"Oblomov" Goncharov

What’s the good of a man like you? You might as well be a bundle of straw.

I wish I could lie down and go to sleep for ever.

This magnificent book is about whether to simply endure life or to really live it, and if the latter, then how.

Ilya Ilyitch Oblomov is a good-hearted man of independent means who lives a life of excessive laziness. Ensconced in his bed, or on his sofa in one room in his apartment, he spends his days in his worn and filthy dressing gown doing nothing, not even reading or writing (there is not a shred of paper in the place, and the ink in the inkwell has dried up), and bickering incessantly with his servant, Zahar, who has been with him since his childhood and treats his master with a mixture of contempt, devotion, insolence and humility. At times their relationship takes on some of the hilarious character of Beckett’s ambiguous and bleak male-male relationships:

“You lose everything,” [Zahar] remarked, opening the door into the drawing room to see if the handkerchief was there.
“Where are you going? Look for it here. I haven’t been in there for two days. Do be quick,” Ilya Ilyitch said.

The plot involves Oblomov’s struggle to escape the vice of sloth, in his failed love affair with the ravishing Olga Sergeyevna, his growing love for his landlady Agafya Matveyevna, and the machinations of her brother and his crony to rob Oblomov of the income from his estate. Oblomov is motivated by a drive to achieve the perfect bliss of family life, to which he thinks Olga can help him. Ironically, he achieves this state only with his landlady, and it takes him a while to realise this. Olga eventually marries Oblomov’s childhood friend, the worldly and practical Stolz, while Oblomov succumbs to the enervating effects of indecision, prevarication and idleness.

The theme of the true nature of love is dealt with in the relationship between Oblomov and Olga, and later in the relationship between Olga and Stolz. Early in their love, Oblomov panics and writes a long letter to Olga, warning her away from him, declaring that her love is a mistake. He clearsightedly warns that the projection of a false ideal on to an object of potential love can be mistaken for love itself; indeed that love often consists in this very projection: What you feel now is not real love, but only an expectation of it; it is merely an unconscious need of love which for lack of proper fuel burns with a false flame that has no warmth in it. The relationship between Stolz and Olga, which comes to prominence in the third part of the novel, is very well drawn with great psychological subtlety. The older Stolz teaches Olga the real meaning of love, and the relationship stands as a wonderful symbol of the marriage of innocence and experience: With the lamp of experience in his hand he ventured into the labyrinth of her mind and character, discovering each day new facts, new qualities….When Olga experiences depression later in their married life, it is Stolz who helps her most with these extremely wise words: Your sadness and yearning is rather a sign of strength. A lively active mind strives sometimes to go beyond the boundaries of life, finds of course no response to its questionings, and the result is sadness, temporary dissatisfaction with life… it’s the sadness of the soul questioning life about its mysteries. That is what one has to pay for Prometheus’s fire! You must not merely endure but love this sadness and respect your doubts and questions, they are the overflow of the luxury of life and appear for the most part on the summits of happiness. Through the character of Stolz, Goncharov reveals himself as great a philosopher of love as Stendahl.

Another marriage depicted in the novel, is that of the peasant Zahar, and the housekeeper Anyissa. She is extremely able, and puts Zahar’s clumsiness, and laziness constantly to shame, for which he exacts revenge by thrusting his elbow sharply into her breasts. Behind the high comedy of this marriage lurks the foresight of the great artist, in which the complex position of the peasant in Russian culture is symbolically described. Anyissa shows Zahar the correct way to do housework, to which Zahar responds: You stupid, I have done it my way for twenty years and I’m not likely to change for you. This little exchange exemplifies the hostile and bitter reaction the idealistic Populists were to encounter 15 years later during the 1870s in their attempts to better the peasants’ lives and improve them through modern agrarian methods and literacy. The presence of the servants in the novel added force to the controversy around the book. Goncharov’s contemporaries held that the Oblomov-Zahar relationship depicted the corrupting influence on both parties of the institution of serfdom. In the indolent figure of Oblomov, moreover, they saw a critique of Russian laziness and ineptitude, and in the practical figure of Stolz (a Russian German whose name means ‘proud’) a symbol of superior Western know-how, which Westernizers saw as the only and ultimate saviour of Russian problems. Our men of action have always been of five or six stereotyped patterns: lazily looking around them with half closed eyes, they put their hand to the machine of state, sleepily pushing it along the beaten track, treading in their predecessors’ footprints. But behold, their eyes are awakening from sleep, bold, lively footsteps can be heard, and there is a sound of animated voices… Many Stolzes with Russian names are bound to come soon! Oblomov thus acts as a bridge between the Slavophile/Westerniser debates of the 1840s, and the Father/Son debates of the 1860s as well as more generally articulating the Asian/European dialectic that has been at the heart of Russian culture since the age of Peter.

