Although Rudin, the hero of Turgenev's first novel, is a 'superfluous man' typical of Russia's intelligentsia in the 1840s, he is none the less a failure in the vein of Don Quixote or Hamlet. His pettiness, his habit of interfering in other people's lives and borrowing their money, his sterility in the face of the love he inflames in Natalya, the novel's heroine, are all redeemed by eloquence. He has a capacity for sudden lightning access to truth that inspires everyone who knows him.