8  russian studies in literature

Russian Studies in Literature, vol. 49, no. 4, Fall 2013, pp. 8–37.
© 2013 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved. Permissions: www.copyright.com
ISSN 1061–1975 (print)/ISSN 1944–7167 (online)
DOI: 10.2753/RSL1061-1975490401

Galina Rebel’

Oblomov and the Others

The technique of juxtaposition in Goncharov’s Oblomov is analyzed as

a central aspect of the writer’s elucidation of his hero’s identity.
This universal formula—“Oblomov and the others”—can be used
to describe the character system in any work, but in Oblomov, the
problem of correlating the title character with the others lies on the
surface of the text, is one of the principal motifs, and serves both to
set the plot in motion and to anchor its composition. Consequently,
the novel’s crucial meanings are either lost or distorted if it is not
conceptualized from that angle.

“What are these other people?” [p. 100]*

The character system

Oblomov himself raises the theme of “others” (those who live dif-
ferently) during his first squabble with Zakhar, which begins with a
search for a letter from the bailiff of Oblomov’s estate and later for
a handkerchief and turns into a lamentation about the filth in which

English translation © 2013 M.E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Russian text © 2012
“Voprosy literatury.” “Oblomov i drugie,” Voprosy literatury, 2012, no. 6, pp.
158–87. Translated by Liv Bliss.
*Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov, trans. Marian Schwartz (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2010); all page numbers in square brackets are from this
translation.—Trans.

8
 Fall 2013  9

undesired “lodgers” are breeding [pp. 10–13]. In reply to Zakhar’s

philosophical excuses to the effect that he did not “invent” every
noxious thing in creation, Oblomov asks, with more than a hint of
exasperation, “Why don’t other people have moths and bedbugs?”
and “Why does everyone else have a clean place?” [p. 13]. And
those questions, for all their contextually routine, everyday na-
ture and their comical orchestration, launch one of the novel’s
crucial structural and semantic nodes, especially since they elicit
the image not only of the other but of the opposite other, the alien
other—the German, who lives the kind of “niggardly” existence
that generates no trash at all.
The parade of visitors that follows this scene represents the oth-
ers who, from Oblomov’s point of view, trifle their lives away and
relative to whom, taken all together, he himself is also an other,
“as free of care as a newborn baby” [p. 30] and at the same time
an entirely worthy, integral person who lives his life “squandering
nothing and selling nothing” [ibid.], who does not “traipse about”
[p. 21] but instead gives himself over to the free play of his mind,
his spirit, and, most of all, his imagination.
Tarant’ev, the last of Oblomov’s morning visitors, brings the
cavalcade of characters filing around and past him to a crescendo
of vaudevillian farce and simultaneously exacerbates the problem
of “the German” to an adversarial extreme, because this time the
German is no longer an abstractly conventional outsider but Ob-
lomov’s childhood friend, Andrei Stoltz. “[O]nce your German
swindles you,” Tarant’ev tells him, “you‘ll know about trading in
an old neighbor, a Russian, for some itinerant” [p. 54].
The dramatic and comic culmination of this theme’s develop-
ment in part 1 of the novel is yet another set-to between Oblomov
and Zakhar, in which the servant, searching for arguments in favor
of the inevitable move to another apartment, ventures on a risky
comparison: “I thought that other people, no worse than us, do
move, you know, so then we could, too” [p. 91].
At this point, that “other people,” which the stunned Oblomov
takes up like a refrain, is promptly wrested out of context, sheds
once and for all its defining functions and stylistic neutrality, is
converted almost into a proper noun, not only grammatically but
10  russian studies in literature

