Against Oblomov and Oblomovism

"Energy is Eternal Delight"

William Blake

I

Oblomov, the eponymous anti-hero of Ivan Goncharov’s 1859 novel is the half-living embodiment of inertia; widely considered to be the epitome of the ‘superfluous man’ of Russian literature of the 1840s and 1850s, but with 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, Oblomov came up from Oblomovka, the family estate in the provinces, to join the civil service, eleven years before the inaction of the novel begins. After two years in his job he uses a sick note admirably insolent in its blatant dishonesty to sequester himself from society to live a life of the mindless. He lives in genteel squalor, due not least to the neglect of his irascible factotum Zhakar, himself an indolent buffoon. There are cobwebs, plates with mouldering scraps of food, a few books and journals gather dust, unread or somnolently glanced through. A bong wouldn’t be out of place. 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 that the novel is a “guide to being idle”. Well, it’s nothing of the sort, but this view of Oblomov, that he is a character to be admired and emulated, rather than pitied, and that the it promotes a life of idling and creative unproductivity is typical, but is perverse. The same review referred to Oblomov as “a fizzing ball of energy intellectually”, but there’s absolutely no evidence in the text to support such a statement, yet this view too, that Oblomov is some kind of 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 obviously against Oblomov and Oblomovism, but you wouldn't think so from much that has been written about the book and its pitiable anti-hero, who is not some kind of existential rebel. Critics and reviewers of the various translations, and readers of the book I’ve spoken too, including the person that first urged the book on me thirty years ago, have been altogether too kind to Oblomov, and I feel the need to subject him to a little light bullying.

We’ll see that Oblomov does have good qualities, but his indolence isn’t one of them. “Flabby beyond his years”, he lives a classic depressive’s existence, in semi-darkness, redeemed, if you can call it that, by gourmandising, 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”.

There are different modes of idling, some more acceptable and admirable than others. Well-heeled and privileged contemporary idlers ought to remind themselves that one is often blind to one’s own unflattering reflection in satire’s mirror, and that Oblomov is “an exaggerated portrayal of one of life’s extremes”, as Goncharov put it, thus he is not aiming for psychological realism; he's also a satirical personification of a feckless, parasitic upper middle class, though Goncharov thought of *Oblomovism  - the name given to this tendency for destructive apathy by one of the novel’s characters - as a tendency that had taken over and was debilitating Russia as a whole, its peasantry, bourgeoisie and 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 and experience. His merits are modest, and I would argue that he is an endearing, but pitiful mediocrity. He makes a few broadsides against society to justify his withdrawal from it: there’s nothing irrational in in his loathing of labour’s curse, but his comments could have been lifted from a novel, and it’s clear from the rest of his characterisation and action they are mere rationalisations to justify the prolonging of his lie-in, forever. Oblomov is a target of authorial ridicule, though satire is unusually gentle, without even a trace of bile.

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. Oblivious to the daggers of time, Oblomov is an emtional a social cripple wallowing in low porcine daydreams of repletion, his sap so insipid it’s doubtful he has volition even for devotion to the solitary vice. There’s nothing even Bhuddhistical in his withdrawal, no passion for contemplating nature and creative dwelling on the ephemerality of phenomenal life, and certainly no asceticism.

If Goncharov’s satire is gentle, it’s because he was no stranger himself to procrastination and Oblomovism. It took him eleven years to complete the novel and he too retired from the civil service to shut himself away himself in rooms in Petersburg, withdrawing from society. Nevertheless, the book is a tract against sloth and Oblomov, in his etiolated existence, is committing the sin of accidie; in more contemporary parlance, he’s suffering from a disorder of diminished motivation.

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, wandered in from the pages of a Dostoevsky novel into this one. Each tries to persuade him to accompany them to Ekatarinof, a pleasure garden along the lines of Vauxhall Gardens. He refuses, and tries 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, still, however, 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 together with the adjoining flat. 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.

