A Fresh look at the Superfluous Men of Nineteenth Century Fiction – and what they can tell us today.
`Nature clearly did not intend on me putting in an appearance, and as a result has always treated me as an unexpected and uninvited guest` (The Diary of a Superfluous Man, p-10).
Plough through any of the writings of the Golden Age of Russian literature and, within its pages, you will bump into a recurring archetype. This consists of a man in his twenties or thirties, highborn (but often in reduced circumstances), influenced by European cultures, unlucky in love and in general at odds with the social mores around him.
Meet the Superfluous Man. Sometimes translated as the Excess man, this term was propelled into Russian conversation of the mid- to late Nineteenth century by Ivan Turgenev in his The Diary of a Superfluous Man from 1850.
The label, then slapped fictional characters from earlier in that century, might be seen as a Russified cousin of the Byronic hero that existed in European culture at that time. On the other hand, the Russian one is less of a personality type and more of a sociological study – and literary trope.
The Bradford born translator of The Diary of a Superfluous Man, Michael Pursglove, traces the type as far back as 1831 with the play by Alexander Griboyedov called Wit from Woe which features a acerbic idealist called Chatsky.
In any case, it was in 1859 that the influential critic Dobrolyubov nailed the Superfluous Man to the mast by listing them in an article called What is Oblomovism? (This being an allusion to Oblomov – the lethargic landowner in Goncharev’s 1859 novel of the same name).
I set myself the task of re-acquainting myself with five translated paperbacks which feature Superfluous Men. I aimed to cut through the barbed wire of literary criticism which surrounds these works and emerge with their still palpitating hearts…
Tragic lovers.
Exhibit A constitute the doomed romancers. Let us beging at the beginning. A novella, first published in censored form when Turgenev was 32, The Diary of a Superfluous Man takes the form of the memoirs of a young man in the throes of an unspecified sickness. Written in the first person and spiced with autobiographical references, the events occur in and around Oryol, Turgenev;s own birthplace (some 368 kilometeres south-west of Moscow).
Chulkaturin is a respectable but socialy awkward civil servant who finds himself drawn to a young girl residing in the estate of a wealthy family that he visits.
It is not long, however, before the girl’s head is turned by the sudden arrival on the scene of the charismatic and high-ranking Prince N.
The battle for her affections can only be setttled, Chulkaturin comes to believe, by the inevitable duel.
The duel goes ahead and leaves Prince N. with a small wound. It also leaves him with a moral victory and the ability to appear magnanimous in defeat, whereas Chulkaturin gets cast in the role of a petty, spiteful man on the eyes of Oryol high society.
Chulkaturin rages against the hostile and insurmountable obstacle between him and his feelings and thoughts(P-10).
What happens next is that Prince N. lets the object of his affections down, however, upsetting her a great deal. Even so, Chulkaturin seems unable to profit from this turn of events. Another man, a colourless minor character up to this point, offers his sympathy to the young lady and wins her hand in marriage. The protagonist’s role in the whole affair has been that of an uneeded and discarded extra.
Ferocious in its intropection, this deathbed confession offers a very desolate picture. Indeed, the novella could be a caricature of all one might expect Russian literature to be like.
Eugene Onegin could not be more different. Penned by Alexander Pushkin a decade earlier, this first saw print in serialised form between 1825 and 1832.
Most Western people’s knowledge of it comes about, I suspect, via Tchiakovsky’s weighty opera adaptation of it from 1879. In Russia, meanwhile, it is a set text in state schools and the kids are expected to learn sections of it by rote.
Having read some bits and pieces of Pushkin’s before and being unmoved by them, I put Pushkin in a box marked Doesn't tranlate so well.
It was during a winter holiday trip to St Petersburg that I chanced on Eugene Onegin, left by a traveller at a hostel. I scanned the opening lines where Onegin makes cheeky remarks about the slowness of the death of his uncle and I was hooked. Meeting up with the actual Eugene Onegin is like expecting to drink a cup of bitter espresso coffee and finding, instead, that is is cocoa – with a marshmallow in it.
The tale, told in sing-song verse, catalogues in episodes, the life and times of a St Petersburg fop. (This might well be a self-projection of Pushkin himself, but the narrator is supposed to be a friend of Onegin’s and one with different views and habits).
Still in his twenties, Onegin inherits his uncle’s country estate and transforms into a country gent but is nagged by ennui throughout:
His passion soon abated/ Hateful the world became and His malady whose cause I mean/It now to investigate is time/Was nothing more than British spleen/Transported to a Russian clime (p-27-28)
In short, is Byron’s Childe Harold in Russified form. Indeed Vissarion Belinsky, the Russian critic, dubbed the poem an encyclopedia of Russian life
Throughout this frothy romp – in which Onegin will alienate his lover Natasha, slay his bosom pal in a hasty duel, have a change of heart about Natasha and fail to win her back – there is something for everyone: romantic transcendence, bawdy archness, jocular japes, Gothic terrors and brooding reflections and all within the commonplace environs of St Petersburg, Moscow and rural Russia, but described with vividness.
The Wandering Prophets.
I call Exhibit B the wandering prophets, not because they too do not have failed love affairs too, but because these excess men are peripatetic and given to soliloquising.
