A Hero of Our Time
Avdeev's best-known work, the "Tamarin" trilogy, highlighting the tragedy of a gifted but socially inert man, was obviously lacking in originality, borrowing heavily from Mikhail Lermontov's "A Hero of Our Time", but also from Alexander Pushkin's "Evgeny Onegin" and Alexander Druzhinin's "Polinka Zachs". "Finely written, his novels lack in freshness and are sewn-up with well-worn fragments, while novelets are not suited at all for our age which sometimes forgives roughness of form, but never - the lack of ideas," wrote Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who saw the Tamarin character as a parody on that of Pechorin, by no means the development of it.