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| Penguin Classics UK, c 1990 |
He was a man of about thirty-two or three, of medium height and pleasant appearance, with dark grey eyes, but with a total absence of any definite idea, any concentration in his features. Thoughts promenaded freely all over his face, fluttered about in his eyes, reposed on his half-parted lips, concealed themselves in the furrows of his brow, and then vanished completely –– and it was at such moments that an expression of serene unconcern spread all over his face. This unconcern passed from his face into the contours of his body and even into the folds of his dressing gown.
Translated by
DAVID MAGARSHACK
(1954)
The Novel: Ilya Ilyich Oblomov is a Russian nobleman, owner of a vast country estate he never bothers to visit, a timid, easily duped individual whose typical response to life's problems is to avoid them, preferably by sleeping on his couch while snugly wrapped in his fancy but increasingly tatty dressing gown. His life consists of sitting round his St Petersburg flat, angrily berating his loyal but stupid servant Zakhar for failing to clean it properly, eating three large meals a day and reluctantly accepting the occasional unsought visit from men like Tarantyev –– dubious 'friends' who drop in only when they're hungry or require another loan he can always be relied on to supply with no questions asked. Oblomov has no ambition, no energy and no interest in improving his estate or bettering the lives of the serfs charged with the thankless task of farming it on his behalf.
But Oblomov has one friend, Andrey Stolz, who refuses to allow him to succumb to his self-perpetuating torpor. Stolz harangues him each time they meet, insisting that he take an interest in his neglected estate and regain the enthusiasm for social reform they shared in their youth. Oblomov would like to do this but, as he repeatedly reminds his idealistic friend, he lacks both the drive and the willpower necessary to commit himself to taking action. Nor does the prospect of leading what Stolz deems to be a normal social life hold much appeal for him. It seems like too much trouble to leave his flat, to actually talk to people and pretend to take an interest in things that generally leave him feeling bored, upset or both. As he explains, ' "They’re all corpses, sleepwalkers, worse than me, these members of society and the public!" '
Things change, however, when Stolz introduces him to Olga Ilinsky, an orphan much younger than himself whose desire to bring him out of his shell and 'improve' him proves too strong to resist. Oblomov falls in love with Olga and, under her watchful eye, gradually begins to take an interest in life again, attending parties and occasionally even the opera with her and her widowed aunt. Meanwhile, his failure to renew the lease on his beloved flat forces him to vacate it and move to the outlying suburb of Vyborg and the ramshackle house belonging to Agafya Matveyevna, the hardworking sister of Tarantyev's shady business associate Ivan Matveyevich. But Oblomov is so naïve, so wary of confronting anybody on any issue whatsoever, that he fails to see the arrangement has been devised by the two men to allow them to keep lining their pockets at his expense without him catching wise to their plan.
Oblomov's life does improve for a time after his move to Vyborg. Agafya Matveyevna spoils him because she considers him a gentleman and Olga continues to love him despite his refusal to commit to any plan of action which might hasten their marriage. But the disease that is 'Oblomovitis' –– the inability to see the point of doing anything, including anything as exhausting as becoming legitimately engaged or attending to his business affairs –– proves a stubborn one to cure. Oblomov continues to dither and procrastinate, refusing to heed Stolz's advice to go and put his badly-run estate in order, preferring to hire another suspicious friend of Ivan Matveyevich's to travel there and do the job for him while he remains in Vyborg, avoiding his responsibilities and living the same timid, obscure and ultimately pointless life he's always lived with scarcely a thought for the long-term consequences of his physical and social inertia.
Goncharov's great achievement in Oblomov was to make its protagonist a sympathetic character rather than the purely farcical or reprehensible one he might have become in less compassionate hands. Stolz and Olga never stop loving him and nor do the equally lazy Zakhar or his landlady, who intentionally goes hungry to ensure he'll always have something tasty to nibble on come supper time. They appreciate his finer qualities –– his kindness, sincerity and honesty –– even as they despair of changing him or making him realize that he's frittering his life away. 'A regular ocean of evil and baseness may be surging round him, the entire world may be poisoned and turned upside down –– Oblomov will never bow down to the idol of falsehood, and his soul will always be pure, noble, honest.' This is how they view him in spite of his faults –– as a man who, in some respects, is their moral superior because he refuses to lie to them, himself or the world about who and what he is.
