Driven to his deathbed by an incurable disease, the thirty-year-old impoverished gentleman Chulkaturin decides to write a diary looking back on his short life. After describing his youthful disillusionment and his family s fall from grace and loss of status, the narrative focuses on his love for Liza, the daughter of a senior civil servant, his rivalry with the dashing Prince N. and his ensuing humiliation. These pages helped establish the archetype of the superfluous man , a recurring figure in nineteenth-century Russian literature. First published in 1850, 'The Diary of a Superfluous Man' was initially censored by the authorities, as some of its passages were deemed too critical of Russian