also in terms of content, takes on pitiable intonations and intima-

tions of pathos, is invested with passion, energy, and indignation,
and expands to symbolic proportions, and the hapless Zakhar is
assailed by a storm of artistically bravura, skillfully bedizened
rhetorical questions and exclamations, of precisely timed volleys
of histrionic accusations. The insignificant others—those “cursed
poor, crude, uneducated people” who “clean their own boots” and
“work tirelessly” [pp. 95–96]—are subjected to a gentleman’s
reproof by Il’ia Il’ich himself, the one, the inimitable (at least to
his servant, since “I’ve never once pulled on my own stockings”
[p. 96]), who does not rush from pillar to post, does not fret, does
not work, yet spends day and night serving as “benefactor” to his
peasants, so that they “do not want for anything, so that they do
not envy strangers, so that they mourn for me to the Lord God on
Judgment Day” [p. 97].
Zakhar’s timid efforts to neutralize his master’s ardor and wriggle
out from under this hail of reproaches has the opposite effect, his
conciliatory responses not only failing to cool the orator down but
actually provoking new paroxysms of Oblomovian eloquence: “The
emotional scene” went on “rumbling like a cloud” over Zakhar’s
head, until Oblomov’s rhetorical vehemence is spent, he is worn
out, and he orders Zakhar to lower the curtains (“the blinds”) and
make sure he’s closed in tight, to give his exhausted soul some
peace [pp. 96–98].
“You were always something of an actor” Stoltz tells Oblomov
later [p. 197], and in part 1 of the novel, the protagonist’s spon-
taneous and organic theatricality is indeed actualized through the
dramaturgic unfolding of the plot: with the exception of certain
descriptive/analytic passages and chapters (5, 6, and 9), the nar-
rative consists of individual scenes, each of which is organized
dialogically, brought full circle contentually, and demarcated
compositionally.
His physical stasis notwithstanding, Oblomov demonstrates
(largely perforce, since “life is moving on” [p. 180]) a high degree
of communicative activity and, both in his interaction with other
characters and during his solitary musings in the intermissions
 Fall 2013  11

between visitors, he exposes to the reader first one side of himself

and then the other. In the time that elapses between waking late in
the morning and his daytime nap, he engages in several lengthy
skirmishes with Zakhar, receives five visitors (and then the sixth,
his doctor), has prolix conversations with them all, uses himself
up emotionally in those conversations (count the cost of putting
up with Tarant’ev alone, and Penkin raises his hackles too, if only
for an instant, and the doctor scares and worries him, and how
much emotion and pathetic words does he expend on Zakhar?),
and is, in addition, burdened by chronic problems (he has to find
an answer for the owner of the apartment, has to write to his bailiff,
has to pay his creditors), while those problems, in turn, force him
to analyze his past and the reasons for this spiritual and volitional
decline . . . What a heavy schedule! What an intensity of experi-
ence! What a gamut of feelings! How many efforts and subterfuges
does it take to do nothing! It would probably have been easier to
do something . . .

But let us return to the moment when the “emotion-riddled” [p. 89]
scene has ended for Zakhar but for his master has transitioned into
its polar opposite, a “private confession” [p. 102]. Behind closed
curtains, alone with himself, and despite his firm intentions, Ob-
lomov gives himself over not to sleep but to musings, which at
first comfort him, with their eternal “might perhaps, somehow”
[p. 100] but are followed by one of his life’s “clear, conscious
moments” [ibid.] when self-denunciatory thoughts, alarming and
bitter, awaken and the other, who had just been so flourishingly put
to shame and overthrown in his servant’s eyes, now—alone with
Oblomov and in his own mind—rises from the mud into which
he had been trampled, draws himself up, and reveals his ability to
do everything that to Il’ia Il’ich had seemed unmanageable and
impossible: to write a letter, to finalize a plan, to move to another
apartment, to make a trip to the countryside . . . And here the
emotionally charged “I’m not ‘other people’” [ibid.] shrivels and
turns inside out, revealing its seamy side. Not a trace is left of his
masterly arrogance (which, for that matter, had been tempered from
the start by the inoffensiveness of the “master” in question and the
12  russian studies in literature

