Against Oblomov and Oblomovism
- cmil1167
- Jun 19
- 11 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
"Energy is Eternal Delight"
William Blake
I
Oblomov, the eponymous anti-hero of Ivan Goncharov’s 1859 satirical novel, is the half-living embodiment of inertia. He's widely considered to be the epitome of the ‘superfluous man’ of Russian literature of the 1840s and 1850s, but but he has none of the Byronism, glamour, or elegance of Turgenev’s Bazarov or Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. A man in his thirties living in rooms in Petersburg with his manservant Zhakar and cook Anisya, Ilya Ilych Oblomov came up to the capital from Oblomovka, the family estate in the provinces, to join the civil service, eleven years before the action of the novel begins. After two years in his job he used a faked sick note to escape work of any kind for good, and sequestered himself from society.
Oblomov lives in genteel squalor, due in part to the neglect of his irascible factotum Zhakar, himself an indolent buffoon. In his gloomy apartment are cobwebs, plates with mouldering scraps of food, and a few books and journals gathering dust, unread or somnolently glanced through. He never goes out, rarely gets up, and lives only for Anisya’s meals, wine, and coffee, and luxuriating in his bed.
Recently I read an old review of the novel in The Spectator that claimed the novel is a “guide to being idle”. It’s nothing of the sort, but this view of Oblomov, that he is a cultured proto-slacker to be admired and emulated, rather than pitied, and that the novel celebrates a life of idling, is a typical but perverse misreading. The same review referred to Oblomov as “a fizzing ball of energy intellectually”, but there’s no evidence in the text to support such a statement, yet this take too, that Oblomov is a philosopher of idling, is also prevalent. He doesn’t read (“serious reading exhausted him”), write, take any interest in art or politics, or in anything else.
Goncharov was very obviously against Oblomovism, but you wouldn't think so from much that has been written about the book and its pitiable anti-hero. Critics and reviewers have been altogether too kind to him. Oblomov does have good qualities, but his indolence isn’t one of them. “Flabby beyond his years”, he lives a depressive’s existence, in semi-darkness, attentive to and curious about nothing: “... for Ilya Ilich recumbence was never a necessity, as it would be for an ill or sleepy man, not an occasional occurrence, as it would be for someone who was weary, not a pleasure, as for a lazy man; it was his normal state”.
Oblomov is “an exaggerated portrayal of one of life’s extremes”, as Goncharov put it. He was not aiming for psychological realism, but presenting a satirical personification of a feckless, parasitic upper middle class. Oblomov is a target of authorial ridicule (though the satire is unusually gentle) and to identify with or to emulate him is absurd. Goncharov thought of Oblomovism - the name given to this destructive apathy by one of the novel’s characters - as a tendency that was debilitating Russia as a whole, its peasantry, bourgeoisie, and its Civil Service.
Oblomov is no dandy aesthete along the lines of Huysmans’s des Esseintes, no intrepid mental traveller to the depths of inner space, experimenting with new modes of living. His merits are modest, and he is an endearing but pitiful mediocrity. He makes a few broadsides against society to justify his withdrawal from it, but his comments could have been lifted from a novel, and are rationalisations to justify his permanent lie-in and etiolated existence. Oblomov has been liberated from labour by the serf system in Russia, and the essence of his existence is an inherited parasitism, his habitual state one of near stupefaction. If the satire is gentle, it’s because Goncharov was no stranger to procrastination and sloth. It took him eleven years to complete the novel and, like Oblomov, he retired from the civil service to rooms in Petersburg, and shut himself away from society.
II
We meet Oblomov as he receives a series of visitors from his bed, ex-colleagues and amiably lampooned social types, in his once opulent but now tatterdemalion oriental dressing gown. Subinsky and Volkov, social butterflies, Alexeyev, an exaggerated personification of nobodyness, Penkin, an up-and-coming young writer who observes that Oblomov is “the same incorrigible lazy bones”, and Tarantiev, an arrogant, scheming sponger. Each tries to persuade him to accompany them to Ekatarinof, a pleasure garden along the lines of Vauxhall Gardens. He refuses, and tries in turn to persuade each of them to stay and have dinner with him instead. Between callers, Zhakar entreats him to get out of bed. By midday he has made it to his armchair, though still in his dressing gown, and he returns to his bed after Tarantiev has left.
The plot is driven by two long-unanswered letters that Oblomov has received. One is from the bailiff at Oblomovka informing him of the parlous condition of the estate and its drop in income, requesting that he come and personally put things in order. It’s obvious from the letter that he’s losing money from the estate’s mismanagement, and that he’s been diddled by the bailiff. The other is from his landlord, giving him notice to leave, as he wants to knock Oblomov’s flat together with the adjoining one. Oblomov knows he has to find a new accommodation, and that he needs to visit his estate, but can muster the strength for neither. Tarentiev offers to send an acquaintance of his to be Oblomov’s agent at Oblomovka, and also tells him that his friend, Ivan Matveyevich, has a house on the ‘Vyborg side’ of Petersburg (a semi-rural, less salubrious district, across the other side of the Neva) who employs his sister, Agafia Matveyevna, as housekeeper and cook.
