A Hero of Our Time
The character type originates in Alexander Pushkin's verse-novel "Eugene Onegin" (1825–1832). This term was popularized by Ivan Turgenev's novella "The Diary of a Superfluous Man" (1850) and was thereafter applied to characters from earlier novels. Mikhail Lermontov's "A Hero of Our Time" (1840) depicts another superfluous man – Pechorin – as its protagonist. He can be seen as a nihilist and fatalist. Later examples include Alexander Herzen's Beltov in "Who is to Blame?" (1845–46), Turgenev's "Rudin" (1856), and the title character of Ivan Goncharov's "Oblomov" (1859).