Diary of a Superfluous Man

A vivid picture of nineteenth-century Russian society, but above all the poignant story of a man whose mortality becomes the only aspect of life that he shares with his fellow man.

When Turgenev published Diary of a Superfluous Man in 1850, he created one of the first literary portraits of the alienated man. Turgenev once said that there was a great deal of himself in the unsuccessful lovers who appear in his fiction. This failure, along with painful self-consciousness, is a central fact for...