Who there amidst them in the distance
Like something not belonging stands

(Pushkin, Eugene Onegin)

In the wonderful way of the ‘marvellous’ and ‘ravishing’ language that was Robert Dessaix’s ‘first Amour’, the Russian for the phrase ‘not belonging’ is just one word, lishnii. Generally translated as superfluous, it gained currency through Ivan Turgenev via the title of a novella, The Diary of a Superfluous Man, which he wrote in 1850. In it, a dying thirty-year-old intellectual recalls the brief and only period of happiness in his life, the three weeks when he was blissfully in love, which ended when the knowledge was forced on him that to his beloved he was – superfluous. Though he does not cite this little known work, an examination of lishnost (the noun) is the crux of Dessaix’s study of not quite belonging.