Superfluous Man

The 'superfluous man' is a literary type that arose in the 19th century: an educated, gifted, often noble personality who, through discord with society, inner division, and a lack of life purpose, finds no application for their powers and feels superfluous, 'unnecessary.' Such a hero is marked by reflection, skepticism, disillusionment, passivity, an inability to act, and 'mental fatigue.' The type took shape in European Romanticism and realism. In Ukrainian literature this type underwent a national reinterpretation: features of the 'superfluous man' belong to Stepan Radchenko, the hero of Valerian Pidmohylny's novel 'The City' (though ambitious rather than passive — a polemic with the type), as well as to some intellectual images of the prose of the 'Executed Renaissance.' The 'superfluous man' type should be distinguished from the 'little person' (the socially humiliated) and the antihero. Analysis of this type reveals the conflict of the individual and society as a recurring theme of 19th–20th-century literature.