The Diary of a Superfluous Man, and Other Stories
Translated by Isabel Florence Hapgood
The most honest meditation on uselessness you will ever read. In the titular story, a dying man keeps a diary in which he dissects his own superfluity with surgical precision. Tchulkatúrin was raised by a gambling father and a virtuous mother who crushed him with love, and he has spent his life watching others live while he merely exists. Turgenev captures something that feels distinctly modern: the creeping suspicion that one has no place in the world, that one's existence affects no one and matters to less. The other stories in this collection explore similar terrain - love that cannot be spoken, futures foreclosed by circumstance, the small tragedies of people who never quite became themselves. The prose is deceptively simple, but carries immense weight. This is a book for anyone who has ever felt like a spectator at their own life.
