#superfluous man

Rudin

Part 1 of the full audiobook reading, with scrolling text, on YouTube. The rest of the parts and the chapter-by-chapter videos are queued in the playlist.

Watch the rest in the playlist: Ion Books on YouTube.

Gorkiy's favourite type is the 'rebel' - the man in full revolt against society, but at the same time a strong man, a power; and as he has found among the tramps with whom he has lived at least the embryo of this type, it is from this stratum of society that he takes his most interesting heroes.

Gorkiy cannot stand whining; he cannot bear such self-castigation in which other Russian writers so much delight - which Turgueneff's sub-Hamlets used to express so poetically, of which Dostoyevskiy has made a virtue, and of which Russia offers such an infinite variety of examples. Gorkiy knows the type, but he has no pity for such men. Better anything than one of those egotistic weaklings who gnaw all the time at their own hearts, compel others to drink with them in order to perorate before them about their 'burning souls'; those beings 'full of compassion', which, however, never goes beyond self-commiseration, and 'full of love' which is never anything but self-love.

...'the hero of the new literature of protest, a member of the tiny minority of educated and morally sensitive men, who, unable to find a place in his native land, is driven in upon himself, and liable to escape either into fantasies and illusions, or into cynicism or despair, ending more often than not, in self-destruction or surrender.'