Finally, Stolz arrives. It is four-thirty and Oblomov is still in bed. Stolz is Oblomov’s childhood friend, a man characterised by Goncharov as Oblomov’s opposite, although what he does for living is left unclear. Whatever, he’s a man of action who is “constantly in motion ... who both went in society, and read, but when he found the time for all this, God only knows”. Oblomov “sincerely loved and trusted him alone”, and only Stolz succeeds in getting him up, dressed, and out into society again.
They agree that Stolz will stay with Oblomov,, and while he unpacks Oblomov dozes and drifts off into a dream, really a dreamed memory, of his boyhood on Oblomovka. It’s given a long chapter to itself, and the life and scenes it describes are the psychological explanation for his Oblomov’s passivity, lethargy, and gluttony. “The people of Oblomovka”, Goncharov writes, “had a hard time believing emotional upheaval. They did not accept life as a round of constant aspirations to go somewhere and achieve something. They understood life as nothing other than an ideal of tranquillity and inaction”.
Life at Oblomovka is peaceful, and existence there is based around food, “the first and most vital concern in Oblomovka”, and his mother spends the whole morning conferring with staff about the menu for lunch, a meal followed by universal napping. She overfeeds him, ensuring that he does nothing for himself, even putting on his own socks, and is always looking for an excuse not to send him to school (a school run by Stolz’s father). His life is made up of meals, strolls, and vacant reverie, in an atmosphere of incipient dilapidation and slow decay. For Goncharov the estate stands for Russia as a whole.
After Oblomov recounts his dream to him Stolz comments perceptively that “it all began with your inability to put on your own stockings and ended with your inability to live”. The dream shows that Oblomov suffers not from an excess of clarity about life, but is victim of a natal nostalgia. Uncorrupted by his privilege, it's true that Oblomov is kind and generous, and has remained artless, but he is at the same time useless - he just can’t get his shit together. As Stolz puts it in one of his several encomiums for Oblomov “He has an honest and faithful heart ... having lost the strength to live he hasn’t lost his honesty and faithfulness ... his soul is transparent, clear as crystal. Such people are rare”. Yet there's not enough in the text to support such laudations. It's true that Oblomov does loan out negligible sums of money to former acquaintances and indulgently keeps on a servant at least as lazy as him. But as for ‘goodness,’ that’s about it, it’s just that he’s not actively bad.
Things change for a while. That night Oblomov and Stolz go out for dinner with a large party. Oblomov overcomes his near agoraphobia and goes back into society, with difficulty, and with several scenes of amusing gaucheness. In his youth, we're told, Oblomov was attractive to women, but “because intimacy with women entails a great deal of trouble ... he tended to limit himself to a bow from afar, at a respectable distance ... his amorous intrigues never developed into full blown romances ... and in their innocence, simplicity and purity were not inferior to tales written by some lady lodger of a certain age”.
Stolz goes on business abroad, expecting Oblomov to join him in Paris, after having introduced him to the vivacious, clever and teasing Olga Ilyinsky and her guardian aunt. He thought that introducing him to Olga “would be like bringing a lamp into a darkened room”, not foreseeing that the two would fall in love.
With Olga, Oblomov’s “heart thirsted for life again”, and so follows the longest section of the book, and the narrative shifts from social comedy bordering on burlesque to the glandular fiasco of romantic love. All the transports, rhapsodies, lachrymal laments, declarations, doubts, obstacles, and sub-plots of their affair are recounted. The bathetic, almost baroque delineation of elevated emotion and fine feeling in this section I took to be satirical-parodic. Intentionally humorous or not, it is very funny.
For Olga “her love is justified by [Oblomov’s] meekness, his pure faith in good, and most of all his tenderness ... he was simpler than Stolz and kinder, and although he did not make her laugh, he made her laugh simply by being himself and easily forgave her teasing”. This is hardly propitious. Olga gives off a faint whiff of reform, and they debate his way of living together often. Oblomov is a rescue project for her, and his getting his act together in regard to his estate is an implicit condition for their marriage. But over this, even as he is systematically fleeced by Tarantiev’s agent, he continues to procrastinate, just as he continually makes excuses not to join Stolz in Paris.
Oblomov writes a break-up letter that surprisingly shows he has the full measure of both himself and Olga, although they are briefly reconciled and plan to shortly announce their engagement to Olga’s aunt. But Oblomov is right, his love was a mere velleity. He makes excuses not to visit Olga. Meanwhile, he has moved to rooms in the house of Ivan Matveyevich on the Vyborg side, and the Neva freezes over, conveniently separating them.