The book is of course an examination of laziness. The main foil for this is Stolz, who is a direct opposite of Oblomov, a man of action, an entrepreneur, a traveller and a socialite. Stolz claims that Oblomov is wasting his life lying on the sofa, and that the purpose of life is work, ambition, transcendence: live for the sake of the work itself, and nothing else. Work gives form and completeness and a purpose to life. Oblomov claims to the contrary that it’s his mode of life that is the real living, and that men of action are simply hiding from the fact that their lives are meaningless: There is no centre round which it all revolves, there is nothing deep, nothing vital. All these society people are dead men, men fast asleep, they are worse than I am. Empty reshuffling of days! Oblomov claims that his laziness makes him conscious of the gentle flow of life, of the delicious splashing of its stream, a moment by moment awareness of the passing of time that the busy men of action have no awareness of, but which should be the real purpose of existence: Isn’t the purpose of all your running about, your passions, ways, trade, politics, to secure rest, to attain this idea of a lost paradise? Oblomov is aware of the damage to his character his sloth is causing: he was painfully conscious that something fine and good lay buried in him and was perhaps already dead or hidden like gold in the depths of a mountain. But at the same time, he is an artist working in dreams. In part one, there is a long chapter entitled Oblomov’s Dream (the only named chapter in the novel) in which Oblomov’s childhood on his estate Oblomovka is described in idyllic terms. While this section gives plausibility to Oblomov’s psychology (he is shown to have been spoilt by over-indulgent parents, particularly his mother) it stands at the same time as a symbol of the golden age of Russia’s past, a vision of an ideal future towards which all Russians should strive, and a vision of a dreamlike alternative to the grimness of reality. This section was published separately in 1849, ten years before the rest of the novel, and did much to stoke the controversy the book aroused. Stolz loves to listen to Oblomov’s depictions of a perfect life on his estate, in which Oblomov paints a word picture of a kind of rural idyll with no falsity, no strife, a state of pure communion amidst plenty and the beauty of nature: Go on painting your ideal of life to me. Humanity at all times in all places has yearned for this dream: it is called peace.

Oblomov is one of the first novels in literature to deal explicitly with the concept of leisure time. Leisure time exists as an unarticulated fact in 19th century literature, both in novels and outside them, and is related to the emerging urban middle classes, who were not always working (like the rural peasantry) or not always doing nothing (like the landed aristocracy) but who switched between the two. However, it is not explored as a conscious theme until Oblomov. Oblomov used to have a job, but he gave it up when he became aware of the split between his working self and his leisured self: When do I live? He keeps repeating like a mantra throughout his working life. When then are you going to live? Why slave all your life? Oblomov is the first character in 19th century literature to voice the difference between the working self and the leisured self, and to reject the drive for personal transcendence and social betterment. Dostoevsky is claimed to have said: “We all come out from under Gogol’s overcoat”. Likewise, we are all the inheritors of Oblomov; out from under his filthy dressing gown, come Des Essientes, Ignatius Reilly, Zoyd Wheeler, and all the couch potatoes of our era.

