CARLO TESTA Vancouver, B.C.

, Canada)

GONCHAROV'S OBLOMOV:
FRAGMENTATION, SELF-
MARGINALIZATION, COCKROACHES

I
In Part Two of Goncharov's Oblomov, the usually meek and unassuming
protagonist welcomes back to the capital his globe-trotting friend of old,
Andrei Shtol'ts, and in the ensuing conversation embarks upon a surprisingly
blunt attack on the emptiness and insignificance of mainstream aristocratic
life in St. Petersburg:

. . . H e H p a s H T C a M H e 3 era a a m a n e T e p 6 y p F C K a A )!(}I3Hb!'
- npoflojiacaji OH, JIO.IIŒCb Ha uHSaH.
K a K a 3 i xce Te6e HpaBHTCA? - CITPOCIIJI Ulrojibu.
- He raicaa, KaK 3aecb.
- L I ' r 0 )IC 3,n:eCb H M e H H O T a K H e I I O H p a B H J I O C b ?

— B e e , BeHHaa 6eroTHa B3aIIyCKH, Be'iHaH Hrpa JjpAHHbIX

ci-paCT14weK, oco6eHHo ./Ka,n:HOCTH, nepe6HSaHbA Apyr Y .LJ:pyra AoporH,

cnjieTHH, riepecyabi, LLteAqKH apyr ¡(pyro, 3TO OrJIR.LJ:bIBaHbe C Hor no
ro.�osb�; nocjiywaewb, o 4cm FOBOPAT, TaK ronosa 3aKpy;KHTCA,
o,qypeeuib.... rRe JK Tyr '-IeJIOBeK?' Fae ero qenocTb? Kyaa OH
C K P B I A C A , K a K p a 3 M e H H J I C J I H a BCAKYIO M e j l o q b ?
- MTo-HH6yab aa J�OJ17KH0 ?ICe 3 a H H M a T b C B e T H o 6 t n e e T B O , -
CKa3aJI IIITOJIb([, - y B C S I K O r O CBOH H H T e p e C b i . H a T O J K H 3 H b . . .

- CBET, 06Il1,eCTBO! Tbi, BEPHO, HapoHHO, AHUpett, nocujiaeuib

MeHA B 3TOT CBeT H 0 6 m e C T B 0 , 9 T 0 6 OT'6HTb 6 0 J I b r n e OXOTy 6 b r T b TaM.

)KH3Hh: xopoma NGH3Hb! Hero TaM HCKaTb? HHTepeCOB yMa, cepana? Tbi
rlocmotpm, rne qeHTp, OKOJIO KOToporo spaWaeTCaa Bee 3TO: HeT ero,
HeT H H n e r o r n y 6 o x o r o , s a s e A a � H - t e r o 3a > k h b o c B e e 3TO m e p T B e U b i ,
cnamne juorh, xy)Ke Mena, 3TH hjichh CBeTa H 06Il1,eCTBa! ...
- Tbi 4)ktjiocoq), U n h u l — C K a 3 a - n HITOJIBLA. — Bee XjlonoqyT,
TOJIBKO T e 6 e H H ` d e r 0 H e H y 7 K H 0 !

' "I dislike this Petersburg life of yours!" he went on, lying down on
the sofa.
 "What sort of life do you like?" asked Shtol'ts.
"Not this sort."
"What is it you dislike particularly?"
"Everything-this constant rushing about, this eternal interplay of
petty passions, greed especially, the eagerness with which they try to get
the better of one another, the scandalmongering, the gossip, the way they
look you up and down; listening to their talk makes your head swim and
you go silly. Where is the real man here? Where is his integrity? Where
has he disappeared? How has he managed to squander his great gifts on
trifles?"
"But society has to be occupied by something or other," said
Shtol'ts. "Everyone has his own interests. That's life."
"Society! I suppose, Andrei, you are sending me into society on
purpose so as to discourage me from going there. Life! A fine life! What
is one to look for there? Intellectual interests? True feeling? Just see
whether you can find the center round which all this revolves; there is no
such center, there is nothing deep, nothing vital. All these society people
are dead, they are all asleep, they are worse than I!...
"You're a philosopher, Il'ia," said Shtol'ts. "Everyone is worrying,
you alone want nothing."'

This is Il'ia Il'ich Oblomov's formal declaration of war against a mindless,

superfluous society.
Clearly, Oblomov is an enemy of the nineteenth century's arrogant and
aggressive banality. It is equally obvious that he does not denounce his
century from a position of strength; he is also a victim of his times. He
exposes fragmentation and lack of "wholeness" (tselost') in the modem
human being, but, as Shtol'ts will remind him moments later, he is a
fragment himself: the book's transparent word play on oblomok ("fragment")
appears to allude to the fact that its protagonist is an incomplete person. Or
does it? The key to a more balanced reading of Oblomov lies in our
understanding that, as the protagonist goes on record as stating here, the real
joke could be on t h e m - t h e useless members of well-to-do society.
Shtol'ts's apparently vague allusion to philosophy is, in fact, no less in-
tentional in its wording than Oblomov's complaints. There was one specific

1. Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov, Oblomov. Roman v cheterekh chastiakh, Sobranie

sochinenii (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1953), IV,
179-80, 180, 181. Transi.; I. A. G., Oblomov, transf., ed. David Magarshack (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1986 [1954]), pp. 172-73, 174. Henceforward to be referred to as Oblomov IV: and
the page number of the Russian edition, followed by a comma and the English edition's page
number. I will retain the translation's wording (excluding the names of persons), while reinstat-
ing the original paragraph format, which the English translation alters throughout.
 philosopher in whose theories S h t o l ' t s ' s and O b l o m o v ' s - a n d
Goncharov's-generation was steeped, who had radically criticized the frag-
mentation of man as incompatible with any form of modem humanism:
Friedrich Schiller.2 Perhaps the best-known formulation of his position on
the issue occurs in the sixth of his letters on the aesthetic education of the
human being, which thus contrasts antiquity and modernity:

Jene Polypennatur der griechischen Staaten, wo jedes Individuum eines

unabhangigen Lebens genoB und, wenn es not tat, zum Ganzen werden
konnte, machte jetzt einem kunstreichen Uhrwerke Platz, wo aus der
Zusammenstückelung unendlich vieler, aber leblosen Teile ein mechanis-
ches Leben im Ganzen sich bildet. Auseinandergerissen wurden jetzt der
Staat und die Kirche, die Gesetze und die Sitten; der GenuB wurde von
der Arbeit, das Mittel vom Zweck, die Anstrengung von der Belohnung
geschieden. Ewig nur an` ein einzelnes kleines Bruckstuck [sic] des
Ganzen gefesselt, bildet sich der Mensch selbst nur als Bruckstiick aus;
ewig nur das eintonige Gerausch des Rades, das er umtreibt, im Ohre,
entwickelt er nie die Harmonie seines Wesens, und anstatt die
Menschheit in seiner Natur auszupragen, wird er bloB zu einem Abdruck
seines Geschafts, seiner Wissenschaft.

That polypoid character of the Greek States, in which every individual

enjoyed an independent existence but could, when need arose, grow into
the whole organism, now made way for an ingenious clock-work, in
which, out of the piecing together of innumerable but lifeless parts, a
mechanical kind of collective life ensued. State and Church, laws and
customs, were now torn asunder; enjoyment was divorced from labor,
the means from the end, the effort from the reward. Everlastingly
chained to a single little fragment of the Whole, man himself develops
into nothing but a fragment; everlastingly in his ear the monotonous
sound of the wheel that he turns, he never develops the harmony of his
being, and instead of putting the stamp of humanity upon his own na-
ture, he becomes nothing more than the imprint of his occupation or his
specialized knowledge.3

2. The influence exerted on the Russian intelligentsia of the time by Schiller himself and
more in general by German Idealism (and European culture) is dwelt upon at length in the
novel. Tirgen [i.e., P. Thiergen]'s "Oblomov kak chelovek-oblomok (K postanovke problemy
'Goncharov i Shiller')," Russkaia literatura, No. 3 (1990), pp. 18-33, elucidates Schiller's in-
fluence on Goncharov as fully as it has long deserved to be.
3. Friederich Schiller, Uber die tisthetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von
Briefen, in Sämtliche Werke (München: Carl Hanser, 1962), V, 584. Transi.: F. S., On the
Aesthetic Education of Man ln a Series of Letters, trans[., ed. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A.
Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 35. Emphasis added.
In view of the conflict which in Schiller's philosophy opposes modern times
to the individual as a total entity, Oblomov's inadequacies can be said to
belong to an intentional authorial strategy on Goncharov's part. On this
assumption, such shortcomings would not be exposed by the narrator in
order to weaken his character's self-defense, but rather, in order to show how
justified his self-defense and his counterattack are.
Still, the fact remains that, the lucid tone of the odd programmatic
declaration notwithstanding, Il'ia Il'ich is in fact far from having conquered
the liberty that lies beyond the Schillerian moral stage of existence. The
threefold pattern which Schiller describes as linking together Natur with
Kultur finally culminates in the "playful" freedom obtained through xsthetic
education;4 but, in spite of the dreams of his youth, Il'ia Il'ich falls short of
attaining even the second of the three levels. He is "a fragment" not merely in
the obvious, empirical acceptation of the word, but in Schiller's specialized
sense too. His own lack of freedom is different than that of the people he
blames; it derives from his remaining a literal child, tied in mystical union
with a stage of his life which no longer exists (and, more importantly
perhaps, might not have been as blissful as memory would have it).
Oblomov is not above the world, in the liberated realm of self-awareness;
and, unlike his active, p r a g m a t i c - i n fact, praxis-obsessed-friend Shtol'ts,
he is not even in the world; he simply remains on the threshold of reality. In
the terminology of Schiller's twenty-fifth Letter, he is restricted to the stage
of "feeling": an undifferentiated part of the universe, Oblomov never becomes
a n i n d e p e n d e n t b e i n g r e f l e c t i v e l y h a n d l i n g t h e l a t t e r a s a n e x t e r n a l o b j e c t . .5
5
Goncharov's novel narrates in detail the Oblomovian way to just such
imprisonment in passivity. In Part One, we see Il'ia Il'ich struggling to keep
abreast of two dangers: that of losing Oblomovka, the ancestral village he
owns, with its three hundred serfs; and that of being evicted from the
Petersburg apartment he occupies. Here, amidst dust, dirt and books never
read to the end, he has nested himself in the company of his serf/servant
Zakhar, with whom he entertains a humorously depicted, somewhat neurotic
relationship. Between the two, frequent arguments flare up; on the day the
novel opens, one dispute among the many brings in its wake self-
introspective implications that are more subtly disruptive than usual. Il'ia
ll'ich begins to doubt whether "the others," whom Zakhar obstinately holds
up to him as a model, may have made better choices in life after all. This is
the moment of Il'ia Il'ich's deepest identity crisis in the novel:

4. Erziehung... V,662-64, pp. 205-09.

5. Erziehung... V,65I, p. 183.
 "Why am I like this?" Oblomov asked himself almost with tears,
hiding his head under the blanket again. "Why?"
After seeking in vain for the hostile source that prevented him from
living as he should, as the "others" lived, he sighed, closed his eyes, and
a few minutes later drowsiness began once again to benumb his senses.
"I, too, would have liked-liked," he murmured, blinking with dif-
ficulty, "something like t h a t - h a s nature treated me so b a d l y - n o , thank
G o d - I ' v e nothing to complain o f - '"
There followed a resigned sigh. He was passing from agitation to
his normal state of calm and apathy.
"It's fate, I s u p p o s e - c a n ' t do anything about it," he was hardly able
to whisper, overcome by sleep.6

When overwhelmed by reality, II'ia H'ich, the grown-up child, the adult who
refuses the adult world, resorts to a highly personal safety mechanism: the
anamnesis of his native village.
In his son ("sleep" as well as "dream"), there appears Oblomovka,
evoking distant memories of harmony and bliss in which the boundaries of
the self are only vaguely drawn. As the interdependence of fragmentation and
marginalization is being explored, the complex internal dynamics that ani-
mates the so frequently and so improperly called "plot-poor" novel fully un-
folds.

6. Oblomov IV, 101-02, p. 102.

 II

Il'ia Il'ich has a vision of himself in childhood and adolescence, living

in what he remembers as a golden age. Feminine protection reigns in
Oblomovka, surrounding young Il'ia and covering all his n e e d s - t o the
point, in fact, of effacing his autonomous existence. Three major personal
influences interact in creating the atmosphere which is to determine Oblomov
future life: namely, the father's, the mother's, and the nurse's.
The father's contribution ought to be examined first, if nothing else on
account of the patronymical bond between him and the other Il'ia. "Il'ia
ll'ich," our hero, is none other than "Il'ia, son of Il'ia": and indeed, father
and son mirror each other, in the marginal son's dream, as variants of the
same superfluousness-formally distinct but essentially identical images of
irrelevance. A number of episodes illustrate the insignificance of Il'ia senior's
pseudo-divine observing eye for the economy of Oblomovka: whether it be in
the atea of the maintenance of public order (in which he offers a travesty of
guidance, personifying what could be termed an extreme form of inconse-
quential omniscience),' or in rustic architecture (where he fully exposes his
inability to "hold the village together" in a quite literal sense),8 his status is
entirely consistent. The father's input amounts to a collection of remarks
ranging from the existentially commonplace to the technologically and
financially grotesque; he is just as superfluous a figure to the well-being of
the village as the son is to the economy of the world. The potentially
positive effects of his benevolence toward Oblomovka cancel each other out
with the pedagogically negative repercussions of the neglect he shows for it;
and the net result of what one would be hard pressed to call, by any standard,
his efforts is on the whole nil.
In a word, junior imitates senior; the child's behavior has nothing to re-
produce but an absence. The role model is here not merely inadequate-it is
non-existent tout court. On the father's side, our Oblomov has always been
an orphan.9

7. Oblomov IV, 114, p.'l 13. ■

8. Oblomov IV, 129, p. 1 2 7 . .
9. After emitting this hypothesis on a strictly textual level, I began to wonder whether it
could be revealing to "test" it biographically. Goncharov senior did, in fact, die in 1819, when
Ivan was seven years old. "Young Ivan scarcely knew his father," states Vsevolod Setchkarev
in Ivan Goncharov,: His Life a n d His Works (Wiirzburg: jal-Verlag, 1974), p. 1. Further infer-
ences are here, of course, a matter of individual preference, although it would stand to reason
to assume that, in this case at l e a s t - t o paraphrase the wording used by Milton Ehre in his
Oblomov and His Creator: The Life a n d Art o f Ivan Goncharov (Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1973)—the creature owes much of the almost "miraculous" liveliness well known to the
critics precisely to the creator's empathy with him. For a contribution laying great emphasis on
the a d t e q u a t i o between Goncharov and Oblomov, see Kenneth E. Harper's "Under the
Influence of Oblomov," in From Los Angeles to Kiev: Papers on the Occasion o f the Ninth
 The mother plays a much greater part in Il'ia Il'ich's childhood. Does
that imply that her function is a more useful one? Hardly so, it would seem.
As Il'ia Il'ich's reverie continues, we witness to what extent the child's hu-
man contacts were dominated by a suffocating version of matemal care:

Seeing his mother, who had been dead for years, Oblomov even in his
sleep thrilled with joy and his ardent love for her; two warm tears slowly
appeared from under his eyelashes and remained motionless.
His mother covered him with passionate kisses, then looked at him
anxiously to see if his eyes were clear, if anything hurt him, asked the
nurse if he had slept well, if he had waked in the night, if he had tossed
in his sleep, if he had a temperature. Then she took him by the hand and
led him to the ikon.
Kneeling down and putting her arm round him, she made him repeat
the words of a prayer.
The boy repeated them after her absent-mindedly, gazing at the win-
dow, through which the cool of the morning and the scent of the lilac
poured into the room.

