Product Description

Set at the beginning of the nineteenth century, before the ideal of industrious modern man, when idleness was still looked upon by Russia's serf-owning rural gentry as a plausible and worthy goal, there was Oblomov.

Indolent, inattentive, incurious, given to daydreaming and procrastination-indeed, given to any excuse to remain horizontal-Oblomov is hardly the stuff of heroes. Yet, he is impossible not to admire. The image of this gentle daydreamer, roused to action for one brief period of ardent but begotten love, is a fixture of Russian culture. He is forgiven for his weakness and beloved for his shining soul.

Ivan Goncharov's masterpiece is not just ingenious social satire, but also a sharp criticism of nineteenth-century Russian society.

Translator Marian Schwartz breathes new life into Goncharov's voice in this first translation from the generally recognized definitive edition of the Russian original, edited by L.S. Geiro and published in Leningrad in 1987. Schwartz also includes a Gastronomical Glossary in this edition.

The Russian novelist Ivan Goncharov (18121891) was born in Simbirsk, Russia. He served for thirty years as a minor government official and traveled widely. His short stories, critiques, essays, and memoirs were published posthumously in 1919. Oblomov was his most popular and critically acclaimed novel during his lifetime.

Marian Schwartz has translated Russian literature for over thirty years. She has published over two dozen book-length translations, along with twenty issues of Russian Studies in Literature. She is the principal English translator of the works of Nina Berberova and is a past president of the American Literary Translators Association.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #869421 in Books
• Published on: 2008-12-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 576 pages

From The Washington Post
Nineteenth-century Russian fiction is one of the undisputed glories of world literature. Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, Fathers and Sons -- who does not know, if only by name, these masterpieces of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev? Perhaps one might add Gogol's Dead Souls to this list or even Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time. Yet suppose one were to mention Tales of Belkin, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District or The Golovlyov Family. How many people would recognize these similarly wonderful books by Pushkin, Leskov and Saltykov-Shchedrin?

In this same elite category of the too-little-known belongs Oblomov (1859), one of the most popular Russian novels and certainly the most winsome and delightful of all the works just mentioned. Its pages relate the story of a man who, deep down, never really wants to get out of bed, and who remains throughout his life as guileless and kindly as a Slavic version of Forrest Gump. In a preface to Stephen Pearl's fine new translation, Tatyana Tolstaya suggests that on the basis of this novel alone, its author, Ivan Goncharov (1812-1891), may be Russia's "true national writer." That may be exaggerated, but even Chekhov -- who really is Russian's national writer (to my mind, anyway) -- did claim that Goncharov stood "10 heads above me in talent."

Tolstaya argues that "there is something deeply Russian in the character of Oblomov, something that strikes a chord in every Russian heart. This something lies in the seductive appeal of laziness and of good-natured idleness, the golden conservation of a serene, untroubled childhood when everyone loves one another and when life with its anxieties and demands is still over the horizon. It is to be found in the tact and delicacy of 'live and let live,' in taking the path of least resistance, in unassertiveness, and an aversion to fuss and bother of any kind."

In essence, Ilya Ilyich Oblomov prefers daydreaming to actually doing anything. Such charming indolence is distinctly un-American, in sharp contrast to the get-up-and-go of Oblomov's close friend Andrei Stoltz. But then Stoltz is half-German, which obviously explains his practicality, efficiency and no-nonsense approach to everything, from business to romance. If Theodore Dreiser had been writing this book, Stoltz would have been the hero.

The novel opens with Oblomov -- around 30, somewhat plump and definitely out of shape -- lying on his divan wrapped in an old dressing gown. For the next 100 pages he pretty much remains just where he is, as a series of friends drop by to say hello, invite him out or try to cadge some money. Money is, in fact, a bit of a problem just now since our rentier-hero relies on his estate to pay his expenses in St. Petersburg. But the bailiff has written with lots of unpleasant news. Drought has ruined the harvest, peasants have started to run off, the old manse is falling down. This clearly makes for a serious crisis, and Oblomov finds himself "faced with the grim prospect of having to think of some way of doing something about it." Despite the sound advice of Stoltz, that something doesn't include actually going home to check up on matters himself. Far easier to forget about the letter for a while, and maybe everything will turn out OK.

Besides, there's far worse on the immediate horizon: Oblomov's landlord plans to renovate the apartment building and wants his feckless tenant to move out right away. Move! Who can face such an overwhelming prospect? At least not now, when it's time for a little nap.