author’s humor) and the soul languishes in sorrow, discomfiture,

and shame, while the mind, about to make the habitual foray in
search of another culprit, instead foists onto that other Oblomov
a new question—Why am I the way I am?
And while Il’ia Il’ich is ostensibly in a dream—which is con-
veyed to the reader not through a first-person narrative but by
the author, as a circumstantial and scrupulous explanation of the
wellsprings of the character’s nature and destiny—a miscellany of
others are drawn to Oblomov’s bed, drafted into active participa-
tion in the plot in order, by analogy and by contrast, to lay bare
whatever has not been expended in the pictures of Oblomov’s
somnolent realm and is instead revealed in the hero by means (or
in spite) of their intervention.
Here it should be noted that Oblomov is dominated by a strict
symmetry. Behind a figurative filigree that may be compared with
Flemish painting or the plasticity of sculptural forms is discerned
an unmistakably noticeable rational underpinning, a Plan that the
author, unlike his hero, not only had but evidently held in mind
from the work’s beginning to its end. And, although he himself
flatly disavowed this (“I knew not what I did!”1) and although
the “dissertational” logic was layered with living pictures, that
logic nevertheless surfaces in the text. The presence of that Plan
is revealed in the architectonics of the entire work and particularly
in the meticulously thought-out and purposefully aligned system
of characters that throng, by no means haphazardly, about Il’ia
Il’ich’s couch.
Throughout the story, the servant Zakhar—a simplified, “plebe-
ian” projection of his master—never leaves Oblomov’s side. To
Oblomov himself, he is “more of an Oblomov than I am” [p. 12],
which is to say that he is an other but in some essential way he
is also the same—another but akin. It is no coincidence that the
theme of the other arises and propels the plot into motion during
conversations with Zakhar, rather than with anyone else, and that
he also launches the pervasive motif of Oblomov—“life is moving
on”—in a more traditional variant (by asking “What kind of life
is that?” [p. 13]). Master and servant coexist in the novel on the
principle of complementarity.
 Fall 2013  13

That pairing is traditionally contrasted to Stoltz and Ol’ga, who

are the vehicles of “positivity.” Two central nodes of character and
plot are identified in the novel, those being Oblomov and Stoltz,
each of whom forms around himself his own “gravitational zone,
his own semantic field.”2
Significant as that contrast is, however, Stoltz bears no com-
parison to Oblomov, either in terms of the degree of his activity in
the plot or of the number of links and intersections between him
and other characters. The novel’s character system is built around
Oblomov, focused on him, and subordinated to him, and is struc-
tured as an accumulation of numerous “duets” that come together
to form a multitier conceptual configuration.
Unlike Zakhar, Stoltz, whose long-awaited and repeatedly fore-
told appearance brings part 1 of the novel to a happy conclusion, is
paired not only contrastively but also, as it were, antagonistically
with Oblomov. He is not just other, he is absolutely other, the anti-
Oblomov, not only as his friend since childhood but also in terms
of the practical assistance he proffers, of the way in which he keeps
the estate producing the income without which Oblomov’s genteel
existence would be outright impossible.
It is important here to note that in this case we are passing over
the very uneven artistic execution of the main characters’ images
(the price exacted by the Plan) in silence, but for clarity’s sake
we must emphasize that Stoltz the “pragmatist,” whom the critics
have repeatedly scolded for his “arithmetical” approach to life, is
drawn to Oblomov in an absolutely disinterested way, in response
to the persistent habits of childhood. In Oblomov’s destiny he
embodies the “life is moving on” formula in its most indulgent
and affectionately friendly variant. The critic’s verdict that “Stoltz
holds fast to Oblomov as his animate principle and his indispens-
able fulcrum, without whom he would instantly go up in smoke,”3
was instigated not by Stoltz’s personality but by Stoltz’s image.
The need to distinguish those two hypostases of his is unmistak-
ably discerned, for example, in a comment that Chekhov wrote to
Aleksei Suvorin in 1889: “Stoltz inspires no confidence in me. The
author says that he’s a splendid chap, but I don’t believe it. He’s
14  russian studies in literature

a shifty dog who thinks a great deal of himself and likes what he
sees. He’s half contrived and three-quarters stilted.”4 Contrived,
stilted (which explains why “I don’t believe it”) . . . this is said not
of the character but of how he has been made.
Yet within the novel’s fictional world, Stoltz is positioned not as
the “stillborn,” emblematically exemplary antitype of the artisti-
cally full-blooded sluggard but as a person of vital importance to
Il’ia Il’ich and whom he eagerly awaits not only to assuage a heart-
felt attachment but also for expressly pragmatic considerations: “If
he were here, he would have rid me of all my troubles long ago
without asking for porter and champagne . . .” Oblomov complains
ingenuously in conversation with Tarant’ev [p. 54].
Tarant’ev in his turn is also an antitype of Oblomov, who further
sets off II’ia Il’ich’s genteel hauteur and dovelike meekness with
his cartoonish crassness, his mendacity, and his scoundrelly ways.
But there are at the same time some undeniably Oblomovian traits
in him as well: like Oblomov, his development was artificially ar-
rested in adolescence by his father and he too did not know how
to cope with random pieces of knowledge; like Oblomov, he is “a
master of talk” but whenever he has “to move a finger or get started”
he cannot do it, and if he does start anything, “like a child” (!) he
never makes a go of it; he too does not like to pay his debts and, in
entirely Oblomovian style, “he . . . was conscious of a slumbering
power locked up inside him by hostile circumstances, for good,
with no hope of seeing the light of day [just as evil spirits in folk
tales are locked up within the confines of enchanted walls]” [pp.
40, 41]—even the comparison is drawn from the mythopoeic soil
on which Il’ia Il’ich was raised and which goes far in explaining
his behavior. And it is in conversation with Tarant’ev that Oblomov
formulates the philosophy of loafing that is so congenial to both of
them when, in reply to some entirely rational advice from his “old
neighbor” (which Stoltz too would give him later and Ol’ga would
make a precondition for their marriage), he says, “New rooms! To the
country myself! What desperate measures you propose! . . . [T]hink
of something so that I don’t have to move out of my apartment, or
go to the country, and so that the matter is taken care of” [p. 51].
In that context, Tarant’ev’s demand for Oblomov’s coat [his dress
 Fall 2013  15