A still from Nikita Mikhalkov's 1980 film adaptation of the novel

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: “he owned part of a company that sent goods abroad”, and there’s a reference to him “inspecting mines”. 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 him into getting up, dressed, and out into society again.

They agree that Stolz will stay with Oblomov and whilst he unpacks Oblomov dozes and drifts off into dream, what is really a dreamed memory of his boyhood on Oblomovka. It’s given a long chapter to itself, and the life and scenes it describes can be seen as 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 feared a superfluity of passion like a fire ... they understood life as nothing other than an ideal of tranquillity and inaction”. Life on Oblomovka is peaceful and existence there is based around food, “the first and most vital concern in Oblomovka”, where his mother spends the whole morning conferring with staff about the menu for lunch, a meal followed by universal napping. Oblomov’s mother overfeeds him, ensures 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 Oblomov suffers not from an excess of clarity but is victim of a natal nostalgia, yearning for a return to a life without the torments of futurity. Feeling neither pain or passion, fire nor ice, he has fallen, in his attempt to recreate Oblomovka in little, back out of time. Undebauched by privilege, he has it’s true remained artless, but at the same time useless - he just can’t get his shit together. As Stolz puts it in one of his several encomiums to 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”. This artlessness puts him on company with Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin in The Idiot (something Dostoevsky noted) but really, he’s closer to Stan Ogden (“Occupation?”, “suppin’ ale”) than Myshkin, or to the dissident ennui of his mad literary cousin, Bartleby. There’s not enough in the text to support such laudations: Oblomov it’s true does loan out some 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 they go for dinner with a large party, and for a while Oblomov overcomes his near agoraphobia and goes back into society, with difficulty, and with several scenes of amusing gaucheness. In his youth 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 shift from social comedy bordering on burlesque to the glandular fiasco of romantic love. All the transports, rhapsodies, lachrymal laments, detours, declarations, doubts, obstacles, obstacles overcome, and sub-plots of their affair are recounted. This bathetic, almost baroque delineation of elevated emotion and fine feeling in this section I took to be satirical-parodic. It may not have been intended as such – but unintentional humour is, nevertheless, still funny.

For Olga “her love is justified by [Oblomov’s] meekness, his pure faith in good, and most of all his tenderness, tenderness such as she had never seen in any man’s eyes ... he was simpler than Stolz and kinder, although he did not make her laugh, he made her laugh simply by being himself and easily forgave her teasing”. This is not exactly propitious. Olga gives off a faint whiff of reform; 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 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 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 conveniently freezes over, 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 there. He looks at Agafia, a widow with two small children “with the same pleasure with which he looked at a hot curd tart”, sneakily 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, no expense spared.

From the beginning Agafia has been seducing Oblomov, but so subtly you barely notice. It’s a sly and sweet seduction, shy glances and smiles, teasing flashes of flesh. But 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, 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, 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”, listening the chicks chirruping outside his window, his new life “reminds him of Oblomovka”.

Ivan Goncharov

However, there’s a doleful interregnum in Oblomov’s idyll. Firstly, the landlady’s brother moves out and no longer supplies the top-quality groceries for the household. Oblomov can’t cover these costs because Tarentiev and Ivan Matveyevich, 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 her brother, so that much of the estate’s oncome is diverted to he and Tarantiev. 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 an Oblomovka in little, not just in its peace and plenty, but also in the social jollity of the shared table and Agafia’s domestic efficiency. Here, “everything breathed an abundance and fullness of domesticity ... surrounded by good, simple, loving faces ... in a lazy crawl for one day to the next.”