Fragment 253

The interaction of people and books is a strange thing. A book takes its whole shape from the society that spawns it, then generalizes the material, renders it clearer and sharper, and as a consequence reality is transformed. The originals become caricatures of their own sharply drawn portraits and real people take on the character of their literary shadows.

Alexander Herzen.

During the early 1860’s two new kinds of character appeared in Russian literature, and in Russian society. These characters have left their enduring mark upon history and are still with us today.

The first is the drop-out. In 1859 Goncharov published his novel Oblomov, in which the eponymous protagonist spends his life consumed with lethargy, lying on the sofa, doing nothing at all. From him descend all the hippies, drop outs, slackers, wasters, agoraphobics, hikikomori, channel hoppers, internet surfers and couch potatoes, those who refuse or are incapable of participating actively in real life, and who replace it with unrealistic pipe dreams of universal peace, brotherhood, or who simply succumb to the enervating effects of an undisciplined and all too easily obtained material comfort.

The second is the revolutionary nihilist. In 1862 Turgenev published his novel Fathers and Sons, in which the hero, Bazarov, rejects everything the previous generation stands for, all ideals and standards. From him descend all the grim-faced revolutionaries of Russia and China, the terrorists of Islam, the Red Brigade, the IRA, those, in other words who are willing to sacrifice the human for the ideological, and who are characterised by an extreme hatred of the dominant social and cultural order.

Both these characters oppose the existing conditions, but their opposition takes different forms: the Oblomov’s is a passive rejection, the Bazarov’s is an active destruction. Modern man’s dissatisfaction with his age swings between these two poles.

Turgenev’s and Goncharov’s contemporaries were aware of the significance of the appearance of these two types, and both books caused storms of controversy.

The critic Dobrolyubov claimed: in each of us there resides a significant part of Oblomov. The critic Pisarev claimed Our whole younger generation with its aspirations and ideas can recognise itself in the characters of [Fathers and Sons].

Literature is in a certain sense both a picture and a mirror.

Dostoevsky

Fragment 153

One of the great historical ironies of the Fathers and Sons affair for Turgenev, was that how ever much he tried to deny that Bazarov was heartless and meant to be negative, the character nonetheless culminated in the figure of Lenin. It’s not for nothing that Bazarov is called the first Bolshevik.

"Fathers and Sons" Turgenev

The Nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky.

Oscar Wilde

For modern readers, Turgenev appears to be the most ‘artistic’ of the writers of his time. He deplored the idea that the artist must use art as a vehicle to propound his own views, and that art must always have social or utilitarian purpose. Polemic was completely alien to his fastidious nature. He appears to be more concerned with art, aesthetics, the transmission of subtle states of feeling caused by the beauty of nature, of personal relationships, of art; he is the most Jamesian of the Russians, the most French. His voice is understated, transparent, urbane and delicate; he never intrudes his views on the reader or the characters, but is concerned most with the integrity of his vision: to reproduce the truth, the reality of life, accurately and powerfully, is the literary man’s highest joy, he writes in his Reminiscences, even if that truth does not correspond to his own sympathies. His writing is the most realistic in the Chekhovian sense, in that it describes a recognizable world in which people are limited by their social environment, in which people cannot express directly what is in their hearts (unlike the torrential loquacity of Dostoevsky’s characters, say) but express it through silences, through glances, and the impalpable power of the unsaid. Turgenev is a master at describing the world, choosing details for details’ sake, not for symbolic or metaphorical reasons, but in order to give a felt life: in Fathers and Sons the chickens scratching in the yard, the statue of Silence with a broken nose placed in the stable, the jars of pickles on the window sill with their mis-spelt labels, the peasant woman who describes her illness as ‘hoisted by the gripes’... but cannot describe what she means by these words; all this creates an intensity of life. For modern readers his slim, svelte, achingly beautiful novels offer perfectly realized glimpses of a completely vanished world.

