Includes: The Diary of a Superfluous Man, A Tour in the Forest, Yakov Pasinkov, Andrei Kolosov, and A Correspendence. The Diary of a Superfluous Man is an 1850 novella by Russian author Ivan Turgenev. It is written in the first person in the form of a diary by a man who has a few days left to live as he recounts incidents of his life. The story has become the archetype for the Russian literary concept of the superfluous man.