I haven’t read it, but the Wikipedia article points to the topic of the superfluous man,
The Russian critics such as Vissarion Belinsky viewed the superfluous man as a by-product of Nicholas I’s reactionary reign when the best educated men would not enter the discredited government service and, lacking other options for self-realization, doomed themselves to live out their life in passivity. Scholar David Patterson describes the superfluous man as “not just...another literary type but...a paradigm of a person who has lost a point, a place, a presence in life” before concluding that “the superfluous man is a homeless man”
which makes me wonder, “Why don’t you just emigrate? You are wealthy, aren’t you, and you have valuable skills, so why not?”
I haven’t read it, but the Wikipedia article points to the topic of the superfluous man,
which makes me wonder, “Why don’t you just emigrate? You are wealthy, aren’t you, and you have valuable skills, so why not?”
I was thinking more of the ‘get into a deadly duel with your best friend over his girlfriend, whom you aren’t all that into anyway’ aspect.
That sounds enormously stupid, unless these people place very little value in human life.
Well, yes. That was why I brought it up. Hard to relate to.