coat, to wear at a wedding—Trans.]—even though, as Zakhar attests,

he already has a vest and shirt of Oblomov’s that he has never
returned—has the look of an attempt, comically rendered but not
without risk for the spineless and malleably defenseless Il’ia Il’ich,
to effect a material congruity and “ingestion” that Zakhar resists,
with bearish heavy-handedness yet firmly and menacingly, due to
a gut feeling that this kind of undue chumminess is dangerous. It is
by no means coincidental that, like Stoltz, Tarant’ev is Oblomov’s
“old neighbor” [zemliak; literally, “compatriot”—Trans.]. He is
a monstrous emanation of that same Oblomovitis,* with all the
contrivances of a comedic villain who, had it not been for Stoltz,
could have proved to be a villain in good earnest.
Stoltz and Tarant’ev are also a pair, and a very important, struc-
turizing pair that determines the outward fabric of Il’ia Il’ich’s des-
tiny; even their first appearances in the novel are indicative and even
symbolic. In summing up the parade of visitors, Goncharov asserts
that these “others”—both those who still visit Oblomov from time to
time and those with whom the “vital ties” are slowly rupturing—are
all equally strangers to the hero. They all “understood life in their
own way, a way Oblomov did not want to understand it” and only
one of them is “dear to his heart” [p. 43], only one does he love
sincerely, only one does he believe. And that is Andrei Ivanovich
Stoltz, who has thus far been presented here (unlike all the others)
by proxy and who is impatiently awaited hour after hour.
Against the backdrop of that eager expectation, however, it is
not Stoltz but Tarant’ev—Stoltz’s surrogate and deputy, as it were,
and a spurious friend—who appears. Of him, it is said that he draws
Oblomov “out of his lethargy and boredom”: “To the room where
sleep and tranquility reigned, Tarant’ev brought life, movement,
and sometimes even news from the outside world.” All of this can
also be attributed to Stoltz, with the substantial distinction that
Stoltz never, ever “put on a show” [p. 42] but instead nudges

*In the introduction to her recent translation of a condensed source-Russian

Oblomov, Marian Schwartz objects to “Oblomovism” because it is too neutral-
with-a-positive-bent. She does not mention “Oblomovitis,” which is delightfully
pejorative and works perfectly in the context of the novel.—Trans.
16  russian studies in literature

Oblomov, purposefully and solicitously, toward a life of action.

But, symptomatically, it is Tarant’ev who finally gets Oblomov
out of bed.
Stoltz and Tarant’ev are at daggers drawn over Oblomov through-
out the novel, and Stoltz’s plan to save his friend from the bondage
of circumstances is contrasted with Tarant’ev’s plan to enslave his
old neighbor irretrievably and once and for all in circumstances
that he is powerless to overcome. The not-unimportant fact that the
prospect of Oblomov’s move to Vyborg arises in the novel before
Stoltz comes and that Pshenitsyn’s widow, in the guise of Tarant’ev’s
as-yet-unnamed “friend’s sister” [kuma], appears before Ol’ga often
goes unrecalled and unmarked. At the same time as Oblomov is visit-
ing the Il’inskiis “with both feet, as well as his arms and head” and
living in a rented dacha nearby (this is no longer just Stoltz’s plan
realized but Oblomov’s own will for change), Tarant’ev is moving
“Oblomov’s entire household to his friend’s sister in a lane on the
Vyborg side.” Let us underscore that—he was moving not only his
things but his “entire household” [p. 210].

