''I remain in unchanged admiration for this bold, headstrong, carefree undertaking, a first novel published when the author was twenty-five, which proved to be the first prose masterpiece in Russian'' Julian Barnes from his preface.Published in Russian in April 1840, A Hero of Our Time reached English in 1853, under the title ''Sketches of Life in the Caucasus, by a Russe.'' Full of towering landscapes and local colour, it can be read as the travelogue of a poet and serving officer, but also as a portrait of the romantic as self-destructive anti-hero.Vladimir Nabokov''s translation of A Hero of Our Time was published in the United States in 1958, the same year as Lolita: world fame was about to overtake this committed Russian living in America.