Oblomov has often been described as a satire, which it indubitably is, but it's also a heartrending portrait of a man for whom life has become an overwhelming proposition, too difficult and frightening to be faced in anything approaching the normal adult way. It speaks to the part of all of us that yearns to solve our problems by hiding from them or, better still, by immaturely denying their existence altogether. As its original translator David Magarshack notes so perceptively in his introduction: 'Oblomov can hardly be said to be a typically Russian character: there are thousands of Oblomovs scattered all over the world.' It is this sense of universality that makes the novel one of the lesser-known classics of Russian literature, placing it on the same level as the best work of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev and Chekhov (who once claimed that Goncharov was 'ten heads above me in talent').
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| IVAN GONCHAROV, c 1859 |
The Writer: Ivan Goncharov was born in 1812 in the western Russian town of Simbirsk, which was later renamed Ulyanovsk in honour of its other famous inhabitant, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Goncharov's father was a successful grain merchant, a prime example of the kind of hated bourgeois Russian capitalist that Lenin's Bolshevik revolution would successfully overthrow in October 1917.
Goncharov was initially educated at a Moscow boarding school –– where he taught himself to read English, French and German –– before spending eight miserable years at a commercial college to which he'd been sent by his mother to prepare for a career in the civil service. In 1831, unable to tolerate his mind-numbing commercial studies any longer, he left the college and enrolled at Moscow University –– a place where he was at long last able to study literature and befriend other would-be writers who shared his enthusiasm for the poetry of Aleksandr Pushkin. In 1832, while still at the university, he published his first book –– a translation of a novel by the French writer Eugène Sue. During this period he also composed many stories and poems he would later either disown or destroy.
He graduated in 1834 and returned briefly to Simbirsk before accepting a government post in St Petersburg. He also worked part-time as a tutor in the Maykov household, teaching Latin and Russian Literature to the future poet Apollon Maykov and the future literary critic Valerian Maykov, Apollon's younger brother. It was in the Maykov home that he also met Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Ivan Turgenev –– the novelists who, along with Tolstoy, would soon come to dominate Russian literature and inspire his own decision to abandon poetry for the composition of fiction.
His first novel An Ordinary Story was serialized in 1847 in the St Petersburg journal The Contemporary Review. Despite being liked by the critics (and Tolstoy) it would be another two years before the story Oblomov's Dream –– a fragment of what was still many years away from becoming his second novel –– appeared in the same magazine. He stopped working on Oblomov to plan his third novel, which he chose to call The Precipice, and serve as private secretary to a Russian admiral on a round-the-world voyage that lasted three years. In 1856, one year after his return to Russia, he was appointed to the post of literary censor by the new so-called 'progressive' Czar, Alexander II. Goncharov took the job seriously, sometimes angering less conservative writers who felt he failed to do enough to help them get their work cleared for publication. He was, by all accounts, very much his father's bourgeois son when it came to the always contentious subjects of politics and social reform.
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| Seven Stories Press, 2008 |
He resumed work on the long-abandoned Oblomov soon after accepting his new position and it was published, again in installments, in another St Petersburg review in 1859. The book was so successful that Goncharov was able to retire from the civil service by 1867, although another ten years passed before he published The Precipice, his third and final novel. Unlike its predecessors, the book was poorly received by both the critics and the public whom he had been convinced –– wrongly, as time would prove –– would adore every word of it. Although Goncharov lived until 1891, he published little after 1877 besides some short sketches, a small number of theatre reviews and a handful of essays. Although he allegedly intended to write a fourth novel, no evidence of its existence has ever been uncovered.
In his final years, Goncharov fell victim to paranoid delusions which saw him accuse Turgenev of trying to steal his plots. Ironically, he ended his days in much the same way as his most famous character chose to live, hiding from the world in the St Petersburg flat he seldom left, frantically writing a bitter, resentment-fuelled memoir which remained unknown and unpublished until 1924.
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