The invitation to supply a short story entitled ‘Diary of a Superfluous Man’ was inspired by Ivan Turgenev’s novella of the same name. Turgenev’s Tchulkaturin; Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin; Goncharov’s Oblomov: these ‘superfluous men’ are not simply literary types, says the critic David Patterson, but represent a ‘paradigm of a person who has lost a point, a place, a presence in life’.
A few submissions contained clear references to 19th-century Russian literature’s hollow men, but there were many echoes elsewhere in the entry of the nihilism, cynicism and fatalism that characterises them.
The winners earn £25, D.A. Prince pockets £30, and honourable mentions go to Amanda Nicholson, Jim Campbell and G.M. Southgate.
D.A. Prince
Saturday: pleasant afternoon on the substitute’s bench, finishing crossword, and the team managing a decent draw without any intervention from me. The coach appreciative, as ever, of my reliability. Got home to find Hugo had completed his maths homework by himself, and Jane had dealt with the Volvo’s puncture and planted four rows of early potatoes.
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