The provocative phrase A Hero of Our Time forms the title of the poet Mikhail Lermontov’s sole novel. The protagonist, Grigory Aleksandrovich Pechorin, is another Byronic typepar excellence.Cynical, self-interested and consumed by boredom, he has few virtues, except for an ability to philosophise:
Passions are nothing more than ideas at the first stage of their development. They belong to the heart's youth, and he is foolish who thinks they will stir him all his life(p-182)
Other observations have quite a contemporary ring to them:
I saw that fame nor happiness depended on it [learning] in the slightest, for the happiest people were the most ignorant and fame was a matter of luck, to achieve which you only had to be clever (p-61).
The narrative is episodic, with much of it being related via Pechorin’s own journal in racy prose. What is more, unlike the previous two novels the setting is exotic. The events occur in the misty peaks of the Ossetian mountains, and Lermontov squeezes every ounce of romance from this.
We follow Pechorin as he claims a young Ossetian girl as his own, thus coming into conflict with the elders of her community, stumbles across a bizarre smuggling exercixe on the coast, is almost drowned by a femme fatale and witnesses a Russian roulette challenge. What stops all this from being just a tale of derring-do is the character study at the core of it.
The novel attempts to place Pechorin alongside a whole generation who came of age in the 1840s. An older acquaintance of his, when asked about Pechorin, responds: there were many who speak the same way, and that most likely some are speaking the truth (p-163).
Turgenev’s Rudin (1857) functions as a more developed revisiting of his earlier novella. Of all these novels, in fact, this is the one with the most sophisticated plot.
We are back in country estate territory. Rudin is introduced to it by dint of being the messenger who has to apologise to the hosts for the non-arrival of a long awaited guest.
Thus he is a stand-in, but however, his smooth intelligence soon charms the wealthy socialite who owns the house and her circle of acquaintances, so he becomes a long term resident there and shares the story with a witty misanthrope and a conventional landowner type, with whom he is compared and contrasted.
In true Superfluous Man style, he embarks on an affair with the young daughter of the Lady of The House. When she discovers this, she expels him.
Rudin is revealed to be a victim of his own eloquence: his love for the girl was all theatrical talk. However, those around him now characterise him as a chancer and a sponger, which is less true.
Rudin tries to explain himself by letter to his disappointed young lover (My fate is a strange one, almost a comic one. I give myself comnpletely, heartily, fully - and yet I am unable to give myself p113). She is unimpressed by this.
When Rudin goes off back to his wandering life, one of his opponents has a change of heart and says this of the man He posseses enthusiasm and...this is the most precious quality in our time (p-125).
Later on, we meet Rudin again. Now he has become an insurrectionist in the 1848 June uprising in France. Here he meets his end – as a hero, of sorts.
The Malcontent.
Chekhov’s short story The Duel, from 1891, is separated from the others by some decades.This fact is reflected in the self-conscious portrayal of the material. The Superfluous Man here calls himself such and makes reference to some of the works mentioned here.
We are back in an exotic locale: this time it is the Black sea off the coast of Southern Russia.
Layevsky, however longs to return to what he sees as the civilised North, feeling that his relationship with a beautiful but flighty young woman is stifling him. He attempts to borrow the money to do so from a good-hearted doctor friend but it opposed by an earnest zoologist influenced by Darwinist notions. This latter, Von Koren, has this to say about Layevsky:
I told him off, asked him why he drank so much...his sole reply to all my questions was to smile bitterly and say I'm a superfluous man...or he'll spin a whole yarn about Onegin, Pechorin, Byron's Cain, Bazarov, calling them our fathers in spirit and flesh (p-268).
This enmity to what he sees as a self-justifying weakling leads to yet another duel. This one, however, turns out to be a seriocomic travesty and there are no victors (and is later followed by a kind of reconciliation).
Chekhov’s character – Exhinbit C-the malcontent -is the least likeable one in this parade but he is well served by the author. There is a reason why Chekhov is revered as a master storyteller and here you do see why.
Echoes down the century.
When you strip away th historical paraphenalia, you feel struck by the freshness of these novels, and their ongoing relevance.
The Superfluous Maan never really left us: he just went global and more downmarket. Ernest Hemingway was known to be a devotee of Turgenev’s. In The Sun Also Rises (1926) we meet a post First World War Superfluous Man in the form of Jake who is impotent as a result of that war.
Nor has contemporary Russia abandoned the Superfluous Man. What about the redundant advertising compywriter turned mass killer in Headcrusher (2002) or the messianic adolescent in Sense (2012)?
In film, Max in Dyxless (2012) owes something to Onegin, albeit one projected onto the Moscow playboy milieu of the early noughties.
In this age of the redundant male perhaps we are all a bit Superfluous these days!
For myself, I just want to shout out a loud spasiba balshoye to these eminent Men of Letters for putting these relatable misfits onto a marble dias for us all to see.
Every dog has his day!
Sources:
Chekhov, Anton The Steppe and other Stories, 1887 -1891 (Penguin Group, London, 2001) Translated by Ronald Wilks
Lermontov, Mikhail A Hero of Our Time (Karo, St Petersburg, 2017) Translated by Martin Parker.
Turgenev, Ivan The Diary of a Superfluous Man and other novellas (Alma Classics, Surrey, UK: 2019) Translator: Michael Pursglove.
Turgenev, Ivan Rudin (Alma Classics, Surrey, UK :2012) Translator: Dora O’Brien.
Pushkin, Aleksander Eugene Onegin (Karo, St Petersburg,2017) Translator: Henry Spalding.