Pushkin’s Superfluous Man
and
Mann’s Alienated Artist!
#onhisbirthdaytoday
6 June 2026
What if you come across a character who is brilliant, over-educated, aristocratic, with immense potential but is paralysed by a profound lack of purpose in life?
Again,
What if you come across a character who steps outside of life, in order to observe, analyse, and represent life, and thereby sacrifices the blessed joys of being a joyful and involved participant in the dance of life?
Well, these are two archetypes that we find in Pushkin’s and Mann’s writings, respectively.
The first one is called the “superfluous man” archetype, whereas the second hypo is the archetype of the “alienated artist”.
The “superfluous man” archetype was in fact brewing piping hot in all of Russian literature for decades.
It was the famous Ivan Turgenev who had officially coined the phrase “superfluous man” in his 1850 novella titled, The Diary of a Superfluous Man, to describe this socio-cultural crisis in the Russia of the past.
So who pray, is the “superfluous man”?
The “superfluous man” refers to a highly privileged, highly educated aristocratic individual whose talents, intellect, and potential are entirely wasted because he has no meaningful function in his society.
Interestingly, however, even a quarter-century earlier, Alexander Pushkin had codified this archetype of the “superfluous man” in his verse novel Eugene Onegin.
In fact it was Pushkin who had come up with the first ever blueprint of the “superfluous man” archetype, in his verse novel Eugene Onegin, when the term wasn’t even coined as yet.
So what makes Onegin special?
Well, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin is famous across the world for any many reasons.
It is a masterpiece in all of Russian literature, pioneering the novel-in-verse format.
Pushkin invented a unique 14-line poetic structure (famously called the Onegin stanza) that defined Russian fiction for the next century.
His character Onegin is afflicted by an unrelenting, crushing boredom - an existential fatigue! Having exhausted the superficial pleasures of St. Petersburg high society, he finds himself incapable of finding meaning in anything else - not in managing his estate, not in reading, and not in love!
Yes! Pushkin had invented an entirely new verse form specifically for this verse-novel!
The entire novel is written in 389 fourteen-line stanzas of iambic tetrameter.
The rhyme scheme is rigidly fixed as aBaBccDDeFFeG.
Lowercase letters represent feminine rhymes (stress on the second-to-last syllable).
Uppercase letters represent masculine rhymes (stress on the final syllable).
The tragedy of the superfluous man lies in the sad fact that, his intelligence doesn’t result in any action. Although he is acutely aware of the evils and the hollowness of his society, yet he lacks the will, or the passion to rebel against it or change it.
Well, today happens to be the birthday of Alexander Pushkin - the pioneering architect of the Modern Russian Language.
Like Oliver Goldsmith, “he touched nothing which he did not adorn”.
Indeed, Pushkin was adept at writing in a variety of genres, namely, the Verse Novel, the Historical Novel, the Realist Short Story, the Historical Drama, the Narrative Epic, etc.
If Pushkin could be called the pioneering architect of the superfluous man archetype, then Mann is the Man of the Alienated Artist archetype!
That takes us to Thomas Mann - Nobel Laureate in Literature for 1929!
So who is the Alienated Artist?
To Thomas Mann, the alienated artist is an exile – an epistemological exile - someone who is alienated from the warmth and normalcy of human existence by the very nature of their calling!
In order to observe, analyse, and represent life, the artist must step outside of it. One cannot simultaneously be an involved, joyful participant in the dance of life and at the same time document the choreography too! In other words, you cannot have your cake and eat it too, says Mann, Thomas Mann.
In short, the artist literally looks through a glass window at his childhood friends dancing, knowing fully well that his calling forever prevents him from joining them.
That’s hence Mann’s alienated artist is sadly, a tragic figure, because of the fact that, they are not only burdened with the task of giving meaning to life and culture, but also pay the price of that task – as they are forbidden from truly living that life for themselves in the process. His novella Felix Krull, Death in Venice, Doctor Faustus etc., are a few examples to this credo.
In short, both writers, although from different and differing social milieus, write about individuals and their unique archetypes to critique a society that has no productive space for its most sensitive or intellectually-liberated people!
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