Although Stoltz and Tarant’ev must defer to the female characters

in the novel’s foregrounded plot conflicts, Stoltz is an unseen pres-
ence even at the acme of the rustic romance between Oblomov and
Ol’ga, and at its culminating point, Tarant’ev, his ominous opposite
number, suddenly materializes. The happy couple measure their
impressions and attitude by Stoltz (“Andrei doesn’t know the epic
that is unfolding in my life” thinks Oblomov, the happy man
[p. 288]; “You lived last night and this morning not in your usual
way but in the way your friend and mine would like you to,” says
Ol’ga, encapsulating the tale of Oblomov’s epistolary confession
[p. 285]), although in a moment of weakness, Oblomov reverts in
his mind to Tarant’ev’s suggestion, while Ol’ga, who knows about
this from the servants, slyly inquires “You won’t be moving to the
Vyborg side?” [p. 256]. And although Il’ia Il’ich laughs in reply
and they both reject it at that time as an inconceivable eventual-
ity, at the romance’s apogee, when decisive words have just been
spoken and solemn promises made, the radiantly happy Oblomov
suddenly has the “distasteful surprise” of finding Tarant’ev in his
 Fall 2013  17

little country home, ensconced in his armchair. “In one instant it

was as if Tarantiev had pulled him down from the sky back into
the swamp” [p. 315].
From Akhsharumov on, scholars have quite often, although
with questionable justification, apostrophized Stoltz as Oblomov’s
Mephistopheles, whereas in terms of his mannerisms and his role
in Il’ia Il’ich’s destiny, the appellation of petty demon rightfully
belongs to Tarant’ev. Remarkably, after his first visit to Oblomov,
when Alekseev is left alone with the host, “an inviolable silence
reigned in the room for about ten minutes” [p. 57], as if to restore
the atmosphere that had been punctured—had been staved in* by
the “old neighbor.” And after Tarant’ev’s invasion of Oblomov’s
rustic idyll, as he sits in the same armchair that had recently been
occupied by his unbidden guest, “It took a very long time to rid
himself of his rude impression” [p. 320].
Oblomov loves Stoltz and longs for him to come whereas he
sweeps past, comet-like (the information that the wished-for and
indispensable Stoltz is again away from St. Petersburg repeats like a
refrain), then appears briefly to help Oblomov, to extricate him from
some trouble, to set him a new task, and to vanish again, enabling
and entitling him to act thereafter on his own account. But Tarant’ev
makes the most of Oblomov’s having been left to his own devices:
“By the time the German does come . . .” is how he summarizes
Stoltz’s upcoming visit while cooking up with Pshenitsyna’s “dear
brother” yet another scheme to misappropriate Oblomov’s property.
Tarant’ev, unlike “the German,” is always uninvited, unexpected,
and unwished-for, yet to this point has done a fairly good job of
working his will on Oblomov.
The plot-based face-off between these two characters is rein-
forced by personal animosity: they speak of each other in categori-
cally negative terms (in which to Stoltz, Tarant’ev is an “animal”
[p. 183] and to Tarant’ev, Stoltz is “The damn German, the sly
rogue!” [p. 53]) although they never come face to face, not even
when an encounter seems inevitable, such as during the celebra-