"Oblomov's Dream" makes up the whole of chapter nine, and was, in fact, published by itself (in a magazine) long before the novel came out. Just on its own, this reminiscence of things past offers 37 of the most wonderful pages you will ever read. Oblomov's memories of the sleepy summer days and cozy winter nights of his childhood waft us into an Edenic paradise of "placid and unruffled calm," a world where nobody really does anything at all. After a heavy lunch, nearly every living thing falls into an afternoon slumber until teatime, as if a fairy had passed a wand over the estate. People doze away the decades. When feeling unusually energetic, Oblomov's mother might spend a busy three hours with a tailor discussing how to make her husband's quilted jacket into a coat for her little boy.

At Oblomovka, even a letter from an old friend, who wants the recipe for the family's home-made beer, demands way too much effort to answer. During long winter evenings, though, people will laugh and laugh as they recall -- it's really too funny -- how Luka Savich's sled fell to pieces as he was sliding down the hill. And what about the day the cows and goats broke through the fence and ate all the currant bushes? Oh, that was a time! By contrast with Oblomov's childhood home, the sleepy, sun-dappled Blandings Castle of P.G. Wodehouse is a veritable hive of industry. "The people of Oblomovka found it difficult to believe in painful emotions . . . . overpowering emotion was something they avoided like the plague."

Not surprisingly, the grown Oblomov has inherited this disposition to take it easy and go with the flow -- he calls it oblomovshchina -- when suddenly his entire manner of half-life is overturned: Stoltz forces him out into the world, and there, one evening, he meets Olga. Or rather Olga! Olga!! Love encourages our hero to buy some new clothes, read the newspapers, attend the theater and actually write that letter to his bailiff. Goncharov's (somewhat long) account of how love sneaks into the hearts of two innocents recreates the almost embarrassingly true-to-memory course of youthful infatuation. The long strolls in the garden, the little spats, the make-up kiss. Ah, first love!

One particular evening walk, however, sounds more than a tad suggestive. The summer heat is building toward a thunderstorm, and Olga feels stifled inside the house. Even outside, she can't breathe, her heart pounds, she trembles, her breast heaves, she sighs faster and faster for relief, speaks faintly, feels a kind of burning inside her breast, then shudders and squeezes Oblomov's hand convulsively before finally bursting into uncontrollable tears. Afterward she walks home unsteadily, feeling weak, with "a strange unconscious, dreamy smile on her face." How did this get past the Russian censors? But, more important, can any grand amour, no matter how grand, actually overwhelm the power of oblomovshchina?

There are many surprises yet to come in Goncharov's quietly humorous, touching and thought-provoking book. How, for instance, should we finally judge Oblomov? Is he an aristocratic parasite, a holy fool or a kind of Buddhist saint? Academic readers will note the expert control of time in the way the novel slows down and speeds up. But anyone will admire how Goncharov brings the subsidiary characters to vivid life, especially Oblomov's sullen but fanatically loyal servant Zakhar, his bovine landlady Agafy Matveyevna (whose elbows fascinate her tenant) and his supposed friend, the shameless scoundrel Tarantyev. Little wonder that Tolstoy declared himself "in rapture over Oblomov" and kept going back to it again and again. The 19th-century critic Vissarion Belinsky once said that reading Goncharov's admired first work of fiction -- A Common Story -- was "like eating cool watermelon on a hot summer day." (That novel sounds like another job for Stephen Pearl.) Oblomov is even better, though you probably don't want to eat watermelon in bed, which is the obvious place to enjoy this altogether splendid book.

Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review
"Offers a fine example of sly and compassionate satire, a very rare genre indeed"-Michael Wood, London Review of Books (London Review of Books )

"You can't help but be captivated by the 'rapture' that Tolstoy spoke of when reading and rereading it."-Ron Rosenblum, Slate, A Slate Best Book of 2008 (Slate )

"The combination of Goncharov's edits and Schwartz's translation left me thumbing back to the copyright page to confirm 1862, not 1962, as this translation sparkles with contemporary lyricism and humor."-Karen Vanuska, Quarterly Conversation (Quarterly Conversation )

"Long before Jerry Seinfeld and Samuel Beckett, there was Ivan Goncharov, a minor government official in czarist Russia, and his classic novel about an ordinary Russian aristocrat mired in his own extraordinary inertia."-Chris Lehman, Bookforum (Bookforum )

"Oblomov is a truly great work, the likes of which one has not seen for a long, long time. I am in rapture over Oblomov and keep rereading it."-Leo Tolstoy (Leo Tolstoy )

"[Goncharov is] ten heads above me in talent."-Anton Chekhov (Anton Chekhov )