III
So far, so farrago. The truth is that Oblomov started noticing his new landlady and cook Agafia, who eventually becomes his wife, as soon as he moved in. “What wonderful coffee! Who makes it?” he asks on his first day in his new apartment. He looks at Agafia, a widow with two small children “with the same pleasure with which he looked at a hot curd tart”, ogling her strategically uncovered shoulders, pneumatic embonpoint and “fat active arms”. His concupiscence is as much gustatory as carnal. She’s a wonderful cook and genius of household management. Her brother, a gourmand like Oblomov, lives in a flat upstairs and ensures that the household has the finest provender the city has to offer, with no expense spared.
From the beginning Agafia has been seducing Oblomov. It’s a sly and sweet seduction, shy glances and smiles, teasing flashes of flesh. And above all, endless delicious meals, snacks and drinks. Agafia, seemingly a woman with little-to-no agency, knowingly steals Oblomov away from her undeclared rival, the sexy bluestocking Olga. What earns Oblomov her devotion is his lack of vulgarity, coarseness and guile, and his kindness to her children. Without doubt these are fine qualities, refinements Agafia finds captivating and to which she’s up until now been a stranger. She also, through her union with Oblomov, significantly raises the social status of her and her children.
Stolz, shortly after Oblomov’s move, returns to Russia and puts affairs at Oblomovka in order, sacking the agent Tarantiev had sent and ensuring that Oblomov gets a comfortable income from his estate. Agafia repairs Oblomov’s dressing gown, signalling a return to his previous otiose mode of living. But it’s nowhere near as apathetic and desultory as before: the food is even better, he has sympathetic company, everything is clean, bright and bustling around him. At Agafia’s “everything of a hostile nature had disappeared from his life” and, smoking his post-prandial cigar “in a dull reverie”, his new life “reminds him of Oblomovka”.
However, there’s a temporary interruption of Oblomov’s idyll. Tarentiev and Ivan Matveyevich (who has in the meantime moved out, and no longer supplies top-quality groceries to the household), to make up for the loss of their share of the corrupt agent’s swindling of Oblomov, trick Agafia into signing a fraudulent promissory note claiming Oblomov is in debt to her, which must be paid off every month to Matveyevich, so that much of the estate’s income is diverted to the swindlers. For a while, the couple are on their uppers, their indigence, as was their plenty, described in terms of food, its quality and quantity.
Stolz returns to Russia for good – by now having married Olga himself – to find Oblomov in this reduced state. He soon uncovers the dastardly plot by Tarantiev and Ivan Matveyevich, and Oblomov’s income from his estate is restored to him in full. Stolz and Olga take an estate next to Oblomovka, but Oblomov can’t be persuaded to move and take over the running of it. Agafia’s home returns to being again another Oblomovka, where Oblomov lives "surrounded by good, simple, loving faces ... in a lazy crawl from one day to the next.”
Occasional sleepy peasant rutting, steaming pies, tasty tarts and pastries, cake, vodka, wine, frequent naps, coffee, cigars. More, it’s true, than many could hope for and of which, no doubt, many dream. It’s a state of animal slumber, life lived in a struggle-free eternal present. Oblomov progresses from flabby to fat. He eats to excess, tries to sleep and nap as much as he can, and takes no exercise other than a resented daily post-prandial walk.
He and the lovingly servile Agafia now have a baby boy, Andrei (she sets the rascal onto Oblomov’s recumbent body so that he can pull his nose or ear to wake him). Stolz is appalled at Oblomov’ marriage and paternity, and his persistent refusal to go and run his estate. Reminiscing about their romance, Oblomov observes of Olga that “she can sing the Casta Diva, but she doesn’t know how to make vodka like this, nor how to make a chicken and mushroom pie”.
Oblomov dies of a second stroke shortly after Stolz’s final visit, brought on, in the words of his doctor by “lying about and eating fatty, heavy food”. It’s a sad end: “not having experienced the pleasures to be attained through struggle, he mentally rejected them and felt at peace only in his forgotten corner, which was alien to action, struggle and life”, and he “passed away without pain or suffering, like a clock someone had forgotten to wind”.
Perhaps if the satire of Oblomov had been just a little crueller, more venomous, and traitorous to Goncharov's class, not so many readers would have read against his condemnatory intentions and crassly taken Oblomov as an exemplar. Oblomov is very funny, but the humour is gentle and the protagonist treated with a little too much compassion. There’s room in the world for Oblomovs and Oblomovism, it’s a social type and human predilection, and sometimes a necessity as a method of recuperation. But its universality or permanence is baneful, an illness, the death of the human spirit. Baudelaire wrote of ennui, to which he was not immune, that it was a spirit of evil, one that “could swallow the whole world in a yawn”.