10 Cold-Hearted Bastards Of Russian Literature

Forget Sochi, let's focus on what's really important: the Russian soul.

This week, a drunken row over the merits of literary forms in Russia ended in a poetry-lover stabbing a champion of prose to death. This post is dedicated to the victim, as all but one of these heroes come from prose.

These are some great but mean + evil male protagonists of Russian lit. At key moments in the narrative, they all lacked compassion, emotion, or empathy. But boy were they memorable!

1. Pushkin's Eugene Onegin

Via Ralph Fiennes as Eugene Onegin (Samuel Goldwyn Films: 1999)

Onegin is a 26-year-old dandy who leaves Saint Petersburg for the countryside, where he rejects the love of Tatyana and kills young poet Lensky in a duel. Onegin's cynicism, arrogance, and selfishness are boundless. The MET is offering a new production of Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin this season.

2. Lermontov's Grigory Pechorin

Via Igor Petrenko as Pechorin

In A Hero of Our Time, Grigory Pechorin is a bored, manipulative, and selfish man, described by the author as a "portrait built up of all our generation's vices in full bloom."

Halfway through the novel, Lermontov's hero admits, "I became a moral cripple; I had lost one half of my soul, for it had shriveled, dried up and died, and I had cut it off and cast it away, while the other half stirred and lived, adapted to serve every comer. No one noticed this, because no one suspected there had been another half."

3. Gogol's Pavel Chichikov

youtube.com / Via Alexander Kalyagin as Chichikov (1984)

Dead Souls, Gogol's epic poem in verse is a true encyclopedia of the Russian soul. It's full of quotable passages every Russian knows from childhood, like this: "Reclining against the leather cushions of the vehicle's interior, Chichikov smiled with gratification at the sensation of driving fast. For what Russian does not love to drive fast? Which of us does not at times yearn to give his horses their head, and to let them go, and to cry, 'To the devil with the world!'?"

4. Dostoevsky's Pavel Smerdyakov

Via Valentin Nikulin as Smerdyakov in Ivan Pyryev's celebrated 1969 adaptation

There's no BuzzFeed future for Smerdyakov, who Dostoevsky says hung & buried stray cats as a child. An actual bastard, Smerdyakov is a vital character in The Brothers Karamazov who ends up killing the Karamazovs' father. Growing up as a servant in his own father's household, Smerdyakov was destined to become a determined low-life. In the end, he killed himself.

5. Bulgakov's Azazello

Via Aleksandr Filippenko as Azazello

In Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, the fallen angel & killer demon Azazello is a key member of Woland's entourage who is both a seducer and a killer. In a book where Satan is portrayed as fair, generous, and kind character, someone had to be cold.

6. Saltykov-Shchedrin's Iudushka Golovlyov

Via Vladimir Gardin as Iudushka Golovlyov (1933)

Porphyry Vladimirovitch Golovlyov was known in The Golovlyov Family under three names: "Iudushka" (Little Judas), "bloodsucker," and "candid boy." Iudushka Golovlyov is a corrupt and cruel hypocrite who brings down the whole Golovlyov clan. In the end, his frozen corpse is discovered half-way between the Golovlyov mansion and the cemetery.

7. Tolstoy's Anatole Kuragin

starslife.ru / Via Vasily Lanovoy as Anatole Kuragin

An incredibly good-looking man, Anatole Kuragin is rumoured to have had an incestuous affair, is secretly married, and tries to elope with Natasha Rostova who tries to take her life when she finds out about his marriage. This Leo Tolstoy didn't forgive, making Kuragin lose a leg in the Napoleonic Wars and erasing him from the plot of War and Peace sometime after the Battle of Borodino.

8. Ostrovsky's Sergey Paratov

Via Nikita Mikhalkov as Sergey Paratov

Things don't end well in Without a Dowry. Life is cruel but romantic, and people like Sergey Paratov make it more vivid. He humiliated Larisa, the woman he loved, and was ultimately responsible for her tragic death.

9. Turgenev's Yevgeny Bazarov

turgenyev.narod.ru

A House M.D. prototype, Bazarov is a young medical student and a nihilist. He falls in love at the end of Fathers and Sons, which weakens him and leads to his untimely death.

10. Dostoevsky's Nikolay Stavrogin

u.pikucha.ru / Via Andrey Rudensky as Nikolay Stavrogin

Stavrogin, in his own words:

"I know I ought to kill myself, to brush myself off the earth like a nasty insect; but I am afraid of suicide, for I am afraid of showing greatness of soul. I know that it will be another sham again--the last deception in an endless series of deceptions. What good is there in deceiving oneself? Simply to play at greatness of soul? Indignation and shame I can never feel, therefore not despair." --The Possessed