However, Turgenev was not without a social conscience, and his self-conscious artistry must be viewed in the context of a general Russian tendency to believe passionately in the mission of literature to change the world, to address and influence society, to combat: injustice, poverty, oppression. He was the boon companion of the social critic Belinksy, the revolutionary Bakunin, and the individualist Herzen. Many of his books entered directly into the burning issues of the day: Sketches from a Huntsman’s Album is said to have spurned the vacillating Tsar Alexander II to finally order the emancipation of the peasants; Rudin describes the stultification of intellectual life under the oppressive regime of Tsar Nicholas 1st. Fathers and Sons caused a huge controversy on its publication in 1862, with critics accusing the author of corrupting the young, and the young accusing him of misrepresenting them.

During the late 50s and early 60s, Russian intellectual life was characterized by a radical split between the ‘fathers' – the generation of writers who were young during the heavily oppressive 40s (among them Dostoevsky, who was imprisoned and exiled for his ‘revolutionary activities’) for whom the new Tsar Alexander II’s reforms were a breath of fresh air; and the ‘sons', the new generation of students and younger intellectuals, for whom these reforms were not fast or far-reaching enough. Fathers and Sons situates this generational conflict within family relations. A young medical student, Bazarov, accompanies his friend Arkady on a visit to the latter’s family home in the provinces, and then later the two friends visit Bazarov’s family. The two young men describe themselves as ‘nihilists’. Although Bazarov himself never defines what this means, his younger friend Arkady defines it for him: a person who approaches everything from a critical point of view… a person who doesn’t bow down before authorities, who doesn’t accept even one principle on faith, no matter how much respect surrounds that principle. A collection of Bazarov’s sayings helps to give the character of this nihilism:

➢ At present the most useful thing is to deny, so we deny.
➢ A decent chemist is twenty times more use than any poet.
➢ Aristocracy, liberalism, progress, principles,…what a lot of foreign, useless words. A Russian would not want them as a gift.
➢ I have conceived a loathing for this peasant. I have to work the skin off my hands for him, and he won’t so much as thank me for it.
➢ The tiny space I occupy is so small compared to the rest of space, where I am not and where things have nothing to do with me; and the amount of time in which I get to live my life is so insignificant compared to eternity, where I’ve never been and won’t ever be, yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood circulates, a brain functions, and desires something as well. How absurd! What nonsense!
➢ The only thing I’m proud of is that I haven’t destroyed myself, and no woman is going to destroy me.
➢ What’s important is that two times two makes four. The rest is nonsense.
➢ Nature’s not a temple but a workshop where man is the laborer.

Bazarov is in the line of heroes descended from Lermontov’s Pechorin, Pushkin’s Onegin, and Turgenev’s own superfluous man, Tchulkaturin: charismatic, original, luminescent, who at once create and describe a new type of character in literature and a new type of person in history. From him is descended Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, and Camus’s Meursault.

The opposite point of view in the dialectic in the novel is provided, firstly, by Arkady’s uncle, in many ways a portrait of the urban Westerniser Turgenev himself, who says: Civilisation… its fruits are dear to us. And don’t tell me they’re worthless. The most miserable dauber, the pianist who taps on the keys in a restaurant they are more useful than you are because they represent civilisation, and not brute Mongol force. You imagine that you are a progressive, you should be sitting in a Kalmuck wagon. Ironically, what Arkady’s uncle cannot understand is that Bazarov does not consider himself a progressive at all (‘progress’ is just another Western ‘–ism’). The book dramatises not only the debate between the two camps, but also their mutual incomprehension. The second way nihilism is contested is in the plot of the novel itself, in which Bazarov is undone by the forces of nature, the only forces that he ultimately recognises, first by the power of love, and then dying uselessly of blood poisoning, death by the most insignificant, microscopic and inglorious of causes.

It is Turgenev’s great genius that what is in effect a clearly drawn dialectic between two points of view does not descend into a mere novel of ideas, does not preach, does not take sides, does not sacrifice character for clarity of argument, does not bore. There are many discussion scenes in the book, but they are always gripping, because the characters are to the fore, the points of views expressed come palpably from the characters themselves, and not from the author, or from the dialectic. The book is full of many memorable characters, not least the women, all fully rounded and lovingly drawn, and there are many trademark Turgenev lyrical moments, such as the sound of Arkady’s father playing Schubert on the cello drifting across the evening garden.