*Protaranennyi, “breached,” a pun on Tarant’ev’s name, which could well

be based in taran, “battering ram.”—Trans.
18  russian studies in literature

tion of St. Il’ia’s Day in the house on the Vyborg side: “At Stoltz’s
appearance, Tarantiev was the first to high-tail it over the wicker
fence and step into the vegetable garden” [p. 428], and the next to
hastily skulk away from the dangerous guest is the hostess’s astute
“dear brother.”
Mukhoiarov, Pshenitsyna’s brother, who is always looming
behind Tarant’ev’s back differs from his noisy and clueless buddy-
cum-clone in being a skillful and successful scoundrel. Had it not
been for Stoltz, this pair would have reduced not only Oblomov
but also a widow with young children to abject poverty.
Pshenitsyna too has a clone of her own—the faceless (almost liter-
ally: “She barely had a face” [p. 235]) but strikingly able and adroit
Anis’ia who, in her pairing with Zakhar, plays before Oblomov’s very
eyes and behind his back an intermezzo on the theme of the union of
a “clever” woman and a “clueless” man, and within the confines of
that intermezzo presents as a lower-level parody of Ol’ga.
The intelligent, energetic, no-nonsense, exacting Ol’ga Il’inskaia
and the inarticulate, patient, self-sacrificing Agaf’ia Matveevna
Pshenitsyna make another vividly contrastive pair. Those two
women are Oblomov’s compass points, the first as destiny’s in-
vocation (his “guiding star” [p. 252]), the second as its invitation
(“he was drawn to her like to a warm fire” [p. 425]). The details of
the symbolism are important: a star (even a guiding star) is always
distant and unreachable, whereas a warm fire is close at hand.
Stoltz, ushers Ol’ga into Oblomov’s life, not suspecting the
effect this will have and not guessing that Ol’ga will ultimately
be paired with him; Agaf’ia Matveevna appears in Il’ia Il’ich’s
life thanks to Tarant’ev, who also cannot imagine how far the re-
lationship between Oblomov and Pshenitsyna will go. And, even
though the two abominable buddies—the “old neighbor” and the
“dear brother”—can be seen peeking out devilishly from behind
the widow’s back, she, like Ol’ga, develops a personal relation-
ship with Oblomov that is influenced by no third party. Oblomov’s
interactions with both women are therefore defined not by external
interference but by how he and those two women feel about each
other and by the choices that are respectively made.
 Fall 2013  19

This “analytical” character system,5 built as it is on mutually

intersecting binary oppositions, forms the milieu of the novel in
which the protagonist’s personality is revealed and his destiny is
shaped. All those with whom Oblomov engages, either directly or
at a remove, needless to say, play various roles and occupy posi-
tions of varying importance in the plot. But that does not override
the fact that the character system is organized as a kind of net in
which, as it were, Oblomov flounders, prodded, encouraged, and
provoked from various quarters. The more inert, “lazy,” and de-
pendent upon the others the protagonist becomes, the more their
activity and significance grows in scope and substance.

“Like a lump of dough”

Oblomov as a target of action

The critics began their conceptualization of the personality and

destiny of Goncharov’s protagonist with Dobroliubov’s harsh
diagnosis of him as a slave: “He is the slave of every woman, of
everyone he encounters, the slave of every rascal who wants to
order him around.”6
In the “realistic” (read: sociological) format in which Dobroliubov
is viewing the figure of Oblomov this definition is irrefutable.
All the characters in this novel are subject to an inflexible pre-
determination; all are derived from deep within the world to which
they belong by birth and upbringing; all have been fostered by their
respective milieus. On this score, it is very indicative that Stoltz’s
dissimilarity [inakost’] is predicated not on his inimitable human
qualities and not on his personal choice but on the fact that he is
a German, schooled by a self-abnegating drudge of a father and
pampered by a Russian mother with an Oblomovian sense of the
world and pretensions to a higher-level gentility, much like that of
the count who is their neighbor.
The determinist approach to personality, where external factors
are given a foundational role, makes possible the line of conduct
that Stoltz demonstrates relative to Oblomov and delegates to Ol’ga,
20  russian studies in literature

when “the aunt had heard Stoltz, on the eve of his departure, telling
Olga not to let Oblomov get lazy, to forbid him naps, to torment
him, tyrannize him, give him various commissions—in short, to
take charge of him” [p. 244].
And that Ol’ga does: “She weighed her power over him in an
instant, and she liked this role of guiding star, the ray of light she
would shed on a still lake and its reflection. She reveled in many
aspects of her primacy in this single combat” [p. 252].
She efficiently and enthusiastically discharges the role of “tor-
mentor,” and he obediently and gratefully accepts the role of “vic-
tim,” at one point even resembling “a dog dragging his tail after it
has been trodden” [p. 286]. Encountering this “passionately lazy
submission and eternal harmony with every beat of her heart; but
no movement of will, no active thought” [p. 252], she purposefully
and ruthlessly pursues her “pedagogical experiment”7 without an
inkling of the doubts and anxieties that are besetting him. Ol’ga
transforms Stoltz’s prosaic metaphor—“a lump of dough” [p.
184]—into a poetic comparison that makes him “the Galatea to
her Pygmalion” [p. 256]. But, although in this case, the lump of
dough is refined to the point of becoming a contextually implied
piece of ivory, the nature of the interactions between Oblomov
(as a passive target [ob”ekt], as “material”) and the other (as the
creative agent [sub”ekt] in regard to him) is preserved. And seems
to remain unchanged to the very end.
As their love reaches its acme, Ol’ga waxes sarcastic about
Oblomov’s past and becomes despotically willful in respect to his
present. He is exhausted by a plethora of feeling and by the efforts
that love demands of him, while she undeviatingly persecutes even
a hint of somnolence. She punishes him for lying down; he trembles
at her glance, responding to her by living at a feverish pace. But a
normal life cannot be lived feverishly . . .
She demands that he clear up his legal affairs, make a visit to
Oblomovka . . . and even in details she is unyielding and categorical:
Kindly go to the theater, no less! [p. 347]. “She is so persistent, so
adamant! [She is hard to persuade . . .],” the crestfallen Oblomov
says to himself [p. 399]. In the meantime, though, he has “taken to
his bed” all over again, but this time on the Vyborg side.
 Fall 2013  21

