The Superfluous Man (lishny chelovek)

A stock figure of 19th-century Russian literature: an educated, capable nobleman rendered purposeless and alienated by the constraints of his society, running from Pushkin's Onegin through Lermontov's Pechorin to Turgenev's heroes. Chekhov's title borrows the term directly, but strips it of Byronic grandeur -- his district-court official is superfluous not by temperament but quite literally, bumped from his own house by his wife's amateur theatricals.