International Congress of Slavists, Kiev, Sept. 1983, eds. Vladimir Markov and Dean S. Worth
(Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1983) pp. 105-18.
 "Are we going for a walk today, Mummy?" he suddenly asked in
the middle of the p r a y e r . >
"Yes, darling," she replied hurriedly, without taking the eyes off the
ikon and hastening to finish the holy words.
The boy repeated them listlessly, but his mother put her whole soul
into them.
Then they went to see his father, and then they had breakfast. 10

The "dark side" of protection, the stifling aspects of Il'ia 11'ich's upbringing
are perhaps nowhere better delineated than in an episode marking the
paroxism of care as imprisonment. One beautiful day, the boy runs off to
play in the s n o w - a n d is caught and brought back home to his family as if
he were a vanquished enemy:

The fresh wind cut into his face, the frost pinched his ears, the cold air
entered his mouth and throat, his chest expanded with j o y - h e ran along
faster and faster, laughing and screaming.
There were the boys; he flung a snowball at them but missed; he
was not used to it. He was about to pick up another when his face was
smothered by a huge lump of snow: he fell; his face hurt from the new

10. Oblomov IV, 110-1 l, p. 110.

 sensation; he was enjoying it all, he was laughing, and there were tears
in his eyes.
Meanwhile there was an uproar at home: darling Il'ia had vanished!
A noise, shouts. Zakhar rushed into the yard, followed by Vaska, Mitka,
V a n k a - a l l running about in confusion.
Two dogs ran madly after them, catching them by the heels, for, as
everyone knows, dogs cannot bear to see a running man.
Shouting and yelling, the servants raced through the village, fol-
lowed by the barking dogs. At last they came across the boys and began
meting out justice: pulled them by the hair and ears, hit them across the
back, and told off their fathers.
Then they got hold of the young master, wrapped him in the sheep-
skin they had brought, then in his father's fur coat and two blankets, and
carried him home in triumph."IT

Eventually, the child is forcibly confined to his bed for three days after the
i n c i d e n t - w h i c h prompts even Goncharov's narrator, generally careful to
avoid explicit statements, to abandon his tongue-in-cheek humor and to
comment blithely:

- y e t only one thing could have done him g o o d - p l a y i n g snowball

again... 12

The education concurrently imparted by the nurse through the stories she
tells young II'ia could hardly be called an improvement over the Oblomovs'
parental pedagogy; quite on the contrary, her contribution underscores the
peculiar inadequacy of what must be termed the "greenhouse approach" to
education applied in O b l o m o v k a - a method which, by way of a childhood
both orphaned and suffocating, creates ideal conditions for later paralysis.
The narrator artfully mixes narration and metadiscourse in order to draw the
reader's attention to the psychological deadlock of the eternal p u e r
superfluus:

11. Oblomov IV, 147, p. 143.

l2.Ibid.
 The nurse or the traditional tale so artfully avoided every reference to re-
ality that the child's imagination and intellect, having absorbed the fic-
lion, remained enslaved by it all his life...
Though when he grew up Oblomov discovered that there were no
rivers flowing with milk and honey, nor fairy godmothers, and though
he smiled at his nurse's tales, his smile was not sincere, and it was ac-
companied by a secret sigh: the fairytale had become mixed up with real
life in his mind, and sometimes he was sorry that fairytale was not life
and life was not fairytale.'3

Not coincidentally, the text stresses that such scientific knowledge as

Oblomov happens to have is identical with the folk wisdom transmitted to
him by his nanny. Such a parodic version of the serious training undergone,
at the other extreme, by Andrei Shtol'ts obviously amounts to an
unambiguous, negative comment on the narrator's part about attitudes toward
modernity that were widespread in the Russia of his times. 14
In the nanny's mention of fairytales, discourse is visibly self-referential:
disconnected as it is from reality, and immersed in the utopian images of
Oblomovka, the nurse's speech becomes Oblomovka's own mirror-image.
Oblomovka as a whole is a nurse's fairytale; and the narrator, as nurse, tells
the readers the story of Oblomov's existence. The conflation of life and fairy-
tale is not merely predicated in Il'ia H'ich's c a s e - i t is also shown "
performatively, in the act of narrating it to the reader.
The gap which separates reality from discourse is the reason for the sor-
rows of the model-less child. "Pust' drugie zhivut kak khotiat!' ="Let the oth-
ers live as they please!": such was to be the motto of Il'ia Il'ich's adult life,
ominously borrowed from the three major personal influences he experienced
in childhood." We find here again, in a slightly different, but equivalent
version, the very theme of otherness which had set his son in motion. But,
in the meantime, we have come full circle. The fallacy of the Oblomovian
world view becomes particularly evident when we recall the fairytale paradox:

13. Oblomov IV, 121, p. 119. Emphasis added.

14.. Oblomov IV, 113, p. 112.
15. Oblomov IV, 137, p. 134.
 Oblomovka, not "the others," represents the marginal, the non-mainstream,
the superfluous existence.
. We reach here the core of Oblomov's self-marginalizing strategy. To use
the terminoiogy articulated by Schiller in his twenty-first Letter, n ' i a II'ich
embodies not the "fulfilled infinity" (erfullte Unendlichkeit) of aesthetic free-
dom-from-constraint, but rather the "empty infinity" (leere Urtendlichkeet) of
lack-of-determination through absence.16 He does not become, figuratively, a
"child" through liberty; he remains a, literal, child of the past. He walls
himself off in his refusal his refusal of the world, emitting no more than a
feeble protest for being denied acccess to the uterine realm he believes
prefigured in his mother-village. The fact that the way of the world might
wound him is, in a sense, a calculated risk implicit in his self-
marginalization, taken on at a subconscious level for the sake of the
fulfilment afforded by the symbolic return of the past.
While such a satisfaction is certainly reassuring and encourages Il'ia
Il'ich to persist in his own version of otherness, in the long run his road to
happiness proves to be a dead end; his sufferings begin as soon as the mech-
anism that originally served him so well starts to backfire. This punctually
happens at the time when he shows himself unable to pursue an adult rela-
tionship with 01'go, whom Shtol'ts introduces to him, and loses her love
through his own stagnation. He thus eventually consumes his life in use-
less protest, stubbornly refusing to admit (and thereby only confirm-
ing) the fact that "zhizn' ne skazka": "life is not a fairytale." His is the story
of a process of self-marginalization that, originally intended as a mechanism
for self-protection, progressively gets out of control and becomes self-
destructive.
The taking of (poorly) calculated risks with reality is not the only
characteristic feaature of Il'ia Il'ich's marginality; a second element goes into
it, and decisively contributes to turning a latent danger into certain disaster.
Oblomov does not simply uncritically reproduce an empty male role model
or respond passively to an overbearing feminine one; he in fact actively
p u r s u e s passivity, thus raising the stakes of his game to an intolerable
degree. There is, to be sure, no lack of logic to his apparent madness, a logic
which will become evident if his behavior is explained as a form of
circuituous, subconscious protest: by foregrounding and staging the present
deleterious consequences of his upbringing, Oblomov solicits and challenges
his past through an implicit yet transparent reproach. The phenomenon can be
described as the strategy of a symbolic self-crucifixion. Cur r e l i q u i s t i -
"Why did you abandon me?": dereliction is here externalized and objectified
through self-martyrdom. II'ia Il'ich's subconscious organizes symbolic

16. Erziehung... V, 635, p. 144.

realities along patterns borrowed from the rhetoric of language: structuring
his inner experience as the life of an orphan is for him the equivalent of
pointing to the responsibilities of those who, whether through sheer absence,
stifling attentions, or overindulgence in fairytales, have been instrumental in
the crystallization of his inadequacies."
Oblomov's case bears remarkable similarities to that of Ella's, an adoles-
cent who dropped out of high, school because her father had left the f a m i l y - a
case Bettelheim discusses insightfully in A Good Enough Parent. IS Unlike
Ella's father, Oblomov senior has never physically abandoned his family; but
his absenteeism might be considered to have been an even more ominous
one. He "was" never there in the first place, to show little II'ia that, for all
the bliss available in Oblomovka, one could not rely on its passive form of
love only; and he neglected to teach him how to acquire the skills needed to
survive in a world in which, pace Oblomovka's women, "life is not a fairy-
tale." Just as Ella, so ll'ia Il'ich too, superstitiously believing in a kind of
magical omnipotence of thought, tries to bring his father back through
protest. Protest alone, however, cannot return to the child a father that never
has b e e n - t h e ideal model-father who could have told him precisely up to
which point "unreal" fairytales represent an enrichment of the soul, and from
which point on they become a liability and must be relinquished for a
rational approach to reality. Il'ia Il'ich eventually loses touch with the
original, limited goal of his "project"; and, as this takes on a life of its own,
he is progressively shut out into an ever more self-consuming tautological
irrelevance.
, Could Il'ia Il'ich break out of his vicious circle by, for example, finding
another f a t h e r - a surrogate father of sorts? Indeed, there are times in the
novel when he would appear to have found one in Shtol'ts, his friend and
former schoolmate, whose practical bent and spirit of initiative on many oc-
casions manage to psychologically bail him out of a desperate situation.
Significantly, the novel takes great pains to stress that the person who could
potentially provide others with a role model is the one who has himself been
exposed to an adequate one: young Andrei Ivanych has enjoyed a disciplined
but, in the last analysis, liberating youth, entirely inspired by the "German"
( o r - R o u s s e a u i a n ? ) pedagogical principle of self-reliance. The narrator
allusively reports a blunt comment made by Shtol'ts senior after witnessing a
particularly robust display of creative independence on his son's part: "Chto

17. Oblomov is, of course, intensely dependent on Oblomovka. My point is, to put the
matter in a somewhat oversimplified way, that he obviously "joves" it too m u c h - t o o much,
that is, for his own good. This makes the very intensity of his attachment suspect, at worst; and
at best simply problematic.
18. Bruno Bettelheim, A Good Enough Parent: A Book on Child-Rearing (New York:
Knopf, 1987), pp. 56-61.
 za rebenok, esli ni razu nosu sebe ili drugomu ne raze!7?" ("What kind of a
child would he be if he never made his nose bleed, or someone else's?")'9The
contrast with the episode in which little Il'ia, haplessly playing in the snow,
is tragicomically tracked down and brought back to his family could hardly
be more poignant.
Oblomov's and Shtol'ts's friendship would thus at first sight appear to
be a viable, if asymmetrical, solution to Il'ia Il'ich's orphanage. However, it
soon becomes painfully obvious that Shtol'ts's frienzied hyperactivity can be
as much a flaw as it is a quality; so much so, in fact, that in practice it ren-
ders him virtually useless for his self-marginalizing friend's needs. Shtol'ts
is so frequently on the move between Russia and Western Europe that,
though apparently a diametrically opposed figure to Il'ia's real father, he
ultmately becomes his equi4alent-the image of another absence. Il'ia Il'ich
cannot then but yet again slip back into his inertia, his solip.sism, .his
"fairytales."20 To formulate the paradox from a slightly different angle, one
could say that, if old Oblomov is the absentee father, Shtol'ts is a merely
intermittent one. On various occasions, Il'ia Il'ich ruefully evokes his
Mentor-friend's absence and muses that, had Shtol'ts at a given time been in
the capital, many things would have turned out differently; "...na B o z o
pachti nikogda ne bylo v Peterburge" (..."but Shtol'ts was hardly ever in
Petersburg.")2' Unexpectedly, an excess of vitality (or, if one prefers, o f
"modernity") leads in the last analysis to the same negative results as a com-
plete lack of it.
The romance with Ol'ga that occupies the central part of the novel tests
Oblomov's ability to finally stand on his own and to choose by himself
whether he s h o u l d - i n the words of his own philosophical self-vindication-
bring his "great gifts" to fruition, or "squander them on trifles." But
Oblomov's demonstrative cupio dissolvi spells Ol'ga's failure along with his
own. Afraid of committing himself, n'ia Il'ich lets the moment of amorous
inspiration in the countryside slip by. After the summer romance, when time
comes for all pragmatic members of society to return to the city, he then
shelves his marriage plans indefinitely, allowing himself to take up lodgings
in the isolation of a country house belonging to an Ivan Matveevich
Alekseev.