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Russian

Customer Reviews

A fun and moving story of "the Russian Hamlet"
Oblomov was written just a couple of years before the abolition of serfdom in Russia, a time when the landowners were still clinging to feudal ways of making money but had been exposed to (and for the most part fascinated by) more modern ways of living their upper-class lives. The title character, like many other landowners, has for some time lived in Petersburg, away from his family estate, but unlike many others he finds himself very bored with society life. Instead, he prefers to remain in his bed, entertaining a handful of guests, mulling over but never putting to paper a plan to improve his estate, and, for him most pleasantly of all, daydreaming about his simple and idyllic childhood in the country. To any outside observer, he is pathetic in this state, where he can't even finish writing a letter, so his childhood friend Stolz tries to bring him out of his torpor. Stolz fails in persuading him that going to dinner parties and taking part in high-society backstabbing is any better than lying in bed, but he does manage to rouse him to some kind of action by introducing him to his friend Olga. Olga and Oblomov fall in love, with Olga dreaming of a permanently-changed Oblomov and Oblomov dreaming of a future growing old with Olga on Oblomov's family estate. Meanwhile, circumstances force Oblomov to move into a new apartment, where the landlady takes quite a liking to him but the landlady's brother, along with one of Oblomov's longtime houseguests, conspire to defraud Oblomov. This probably only summarizes about half of the novel, but saying much more would probably give away too much of the ending.

Despite the unattractiveness of Oblomov's preferred lifestyle, Goncharov manages to make Oblomov a very lovable character. The reader is brought into a fair amount of sympathy with Oblomov's nostalgia for his childhood and his innocent hopes for a peacefully happy future, and I for one was unable to blame Oblomov for wanting to stay in bed rather than put up with all the artifices and machinations of high society life. All the love affairs in the novel are mostly well put-together (though in the novel's final part Goncharov was a bit too long-winded about some of the characters' emotions), and although Oblomov receives by far the most attention, both Olga and Oblomov's servant Zahar are well- (and in the latter case quite amusingly-) drawn The main qualm I had about this book prior to reading it was that the prospect of spending 500 pages on a novel about a man who wants to do nothing but lie by himself in bed sounded a bit boring, but that turned out to be unfounded for a couple of reasons. First, Stolz and Olga do manage to get him out of bed and persuade him to take action on some fronts, even if his deeper inclinations still show throughout. Second, the first (150-page) part of the novel, which Oblomov does spend entirely in bed, surprisingly turned out for me to be the novel's most entertaining part.

There were some minor technical problems with the work (in particular I thought some of the changes of scene were quite awkward), but these did not take away at all from my enjoyment of the book. Oblomov is ultimately a tragic figure, and his flaw of inaction is very much tied up with the archaic feudal system in place in Russia at the time. However, this does not prevent those of us living 141 years in the future and many thousands of miles away from sympathizing with him and having a great deal of fun as more and more about this fascinating character is revealed.

Eats shoots and translates
You are best off buying the old Magarshack translation, published by Penguin Classics.

The new Pearl translation contains so many unnecessary typographical errors--comma disease, carriage returns that insert white lines in the middle of paragraphs more than once, quotation marks regularly lost track of--that the edition is too broken to use with pleasure.

Stylistically Pearl's done something different from Magarshack, "updating" the old-feeling language. This sometimes works well in dialogues between characters, but not so much in the voice of the narrator, in my opinion.

The saint of sloth
Oblomov, the main character of Ivan Goncharov's novel, is widely regarded as one of the finest literary examples of the backward-looking landed gentry of mid-nineteenth century Russia. His name has even entered the Russian language in the term "oblomovshchina", meaning backwardness, inertia. The unheroic hero Oblomov is also a very fine literary creation of a fully-fledged human being. He is a melancholy idealist, a dreamer whose temperament is such that he never begins to put his dreams into action. His tragedy is that he weighs the possible obstacles to his endeavors for such a long time that, finally, he never even starts to act.

Ivan Goncharov is at his best when he describes the mental processes of Oblomov that lead to his bumbling life. There is no better description of how the mind of a pessimistic person manipulates the perception of reality than in this book.

"The Saint of Sloth" is the title of a review written by the critic V.S. Pritchett for the New York Review of Books. It captures nicely the two main aspects of Oblomov's character. On the one hand, Oblomov is lazy, irresponsible, pessimistic, paralyzed, complacent, slothful; but on the other hand he is idealistic, true to himself, honest, child-like, innocent, saintly. He is ultimately a lovable human being. He does not lack wisdom, he lacks resolve.

As can be expected, Goncharov's book is not an action-packed thriller. On the first 50 or so pages, Oblomov barely manages to get out of his bed. A patient reader who keeps reading, however, is rewarded with a wonderfully realistic love story (including all the ups and downs), and many wise comments by the bachelor Goncharov on life, love, passion, duty and marriage.