Authors: Ivan Goncharov
The novel ends with an ironic twist. Alexander, upon turning himself into a calculating businessman like his uncle, is surprised by the news that Peter in his young years also went through a heady romantic phase. Alexander has repeated his uncle’s career even to the backache that comes with success. Neither youthful enthusiasm nor middle-age scepticism are adequate responses to the problem of living. Instead of a didactic defence of the bourgeois virtues, Goncharov’s first novel is a wry comment on the way of the world, the ‘common story’ of growing up.
Though
Oblomov
turns on a similar opposition of practical action and sentimental drift, it is much richer, more deeply felt. It does not tell the story of a career to be made but of a life to be saved. The writing of
A Common Story
went smoothly – conceived in 1844, written in 1845 and wrapped up the following year, according to the author’s later testimony. It is an amusing book, but cerebral. Goncharov lived with Oblomov eleven to thirteen years before it finally appeared in 1859. It ‘ripened’ in his mind, he recalled. The bulk of it burst out of him in the summer of 1857 at the spa in Marienbad. It was the happiest moment of his life.
The extended period of writing is reflected in shifting styles. Part One, in its portraiture of a typical day in the life of Oblomov, is in the manner of what Russians call ‘the natural school’ – a first flower of realism. The comic zaniness in the relation of master and
servant owes much to Gogol, the towering figure of the time. Isolated in his cramped room, the outside world blocked out by dusty windows, endlessly squabbling with his manservant Zakhar – the two seem married to each other – Oblomov fears his life may have ended before it started. ‘Why am I like this?’ is the question that sets the novel in motion. In the famous chapter entitled ‘Oblomov’s Dream’ his dreaming mind returns in nostalgia to the lost paradise of childhood, a time when the habits of ordinary life could be fully satisfying. Kitchen, barnyard and meadow are apprehended with poetic warmth; domesticity is granted mythic significance. In his ‘Dream’ Oblomov also sets out to discover the roots of his illness. At a dead end, his recourse is to self-knowledge. As in psychoanalytic theory, childhood gives us the objects of our desire and the source of our disease.
Upon awakening he makes a desperate attempt to join the world. By 1857, when the story of Oblomov’s love for Olga was written, the grotesqueries of the natural school were long out of fashion. The manner of the summer romance is delicate, poetical in the manner of Turgenev, the leading novelist of the late fifties. Oblomov has escaped his shabby seclusion and entered a world of aristocratic refinement. The figure of Olga often melts into lyrical images: a sprig of lilac, radiant light, the aria
Casta diva
. She promises grace.
Readers have found Stolz unconvincing but his friendship with Oblomov is important. They have been close since childhood. Each represents, we are told, half of life. The half-German Stolz (the name means ‘pride’) is all work, discipline, ambition (the Peter Aduyev of this novel). Oblomov, for all his sorrows, is blessed with the passive virtues: delicacy, imagination, tenderness. ‘Oblomov’ comes from the Russian word that means ‘fragment’, and they are both fragmented men, each looking longingly to the other for what he lacks. For all the mocking of romanticism, Goncharov, like other ‘men of the forties’, held on to its dream of human wholeness. ‘Give me man’, he has Oblomov cry out.
In the last section the loving rendering of everyday life and the dream-like atmosphere of ‘Oblomov’s Dream’ return, as we enter the homely domain of Agafya Matveyevna. Among the symmetrical pairings of Goncharov’s fiction – Peter and Alexander Aduyev, Stolz and Oblomov – are Olga and Agafya, the aristocratic beauty and the nurturing woman from the lower classes.
The novel is acutely conscious of time. In his lonely bachelor apartment Oblomov tries to shut out the common sense of time
moving in a straight line, its destination – death. In his ‘Dream’ he evokes a mythical time of eternal returns, where the seasons come and go, men sow and reap, and nothing ever changes. The summer romance seeks to escape the anxiety of change by another kind of permanence – a frozen lyrical moment, a song that never dies. The concluding pages accept the inevitability of death but see life, on the analogy of geological rhythms, as maintaining a perpetual balance. In one place mountains crumble; elsewhere the sea piles up new land.