Fragment 123

Notes on Dostoevsky 5

In Humiliated and Insulted, Dostoevsky offers this self-portrait of his working method.

While planning my novels I like to pace up and down the room. Incidentally, I have always found mulling over my compositions and imagining how they are likely to turn out more enjoyable than actually committing them to paper, and not just out of laziness.
I manage to overcome the temptation to throw down my pen and rush outside, and again make a furious onslaught on the paper in front of me –come what may I must finish my writing. My publisher must have it or he will not pay …for the two nights and days of toil during which I wrote a hundred and sixty pages!...When I really get going I get into such a nervous state I can think more clearly, my feelings are more acute and intense, and even the language just flows, so that under pressure the result flows out much better.

In a letter to his brother in 1845 he writes: What do I want with fame when I’m writing for daily bread?

"Humiliated and Insulted" Dostoevsky

This was a sombre story, one of those sombre and tormenting stories which so frequently and imperceptibly, almost mysteriously unfold under the heavy Petersburg sky, in the dark, clandestine by-lanes of the vast city, amidst the flighty ebullition of life, dull-witted egoism, conficting interests, morose debauchery, hidden crimes- amidst all this utter hell of a nonsensical and abnormal life.

If it could come about that each of us were to describe his innermost secrets –secrets which one would hesitate to tell not only to people at large, but even to one’s closest friends, nay, to fear to admit even to one’s own self - the world would be filled with such a stench that each one of us would choke to death. That’s why, speaking in parenthesis, all our social conventions and niceties are so beneficial.

I’m sometimes possessed by an indomitable urge to poke my tongue out at someone in certain circumstances.

The plot is the most complex of Dostoevsky’s novels, and the most Dickensian. A young writer is dealing with a family tragedy involving a cast-off daughter, an idealistic, hopeless young lover, his evil manipulative father, litigation and ruin. At the same time, he rescues from a brothel a young girl and tries to nurse her back to psychological and physical health. The book is fast-paced and teems with characters: an old dying man and his dog, a brothel owner, a private detective and his wife, an old German doctor; and incident: a lot of running around from one location to another, and Dostoevsky’s trademark dramatic confrontations between characters. In the second half of the book, sequential narrative more or less breaks down, as the press of events in both plots causes the narrator some difficulty. Over all these events and characters, linking them all together, is the evil genius of Prince Valkovsky, who starts out as a peripheral character, but gradually, sinisterly, moves to the centre of the book.

This novel was written and published at the same time as The House of the Dead, and shares as its main theme the examination of appearance versus reality. Compare this from Humiliated and Insulted: Some suddenly remembered detail from the past –at the time hardly noticed and quickly forgotten- now assumes a totally distinct significance in my mind, resonant and revelatory, shedding light on much that I had hitherto been enable to comprehend, and this from The House of the Dead: Even though I looked at everything with keen and avid attention, I could not discern much of what lay under my very nose.