19. Oblomov IV, 159, p. 154. That it takes a German father to utter such words is clearly
a "sociopolitically" commited statement on the author's part.
20. Translation: "Germany" (= rationalism, modem capitalism) is, in and of itself, not an
automatic answer to Russia's problems. Goncharov's e q u a n i m i t y - a n d a r t i s t r y - i n treating the
seemingly eternal polarity between Westernizers and Slavophiles remains, it seems to me, ex-
emplary to this day.
21. Oblomov IV, 70, p. 73.
 From then on, Il'ia Il'ich remains a prisoner of his own naivety; he is,
among other things, entangled in a plot designed to spoliate him. Why does
he not pursue his relationship with Ol'ga, or even intervene to stem his own
financial ruin? After all, by taking charge he would simply abide by the prin-
ciples often propounded and praised by himself and Andrei since their school
days (moving back to Oblomovka, running it in person and according to the
principles of sound bookkeeping, preventing theft...). But Il'ia Il'ich does
not feel that he can muster the challenge. It is as though something prevented
him from symbolically "violating" the land of immobilization.
The drive toward self-marginalization is again responsible for the events
(or lack of them); only, at this point, in an extreme, pathological form. If
commodification of the sacred already exists, if o t h e r s - t h e starosta of
Oblomovka and profiteers of all sorts-atready pillage the holy terrain, let
them do so; Il'ia Il'ich applies here, sui generis, the "pust' drugie ihivut kak
khoxiat!"-"Let the others live as they please!" by which his family had lived
during his childhood .22 He prefers to receive a trickle of coins from someone
else's greater transgression than a river of gold from a smaller one of his
own; and he opts out of Ol'ga's love, rather than seeing himself forced by it
to join what he perceives to be a world of guilt. If at the decisive moment
Andrei had been there, he may have been able to show Il'ia Il'ich how to be
"a man": that is to say, how to keep the childish proliferation of "fairytales,"
in check. But, once more, Andrei was then abroad...
Il'ia Il'ich's giving up his marriage with Ol'ga is thus the choice of an
unambiguously pursued project of self-destruction that is no longer aware of
itself. Oblomov prefers the continuation of m1X!rning and death to the
renewal through life; having failed to elicit the caring love he was attempting
to call forth through protest, he finally takes the same path in the opposite
direction, and moves back regressively toward the hidden source he feels he
has lost.
As early as in the fifth chapter of Part One, the narrator had already
hinted to the fact that Il'ia Il'ich's death was to eventually occur unawares, by
way of a routine-induced, peaceful, drawn-out form of suicide: '

22. See above, fn. 16.

 ... as Oblomov grew older, he reverted to a sort of childish timidity, an
expectation of danger and evil from everything that was outside the
sphere of his daily experience, the result of getting out of touch with
life.
He was not afraid, for example, of the crack in his bedroom ceiling,
he was used to it; nor did it ever occur to him that the stuffy atmosphere
in the room and his constant sitting indoors was almost more perilous
for his health than night dampness, that his daily over-indulgence at a
meal was a kind of slow suicide; for he was used to it and felt no fear. 23

The approach of death, actualized in Part Four, is for Oblomov "without

fear," because it represents for him a reunion with a lost unity.2' By imper-
ceptibly slipping into a permanent relationship with the protective and ma-
ternal Agaf'ia Matveevna, his landlord's sister, Il'ia II'ich, now delivered of
all fear, eats his way to disease and death. Significantly, the means for a re-
turn to "his" Oblomovka are offered him by a woman who, as the narrator
suggests, is an embodiment of the same digestive, nutritional functions
whose triumphs were celebrated in the ancestral village.25
After a few years in her house, Il'ia Il'ich dies as the old folk in
Oblomovka used to die.26 He dies "povidimomu, bez boli, bez muchenie, kak
budto ostanovilis' chasy, kotorye zabyli zavesti" ("apparently without pain,
without suffering, just like a clock that has stopped because it has not been
wound up"),2' having "made sense" of his life by re-fictionalizing it through
melancholia. The mourning of the orphan expressed in and by self-marginal-
ization has, if nothing else, helped ll'ia Il'ich answer the question of individ-
ualization-the "Who am I? Why am I so?" ringing in his mind ever since
his Petersburg days. The pacifying answer to the adult's question is

