Unreliable Narration in M.Yu. Lermontov's Novel "A Hero of Our Time"

The subject of the article is the functioning of unreliable narrators in M.Y. Lermontov's novel "The Hero of Our Time". The article analyzes the discourses of three narrators: Maxim Maksimych, who is unable to interpret the motives of Pechorin's actions and is therefore limited in narrative possibilities, and two unreliable narrators— the wandering author and Pechorin. The key research method was the narratological analysis as a kind of discourse analysis. The scientific novelty consists in identifying the different ethos of the novel's narrators: if the wandering narrator is distinguished by the ethos of wanting to realize himself as the author of the text, Pechorin by the ethos of wanting to gain self—identity, then the ethos of the implicit author becomes the ethos of conscience. The itinerant officer and Pechorin are distinguished by the modality of opinion, which makes them unreliable narrators, whereas the comprehension of a man of his time becomes the modality of the entire text. Based on the narratological analysis, it has been revealed that in the novel "The Hero of Our Time" there is a multi-stage aesthetic completion: Pechorin creates a diary (epistolary prose), which is fundamentally incomplete, however, on the pages of the text we see a rejection of the author's ambitions in the chapter "Maxim Maksimych", the wandering author selects from his diary the events related to the staying of the hero in the Caucasus, participating in the act of narration, and the primary narrator writes a preface to the entire novel, metatextually evaluating his hero ("portrait, made up of the vices of a generation"). During the analysis of the discourses and ethos of unreliable narrators of the novel "Hero of Our Time", it was found that in using the figure of an unreliable narrator, Lermontov follows the traditions of Pushkin's prose, in particular the discoveries he made in "The Stories of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin": multilevel narrative organization, contradictory discourses of unreliable narrators, probabilistic worldview.