“A stone would have come to life after what I did” [p. 403]—thus,
with a formula that might have been uttered by a frustrated, cre-
atively unsuccessful Pygmalion, Ol’ga sums up her relationship
with Oblomov. And she pronounces a withering judgment: “It’s all
useless, because you’ve died” [ibid.]. He is dead to her, because she
has finally understood that she cannot remake, recast, recreate him,
and she acknowledges that both to him and to herself: “I learned
only recently that I loved in you what I wanted there to be in you,
what Stoltz had pointed out to me, what he and I had invented. I
loved the future Oblomov!” [p. 406].
Here is Stoltz’s remarkable assessment of recent events and of
Oblomov’s role in them: “It is I who am most of all to blame, then
she, and then you, and very little at that” [p. 429]. Andrei does not,
however, stop trying to save his friend, acting now not only on his
own account but also as commissioned by Ol’ga: “Now I’m obey-
ing not just my own will but Olga’s. She doesn’t want—do you
hear?—she doesn’t want you to fade away altogether, to be buried
alive, and I promised to dig you out of your grave” [pp. 430–31].
At one point, when Ol’ga is upset, she feels that she had presumed
too far—“Had it been so long ago that she had manipulated her own
fate and another’s with such confidence?” [p. 458]—but her happy
union with Stoltz restores her confidence and again she wants to start
“manipulating” someone else’s fate as she sees it, pestering Oblomov,
worrying about him whether he wants her to or not:
“You have to act decisively with him, put him in the carriage
with you and drive away” [p. 514].
“He won’t be in filth but rather close to people like himself, to
us” [ibid.].
“You won’t leave him, won’t abandon him?” [p. 515], she inter-
rogates her husband when she suspects that his friend is wearing
on him. But that now-patent weariness may possibly be hinting
vaguely to Stoltz that he will never be able to relocate Oblomov,
carry him away, transplant him into different soil, settle him nearby,
and force him to live “not in filth.” Ol’ga wants to try that again, in
a different way this time but still operating on the naive assumption
that inward circumstances can be changed by outward, extraneous
efforts, whether the target entity wishes it or not. Stoltz is seemingly
22  russian studies in literature

beginning to understand that this is not the case and that the only
thing he can do is ensure that Oblomov continues receiving the
rental income from his estate without interruption, so he can sup-
port the Oblomovka he has established on the Vyborg side.
That Oblomovka, greatly desired and imprinted into Il’ia Il’ich’s
conscious and subconscious mind for good and all as an ideal way
of ordering the world, is created for him by Agaf’ia Matveevna
Pshenitsyna, who takes Oblomov on as the principal target (!) of
her caring, her concern, and her love, requiring nothing in return.
Whereas with respect to Ol’ga, the “poor Oblomov” always felt
as if he were at a school examination that he was ultimately going
to fail in spectacular style, with respect to Agaf’ia Matveevna,
from the very beginning, by virtue of his origins and social status,
he is on the same pedestal he occupied in his early childhood and
he had been aspiring to mount once again: “He was a gentleman.
He shone, gleamed!” [p. 421]. Pshenitsyna is prepared to serve
Oblomov’s naively egotistical, defenseless, charming gentility to
the grave, without words, without analyzing her own feelings, and
especially without analyzing Il’ia Il’ich’s conduct and his attitude
toward her, acknowledging him once and for all as her sovereign
lord, as the sense and content of her life.

