About this audiobook
Chulkaturin begins a diary while looking back on a life he considers disappointingly insignificant. Memories of affection, embarrassment and rivalry become evidence in the judgement he makes about himself. His account offers an intimate perspective, but the intensity of his self-criticism does not guarantee that he has understood how others saw him.
Ivan Turgenev gives the narrator a voice in which honesty and wounded pride remain difficult to separate. The wish to explain a failed relationship becomes part of a wider need to discover whether his presence has mattered. Small social encounters acquire an importance that their other participants may never have recognised.
The novella explores loneliness, self-consciousness and the distance between a life experienced from within and a life interpreted from outside. Its diary form invites readers to attend to omissions and contradictions as well as explicit confession, asking how a person constructs meaning when recalling events through a settled belief about his own inadequacy.
