths.

Pechorin's own last condition is cruel: each man stands at the very edge of a ledge, so that even a slight wound is mortal. The ledge is "covered with fine sand, as if on purpose for a duel." Lermontov's own duel was fought at the foot of Mashuk in 1841, where Martynov's shot hit him in the heart. The pin marks Mashuk because the novel places its duel on an unnamed cliff and Mashuk is where the author died.

Location precision: The novel does not name the cliff; the pin marks Mashuk, the mountain where Lermontov was killed.