The Emergence of a Hero first appeared in Russian in 2016, and remains every bit as fine a work of scholarship in Leo Shtutin's welcome and accomplished translation. In minute detail and with finesse, Andrei Zorin portrays a precocious talent who grasped at the dawn of the Romantic age that a new type of personality was coming into being - a personality prone to melancholy and disillusionment but also idealistic, inclined to self-sacrifice and capable of delighting in love, friendship, philosophy, music and poetry.
Andrei Zorin has been Professor and Chair of Russian at the University of Oxford since 2004. His publications include By Fables Alone: Russian Literature and State Ideology of the Last Third of the XVIII - First Third of the XIX centuries (2014), On the Periphery of Europe: The Self-Invention of the Russian Elite (with Andreas Schönle, 2018), scholarly editions of Russian classics, and more than 200 articles in English, Russian, French, German, Italian, and Finnish.