In five linked episodes in A Hero of Our Time (1839), early Russian novelist Mikhail Lermontov (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lermontov) builds up the portrait of a Byronic hero officer, Grigory Pechorin, caught up in and expressing the sickness of his age.
The sickness is a certain ennui, nihilism and indifference to the world. The setting is Russian military life in the Caucasus. This is a marvellous novel and an early landmark in Russian literature.
A Hero of Our Time served as an inspiration for many later Russian authors, including Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Unlike his successors, Lermontov kept the length of his novel to manageable proportions and the characters to a number that does not require a card index to comprehend!
Mikhail Lermontov
ISBN 978-0143105633