23. Oblomov IV, 62-63, p. 66. Emphasis added.

24. One cannot help being reminded here of the almost mystical feeling mentioned by
Freud at the beginning of Civilization a n d lts D i s c o n t e n t s - U e i n Gefiihl wie von etwas
Unbegrenztem, Schrankenlosem, gleichsam 'Ozeanischem' " ("a feeling as of something un-
limited, without bounds, as though 'oceanic' "). Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur
(Civilization a n d Its Discontents), in Gesammelte Werke (London: Imago, 1948), XIV, 422.
25. Oblomov IV, 394, p. 376.
26. In Oblomovka, "... stariki ne b o r o l i s s trudnoi, muchitel'noi smert'iu, a, dozhiv do
nevozmozhnosti, umirali kak budto ukradkoi, tikho zastyvaia i nezametno ispuskaia poslednyi
�zdokh." ("... old men did not struggle with a hard, painful death, but, having lived to an unbe-
lievably old age, died as if by stealth, quietly growing cold and imperceptibly breathing their
last.") Oblomov IV, 126, p. 124.
27. Oblomov IV, 499, p. 477.
eventually found, if regressively, through his anabasis to Il'ia-the-child: a
child deprived of a father by the fairytale-paradise of Oblomovka, and de-
prived of the fairytale-paradise of Oblomovka by the Petersburg-like way of
the world.

III

Doubts about one's identity need not be a prerogative of visionary (or, for
that matter, egotistic) idealists. At least one skeptical, cynical literary charac-
ter is known to have entertained some of his o w n - a n d in an even more de-
structive, self-destructive, melancholy way than Oblomov would have:

Oh, if only it was out of laziness that I do nothing! Lord, how much I
should respect myself then! I should respect myself because I had some-
thing inside me, even if it was only laziness; I should have at any rate
one positive quality of which I could be sure. Question: what is he?
Answer: a lazy man; and it really would be very pleasant to hear that
said of me. It would mean being positively defined, it would mean that
there was something that could be said of me. "A lazy man! "-that is a
name, a calling, it's positively a career, gentlemen! Don't laugh, it's
true. Then I should be by right a member of the very best club, and have
no other occupation than nursing my self-esteem.28 .

These words come from a "diseased ... angry ... unattractive human being,"-
Dostoevskii's "man from underground." To him, a man such as Oblomov
would surely appear endowed with the enormous advantage of at least having
an identity-since superfluousness could arguably be said to make Il'ia Il'ich

28. Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh (Moscow:

Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1956), vol. 4, p. 147. Translation: F.
M. D., Notes from Underground, transl. J. Coulson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 28.
 Oblomov "positively lazy." In the context of his thought-provoking ram-
blings against modem rationalism, Dostoevskii's narrator thus opens up the
conceptual space for a potentially bright view of melancholia; if nothing
e l s e - a n d here we must give the misanthropic recluse his d u e - a l l stagna-
tion, including Oblomov's, can be viewed as a path to self-definition.
Imperceptible, gradual self-destruction can paradoxically be perceived as a de-
vice helping make sense of life, and thus pass muster as a viable, albeit
peculiar, strategy to be applied toward reality; "oblomovitis" can unex-
pectedly qualify as a functional path toward the fictionalization that defines
an identity, even if that were only the identity of the emotionally orphan
yearning to win back his Oblomovka-the identity of an emotional and exis-
tential pauper.29
Foregrounding the peculiar logic that lies behind the protagonist's
psychic retrenchment and his settling for a beggarly human existence, rich
only in "squandered gifts" and lost opportunities, appears all the more
fruitful a way of approaching Oblomov when we consider that such a reading
allows us to fully seize the double form of deprivation around which
Goncharov's novel can be said to ultimately revolve: namely, that haunting
the serf Zakhar and, on a different level, his orphaned master, both of whom
are locked in two equivalent forms of bereavement that run through the
book's every twist and turn. The parallelism between the two culminates in
the last chapter of the book, which follows upon Oblomov's death and refers
the narration back to its own beginning: there, by explaining itself as the
history of its own genesis, the text transparently endeavors to use a
"posthumous" textual space to conceptually settle questions-financial
questions at first glance, but in the last analysis fundamental questions of
identity.
In this postlude, the the narrator tells us that Shtol'ts and a literator
friend of his, on a stroll near a church in Vyborg one Sunday morning,
stumble upon a dramatically aged, homeless Zakhar, who spends his last
days lying to the passers-by, while begging them for alms. The episode
forcefully pursues the analogy between serf and landowner that had implicitly
run throughout the text: since Oblomov, the orphaned master, was not able
to recreate within himself a reliable paternal role model, he could not but, in
turn, default on his moral obligation to provide the like for the serfs with
whom an ancient custom had entrusted him, and for whom it had made him
responsible. When all is said and done, the epilogue in Oblomov brings
home the self-evident but nonetheless shocking truth that for Zakhar, left

29. A (politically oriented?) advocatus diaboli could argue here that Oblomov has at least
a name for his disease, while many o t h e r s - Z a k h a r , to name but o n e - a r e n ' t even that lucky.
without proper guidance at the mercy of the world, life wasn't a fairytale
either.3o
In the course of this final episode, the friend who accompanies Shtol'ts,
stunned by the number of homeless people roaming around the church
square, eventually raises what is perhaps the climactic question of the novel:
"Where do beggars come from?" This sentence clearly urges upon the readers
the notion that the whole of the novel whose last page they are about to turn
could, and indeed should, be applied toward the quest for an explanation.
Have we not, by the end of the book, read at length about Oblomov, the
perfect beggar? His life is an ideal illustration of what existential orphanage
is, and of the ominous consequences it can have both for the individual and
for society.
. Astutely, however, Goncharov has Shtol't's first reaction entirely miss
the point, so as to give us the very paradigm of what is not and cannot be an
adequate response:

"I should like to know where beggars come from," said the writer.
"Where they come from? Why, all sorts of nooks and crannies."3'

But Shtol'ts's friend immediately proceeeds to clarify the meaning of his

inquiry: how does one "get to such a position"? Is it "a sincere or a false"
process? Are beggars, here implicitly equated with cockroaches that creep
upon the world from their "nooks and crannies," a fatal, inevitable occurrence
of life? Faced with a question which his capitalistic success story has evi-
dently ill prepared him to answer, Shtol'ts at first wonders whether to correct
himself, then suggests that the writer ask the beggars: a nice profit, he adds
with impeccable professionalism, could be made from the publication of a

30. As if to pre-empt any possible ambiguity or vagueness, in the passage the narrator
sharply and effectively focuses on the double orphanage motif, rendered textually unequivocal
by the fact that during the final encounter in front of the church Zakhar addresses S h t o l ' t s - t h e
one true, albeit intermittent."father" in the n o v e l - w i t h an insistent: "batiushka, batiushka,...
otets rodnoi" (literally a somewhat un-Anglo-Saxon "daddy, daddy,... native father")
(Oblornov IV, 504 and passim, pp. 482-83. The expression is rendered by the translator with
"sir"!). The reference, while not "unrealistic" within the time-frame and the place of the
events, seems too specific, insistent, and unique to this passage of the book, to be either a mere
coincidence or the innocent reproduction of a sociolinguistic convention.
31. Oblomov IV, 503-04, p. 481. By portraying Shtol'ts as being such a stultus that he can-
not even interpret the novel he has been living through, Goncharov eventually relativizes the
successful man's psychological skills, arguably intending to rap en passant the hybris of his
whole existential project.
 life-story of theirs. And it is then that, when he finally proceeds to summon
one for an informal interview, he recognlzes-Zakhar.'2
The "cockroach" link appearing at such a privileged turning point in the
plot is far from being an innocent textual coincidence; as the reader now
suddenly recollects, the reference to household filth and domestic insects has
in fact been one of the major metaphorical devices throughout the novel. All
life long, Zakhar's philosophical banner, the cogito of his dirtiness and
laziness, has been a dignified disclaimer, presented in a wealth of variations
but always amounting to the same principle: "I'm not the one who concocted
cockroaches!"33 In his view, since it was Providence that created cockroaches,
it, and it alone, should be held accountable for their existence and spread. To
Zakhar, the cockroach-ness of life was and is unequivocally due to the
Providence's-i.e., the paternal authority's-default. We have seen how
deeply Il'ia Il'ich shared in his serf's predicament, if not in the latter'ss
dubious social manners.
Nonetheless, we also know that when Anis'ia, Zakhar's patient and sup-
portive wife, was still alive, she used to apply a diametrically opposed
approach to existential entomology. She, too, held the view that cockroaches
acre created by divine design; but, according to her, a masterful, disciplined
human praxis could prevent them from proliferating. "Cleaning up the house"
was for her the apparently literal maxim by w h i c h - t h e reader now retrospec-
tively discovers-the novel had, all along, figuratively proclaimed the need
for all persons to be in command of their own life. By the time the text ends,
the two brotherly beggars of the novel, master and serf, have fallen
abundantly short of that ideal; and the existential condition exemplified by
cockroaches is successfully resolved only in the two Oblomovians' respective
counterparts, Shtol'ts and Anis'ia, who, at different levels of meaning (and of
society), are both determined to "run a clean house." "Otkuda berutsia
nishchie-Otkuda berutsia tarakany?" ("Where do beggars come f r o m - W h e r e
do cockroaches come from?"): the superfluousness and/or poverty caused by
lack of will and discipline can only be reversed if the pre-existing
pedagogical and existential vacuum is filled. It is, first and foremost, for
such a correction that Il'ia Il'ich Oblomov's (and, mutatis mutandis,
Zakhar's) strategy of regression yearns without success.
Clearly, Oblomov explores the hidden logic that governs a fragmented
person's life; beyond that, it highlights the destructive contradictions intrin-

32. The mere mention o f the idea of recognition triggers a wide spectrum of theoretical,
critical, and historical implications that far exceed the scope of this article. The interested
reader will find what is likely to be the definitive treatment of the concept in Terence Cave's
cornucopian Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, Clarendon Press,
1988).
33. Oblomov IV, 15, 221, 506, pp. 20, 213, 483.
sic to a self-marginalizing fictionalization of one's own experience. But those
are merely the visible layers of the text. At a deeper philosophical level,
Goncharov's novel articulates a chain of indirect but constantly renewed allu-
sions to orphanage, mendicity, and pests, both literal and metaphorical; ul-
timately implying that, given adequate role models, one could have fiction
without (self-) crucifixion. When such is the case one can, thanks to the more
favorable circumstances, conceivably still choose to be "superfluous" to
fashionable society; but then in the sense in which Schiller had understood
the n o t i o n - t h a t is, in aesthetico-philosophical freedom, rather than as an
existential beggar. As Dostoevskii puts it, "with self-esteem"; and without
cockroaches.

University of British Columbia