Diary of a Superfluous Man - pocketboek

Set in a corner of nineteenth-century Russian society, Diary of a Superfluous Man is the poignant story of a man's struggle to find meaning in his experiences.A clerk named Chulkaturin, nearing the end of his life, writes in his diary, "I have nothing against happiness; in fact I have tried to approach it from every angle." Yet things never worked out right for Chulkaturin. Afraid of expressing his thoughts, insecure, self-preoccupied, he not only was unable to win the woman he loved but also stood in the way of her happiness as well.When Turgenev published Diary of a Superfluous Man in 1850, he depicted a life in which the tragic and the foolish intertwine. Failure as a lover, along with painful self-consciousness, is a central fact for the ailing Chulkaturin, and we are given here one of the first literary portraits of the alienated man.