Goncharov started
The Precipice
in 1849, when he was still in the early stages of
Oblomov
. The writing dragged on for twenty years. He rushed to Marienbad periodically, but the inspiration of the glorious summer of ’57 would not return. He was stuck. He had no trouble getting the words down but he couldn’t find a principle by which to connect them.
Some time around 1860 he decided to change his procedure. A Common Story and Oblomov are biographies of a soul. They describe the course of a life, the former as part of an entertaining if thin comedy of manners, the latter with warmth of feeling and psychological penetration. Goncharov began
The Precipice
with similar intentions – to portray in the person of Boris Raysky ‘the insides, the heart of an artist’, but he couldn’t pull it off. In midstream, some time around 1860, he decided to accommodate changing trends on the Russian literary scene and write a political novel in a dramatic rather than biographical form. The Precipice belongs to a wave of anti-nihilist fiction (radicals were dubbed nihilists). Turgenev’s
Fathers and Sons
and Dostoyevsky’s
The Devils
(also translated as
The Possessed
) are two outstanding examples of the tendency.
Goncharov’s effort is not in their league.
The Precipice
is overwrought and melodramatic – a far cry from the reflective manner and poetic warmth of
Oblomov
. It is also humourless. Living in an autocratic society that did not allow the give and take of open dialogue, many Russians saw society as divided into ‘us’ and ‘them’. Political discourse turned moralistic. The nihilist of
The Precipice
has bad manners and is licentious. In
Oblomov
the gentry estate, the central institution of Old Russia, is an ambiguous place – a dreamland of pastoral peace and an island isolated from possibilities of moral and intellectual growth. In
The Precipice
it is a bulwark of stability in a world of uncertain passions. Great works of art intrigue us with their complexity.
Oblomov
is among them.
FURTHER READING
Borowec, Christine, ‘Time after Time: The Temporal Ideology of
Oblomov
’,
Slavic and East European Journal
, 4 (Winter 1994).
Diment, Galya,
The Autobiographical Novel of Co-consciousness: Goncharov, Woolf and Joyce
(Gainsville, Fl., 1994).
—(ed.),
Goncharov’s
Oblomov:
A Critical Companion
(Evanston, Ill., 1998).
—‘Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov’, in
Dictionary of Literary Biography
(Farmington Hills, Mich., 2001).
Dobrolyubov, N. A., ‘What is Oblomivitis’, in
Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, and Dobrolyubov: Selected Criticism
, ed. Ralph E. Matlaw (New York, 1962).
Ehre, Milton,
Oblomov and His Creator: The Life and Art of Ivan Goncharov
(Princeton, N.J., 1973).
Freeborn, Richard,
The Rise of the Russian Novel: Studies in the Russian Novel from Eugene Onegin to War and Peace
(Cambridge, 1973).
Gifford, Henry,
The Novel in Russia from Pushkin to Pasternak
(New York, 1965).
Harrison, Jane Ellen,
Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos
(Cambridge, 1919).
Louria, Yvette, and Morton I. Seiden, ‘Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov: The Anti-Faust as Christian Hero’,
Canadian Slavic Studies
, 3 (Spring 1969).
Lyngstad, Alexandra and Sverre,
Ivan Goncharov
(New York, 1971).
Macauley, Robie, ‘The Superfluous Man’,
Partisan Review
, 19, no. 2 (1952).
Mays, Milton A., ‘Oblomov as Anti-Faust’,
Western Humanities Review
, 21 (Spring 1967).
Mirsky, D. S.,
A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900
, rev. edn, ed. Francis J. Whitfield (New York, 1949).
Peace, Richard,
Oblomov: A Critical Examination of Goncharov’s Novel
(Birmingham, 1991).
Poggioli, Renato,
The Phoenix and the Spider
(Cambridge, Mass., 1957).
Pritchett, V. S.,
The Living Novel
(London, 1946).
Setchkarev, Vsevolod,
Ivan Goncharov: His Life and His Works
(Würzburg, 1974).
