The Superfluous Man

The Superfluous Man, originally titled A Hero of Our Time, is a classic novel by the Russian writer Mikhail Lermontov, regarded as the beginning of the Russian socio-psychological novel. The book is composed of several linked parts—Bela, Maxim Maximych, and Pechorin's Diary—and combines the qualities of travelogue, diary, love adventure, and confession. The protagonist Pechorin is a young, wealthy noble officer with excellent prospects; he is intelligent, perceptive, and given to self-examination, yet he can never find the meaning of life. He successively draws close to Bela, the daughter of a prince; a smuggler woman in a seaside town; his former lover Vera; and Princess Mary, and almost every involvement ends in others' pain. He can see his own coldness and vanity but is powerless to escape them, so he repeatedly exhausts himself and those around him in the cycle of pursuit and weariness. Through such a character, Lermontov captures the spiritual state of a portion of nineteenth-century educated Russian noble youths who were dissatisfied with reality yet unwilling or unable to resist—the weariness of "refusing to accept, yet refusing to resist." Pechorin inherits the bloodline of Pushkin's Onegin, becoming an unavoidable figure in the lineage of the "superfluous man" in Russian literature and distilling the spiritual character of an entire era. Read today, that questioning of meaning and that feeling of being both clear-eyed and powerless about one's own situation still resonate with contemporary readers.