The main vehicle for this concern with appearance versus reality is the character of Prince Valkovsky who goes out of his way to create a mask in order to fool people, and then takes pleasure in ripping off his mask: there’s a trait in my character you’ve not spotted as yet – a hatred of all this banal, utterly pointless show of innocence and sentimentality. One of my sporting amusements is to pretend that I am that way myself…(and) string along some everlastingly juvenile Schiller only suddenly and unexpectedly give him the shock of his life- lift up my mask, pull a face and poke out my tongue at him… The Prince’s depravity, a kind of cynical realpolitik, is set against Schillerian romanticism, both in dialogue, and in incident. Against his cynical worldly manipulations are placed the rescue of Nelly, and the kindness of the writer and his friends in rescuing her. The heart of the book, then, is this dialectic between worldly cynicism and Schillerian idealism. The latter is complicated by the figure of Alyosha, the Prince’s son. This character is another in the line of saintly characters that extends from Rostanev to Myshkin and Alyosha Karamazov. He was pure of heart and upstanding, ready to surrender wholeheartedly to all that was fair and splendid…he could not think and argue for himself…he did not have a whit of personal willpower… could become attached only to one who could rule, not to say dominate him. His inability to choose between the two loves of his life may be read as a kind of egoism which threatens to ruin the lives of the people he loves. Against this naïve Schillerism (?) is set the practical machinations of the author, Katya and Natasha, which are directed at a good end, which Alyosha in his idealism cannot achieve on his own. A cynical knowledge of the world and how it works, and a certain idealism towards it are both required, the novel seems to be saying

The story is told by the young writer Ivan Petrovich, who participates in all its main events. One comes pretty soon to like the character of the author. He is gutsy, and has just the right blend of cynicism and idealism to control the narrative, and to help the people around him in whose stories he takes an active part. In his key scene with the prince he sticks to his guns, and is just as rude to the Prince, as the Prince is to him: You simply talk too much, I said looking at him with contempt. As well as a man of the word, he is also a man of the deed: he attacks the Prince in the climactic scene of the book, and is capable of bursting in to a brothel to rescue a waif. Although the writer shares several details of Dostoevsky’s biography – he has just published Poor Folk in the novel and his fame is rising- he is clearly not Dostoevsky in the same way that the narrator of The House of the Dead is. There are several digs at Belinsky, and the Petrashevsky circle is satirised in the figures of Lavenka and Borenka and their circle of ardent philanthropists.

Narrative provenance is foregrounded as an act of memory, from Ivan’s hospital bed, where he has succumbed to an illness and is soon to die: I want to record everything now and if I had not devised this occupation for myself, I think I’d have died of misery. However, narrative authenticity is constantly compromised by the subtle suggestion that the story is a figment of Ivan Petrovich’s imagination, that he has made it up, and that all these events did not really happen to him or those he knows at all: The plot of a whole novel flashed before my imagination: A poor woman dying in a coffin-maker’s basement: her orphaned daughter occasionally visiting her grandfather who had cursed her mother; a demented eccentric old man breathing his last in a coffee house after the death of his dog: this is precisely a synopsis of the Nelly plot. The prince tells Ivan Petrovich: You call yourself a writer! You could model one of your characters on me. The book ends in an epilogue, which is separated initially from the rest of the narrative by a switch to a different tense, the present simple, but which soon switches back into the past simple as the ends of the story are wrapped up.

The book is the first in Dostoevsky’s canon which offers realistic portraits of women. Natasha, Katya, the Countess, Anna Semyonova, are the first really rounded female characters Dostoevsky creates in his work. The central female character of Natasha is especially powerful and well drawn, but even the peripheral female characters are as three dimensional.

It is also the first in Dostoevsky’s canon in which epilepsy appears. Nelly has several fits throughout the book, including at the most climactic moments. Ivan Petrovich also describes a sense of mystical terror which comes over him just before her appearance in the novel: a most dreadful agonizing fear of something I cannot define, something unfathomable and non-existent in the normal course of events, but which may at any given moment materialize and confront me as an unquestionable, terrible, ghastly and implacable reality, making a mockery of all evidence of reason. This fear, totally confounding all rationalization, normally increases inexorably, so that in the end the mind -which oddly enough on such occasions can function with particular lucidity- nevertheless loses all capacity to counteract the senses. It becomes unresponsive and impotent, and the resulting dichotomy only heightens the fearful agony and suspense. It’s this mystical terror which overcame Dostoevsky just before his fits, and which he here for the first time transforms into a description of existential dread.

No matter that we are humiliated, no matter that we are insulted, but we are together again!.. we shall go hand in hand and I shall say to them, this is my daughter without sin whom you have humiliated and insulted, but whom I love and bless for ever and ever.