Superfluous man

He is often unmindful, indifferent or unempathetic with society's issues and can carelessly distress others with his actions, despite his position of power.

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.

[1] Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (1840) depicts another superfluous man – Pechorin – as its protagonist.

[1] Russian critics such as Vissarion Belinsky (1811–1848) viewed the superfluous man as a byproduct of Nicholas I's reign, when the best-educated men would not enter the discredited government service but, lacking other options for self-realization, doomed themselves to live out their life in passivity.

The radical critic Nikolay Dobrolyubov (1836–1861) analyzed the superfluous man as by-product of Russian serfdom.