ABSTRACT
The ‘superfluous man’ (lishnii chelovek) is a term that, since the mid-nineteenth century, has been applied to a particular type of character in Russian literature. Ivan Turgenev’s work of 1850, The Diary of a Superfluous Man (Dnevnik lishnego cheloveka), popularized the term ‘superfluous man’, which came to be used to identify literary characters of an earlier period of the nineteenth century as well as those in the middle years of the century and beyond, into the twentieth century. Often, the end of the tradition of ‘superfluous men’ was earmarked as the mid-nineteenth century, with characters such as the eponymous Oblomov in Ivan Goncharov’s novel, many of Turgenev’s characters, including Chulkaturin, in The Diary of a Superfluous Man, and Bazarov in Fathers and Sons (Ottsy i deti).