Stilman, Leon, ‘Oblomovka Revisited’,
The American Slavic and East European Review
, 7 (1948).
Terry, Garth M.,
Ivan Goncharov: A Bibliography
(Nottingham, 1986).
PART ONE
1
I
LYA
I
LYICH
O
BLOMOV
was lying in bed one morning in his flat in Gorokhovaya Street in one of those large houses which have as many inhabitants as a country town.
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.
Occasionally a sombre look of something like fatigue or boredom crept into his eyes; but neither fatigue nor boredom could banish for a moment the mildness which was the predominant and fundamental expression not only of his face but of his whole soul, so serenely and unashamedly reflected in his eyes, his smile and every movement of his head and hands. A cold and superficial observer, casting a passing glance at Oblomov, would have said: ‘A good-natured fellow, I’ll be bound, a simpleton!’ A more thoughtful and sympathetic man, after a long scrutiny of his face, would have walked away with a smile, full of pleasant thoughts.
Oblomov’s complexion was not ruddy, nor dark, nor particularly pale, but rather nondescript, or seemed to be so because he had grown so fat and flabby – which was unusual for a man of his age – whether because of lack of exercise, or fresh air, or both, it is difficult to say. Generally speaking, his body, if one were to judge by the dull and excessively white colour of his neck, his small, chubby hands, and his soft shoulders, seemed too effeminate for a man.
His movements, too, even when he was excited, were kept in check by a certain kind of mildness and laziness which was not without its own touch of gracefulness. If his mind was troubled,
his eyes were clouded over, lines appeared on his forehead, and he was plunged into doubt, sadness, and fear; but his anxiety seldom took the form of any definite idea and still more seldom was it transformed into a decision. All his anxiety resolved itself into a sigh and dissolved into apathy or drowsiness.
How well Oblomov’s indoor clothes went with the calm features of his countenance and his effeminate body! He wore a dressing-gown of Persian cloth – a real oriental dressing-gown, without the slightest hint of Europe, without tassels, without velvet trimmings, and so capacious that he could wrap it round him twice. The sleeves, in true Asiatic fashion, got wider and wider from the shoulders to the hands. Though this dressing-gown had lost its original freshness and here and there exchanged its natural sheen for one acquired by years of faithful service, it still preserved the brilliance of its oriental colour, and the material was as strong as ever.
The dressing-gown had a vast number of inestimable qualities in Oblomov’s eyes: it was soft and flexible, it was so light that he did not feel its weight, and it obeyed the least movement of his body like a devoted slave.
Oblomov never wore a tie or a waistcoat at home because he liked to feel unhampered and free. He wore long, soft, wide slippers; when he put his feet on the floor as he got out of bed, he invariably stepped into them without looking.
Lying down was not for Oblomov a necessity, as it is for a sick man or for a man who is sleepy; or a matter of chance, as it is for a man who is tired; or a pleasure, as it is for a lazy man: it was his normal condition. When he was at home – and he was almost always at home – he lay down all the time, and always in the same room, the room in which we have found him and which served him as a bedroom, study, and reception-room. He had three more rooms, but he seldom looked into them, except perhaps in the morning, and that, too, not every day, but only when his man-servant swept his study – which did not happen every day. In those rooms the furniture was covered with dust sheets and the curtains were drawn.
The room in which Oblomov was lying seemed at first glance to be splendidly furnished. It had a mahogany bureau, two sofas, upholstered in a silk material, and a beautiful screen embroidered with birds and fruits never to be found in nature. It had silk curtains, rugs, a number of pictures, bronze, porcelain, and all sorts of pretty knick-knacks. But an experienced person of good taste casting a cursory glance round the room would
at once detect a desire to keep up appearances somehow or other, since appearances had to be kept up. Oblomov, of course, had nothing else in mind when he furnished his study. A man of refined taste would never have been satisfied with those clumsy and heavy mahogany chairs and those rickety book-stands. The back of one of the sofas had dropped and the mahogany veneer had come unstuck in some places.