Spousal farmyard haunches, occasional sleepy peasant rutting, steaming pies, tasty tarts and pastries, vodka, wine, cigars. More, it’s true, than many could hope for and of which, no doubt, many dream. It’s such a state of ‘animal slumber’, life in a struggle-free eternal present, that philosopher-turned-EU-bureaucrat Alexandre Kojeve posited as the desired and ideal end-point for mankind, which he claimed had been realised in the American suburbs of the 1950s, that had reached the “final stage of communism”: a world of comfort and prosperity for all where you obtained what you desired without struggle: liberté, fraternité, banalité (it was a fantasy, of course, and American fiction and cinema of the period examined the dark reality of this specious consumerist utopia). And it’s just that life that Oblomov lives, an animal existence, and a toothless, not very playful animal at that.

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. Agafia’s loving servility demands nothing of him; she has little-to-nothing to say for herself (her brother calls her “a cow”), and makes no demands of him in return. The couple now have 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 make vodka like this, nor how to make a chicken and mushroom pie”.

Oblomov dies shortly after Stolz’s final visit of a second stroke, 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”. Goncharov’s happy ending is Andrei going off to be brought up by Olga and Stolz on their estate, with visits from his mother, who says she found her life’s fulfilment in her life with Oblomov, telling Stolz and Olga that her “life was not lived in vain” and that “she loved him as a lover, a husband, and master”.

Perhaps if the satire of Oblomov had been just a little crueller and more venomous, more traitorous to his class, not quite so many readers would have read against Goncharov’s satirical and condemnatory intentions, and crassly taken Oblomov as an exemplar, someone to be admired. It’s true that over time an author’s puppets may take against him or her, and Oblomov might be said, at the novel’s close, to have blown a good-natured raspberry at Goncharov - but this is purely down to Goncharov’s pusillanimity. Goncharov has the writer Penkin describe his work as “burning malice, bitter denunciation of vice, contemptuous laughter at a fallen humanity”. We’re supposed to disapprove of this, but this is how I like my satire, cruel and violent, like Smollet or Cervantes, or vituperative and ranting with a note of incipient madness like Bernhard or Swift. Oblomov is very funny, but the humour is gentle and the protagonist treated with a little too much compassion.

Oblomov intelligently and amusingly poses the question of how to live, why and who for, life’s eithers, ors, and neithers. There’s room in the world for Oblomovs and Oblomovism, it’s a social type and human predilection, sometimes a necessity in life as a mode of recuperation: but its universality or permanence is deathly, an illness, the death of the human spirit. Oblomovism is something you snap out of as soon as you can. The popular idea that Oblomov is a prototypical slacker doesn’t convince: the typical Gen X slacker was not a sofa-bound, bong-beguiled comedy stoner, but an intense liver, often creative, always enthusing about some new book, film, or record, and if they didn’t work or were doing a McJob it was because they were intensely alive, not half-dead. They were the last bohemians, and the last generation not to be a hideous human-screen-hybrid; nothing about the life of a 90s slacker resembles that of Oblomov, a man in convalescence from the condition of being born. It’s worth noting too that rhapsodes of abnegation and prophets of withdrawal such as Beckett and E M Cioran were extremely productive begetters of beauty, burning with lyric intensity. During the lockdowns many got a taste of Oblomovism, though albeit enforced. Sadly, some took to it. Atomised, withering and fattening simultaneously, just like Oblomov, even down to food being brought by serfs. It would even be pardonable to view Oblomov with contempt. For Baudelaire ennui, to which he was not immune, was a spirit of evil that “could swallow the whole world in a yawn”.

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*I reread Oblomov in Marian Schwartz’s 2008 translation, published by Yale University Press. It’s regarded by those qualified to comment on such matters as the best extant translation (it’s definitely the most handsome volume of the bunch). Schwartz explains convincingly why she uses the word ‘Oblomovshchina’ instead of the common translation ‘Oblomovism’, but I retained the latter, from the David Magarshack translation I read previously, simply because it is easier to say, type and remember: you might say out of pure laziness. There’s a charming 1980 film of the novel, Several Days from the Life of I. I. Oblomov, directed by Nikita Mikhalkov, currently available, like much of Mosfilm’s output, to view on YouTube.

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