Obviously, the attitude toward Oblomov as a target for others

to act on corresponds to his own “parasitic” sense of self, which
is comically illuminated in the account of how Oblomov invari-
ably follows up his bitter moments of insight and contrition with
a fervent prayer imploring the heavens to “avert whatever storm
threatened,” after which, “having submitted his fate to heaven’s
care,” he would become “calm and indifferent to everything in the
world, and the storm there could do as it pleased” [p. 69]. That urge
to submit his fate to the care of someone other in many ways also
defines Oblomov’s conduct throughout the novel.
“Give me some of your will and intelligence and lead me where
you like,” he says to Stoltz. “Maybe I’ll follow you, but by myself
I’ll never budge” [p. 198]. It is the same with Ol’ga: at the acme
of his love for her, “in the rays of her maidenly glow, vital strength
and young but subtle, profound, and healthy mind,” Oblomov feels
 Fall 2013  23

“as if he were flying” [p. 387], but without her, when she is absent,
he shrivels, dims, fades away. Yet, having fulfilled none of her
demands, he ultimately entreats and advises her to “Take me as I
am” [p. 405]. More than that, he is prepared to submit his lot to the
care not only of Ol’ga and Stoltz, not only of Zakhar, who loves
him but is completely clueless, but of any random scoundrel. And
one such promptly presents himself, in the form of Mukhoiarov.
Oblomov’s detachment from his rustic roots as well as his educa-
tion and government service have led him to an awareness of his
demarcation, his differentiation, but he is also aided in recognizing
and asserting it by Zakhar, who is not an individual singularity but
a societal particularity. Twice—early in the novel, during a con-
versation with Stoltz, and at its end, in conversation with the “dear
brother”—Oblomov attests to himself as a gentleman, but confirms
that on each occasion by summoning or referencing Zakhar, since
that is the kind of objectification he needs to give him weight and
actual societal significance in his own eyes.
His incompatibility and ultimate rift with Ol’ga are in no small
measure predicated on the fact that Oblomov had been interesting
and important to Ol’ga in and of himself, as an individual, as a per-
son, without his integument of gentility or, in a manner of speaking,
without Zakhar. But he feels defenseless and untenable without that
armor. And Agaf’ia Matveevna’s success is predicated on the fact
that she does not invoke Oblomov’s agency [sub”ektivnost’]. She
is seeking nothing from him, as Ol’ga had; she accepts him exactly
as he wants to perceive himself and be accepted by others, and for
this reason, even before breaking with Ol’ga, he is unconsciously
drawn to Pshenitsyna, finds her restful to his eyes and his soul,
and in turn seeks nothing from her but just observes her “with the
same pleasure with which he had looked at the hot curd tart that
morning” [p. 369].
Taking “literature’s . . . surgical department” (as represented by
Dobroliubov) to task at one point, Akhsharumov declared Ol’ga
and Stoltz to be “enemies to Oblomov, that is, to the idea whose
face this serves to represent,”8 by which he meant the confronta-
tion between the national and cosmopolitan principles. That was,
needless to say, an ideological stretch, polemical overkill, since
24  russian studies in literature

Ol’ga and Stoltz are no enemies to Oblomov. They sincerely wish

him well, he is in great need of both of them, and without Stoltz he
would have been quite simply finished. Even so, though, Ol’ga and
Andrei see what is good for Il’ia Il’ich differently than he does: on
the one hand, they are prepared to take him under their wing while
on the other, they want him to be independent. But Oblomov can-
not bear to be identified with others, which is to say that he values
his selfhood [samost’] and sees it not in any personal uniqueness
but in his membership of the gentry, in his devotion to the age-old
landowning lifestyle and to the habits and behavioral norms that he
absorbed in childhood and felt to be his mainstay, the foundation of
his human essence. And Goncharov confirms and showcases this
societal, “determinist” approach to his personality in and through
the logic of the entire novel, including the eloquent and symbolic
act toward the end, wherein the young Andriusha Oblomov is given
to Stoltz to raise.
While according to the Bakhtinian logic, Dostoevsky’s hero
turns himself inside out just to be rid of someone else’s external-
izing definition [ovneshniaiushschee opredelenie], Goncharov’s
protagonist wields that definition as his banner and his shield. He
hides behind it and asserts himself through it, and to bear the stamp
of Oblomovitis is for him a hundred times better than to be without
that stamp, since that, in his understanding, would be tantamount
to not existing at all.

“This only Oblomov could do”

Oblomov as an agent of action

Having presented Oblomov as a direct and visible (textbook-ready,

in fact, and actually a frequent feature in textbooks) product of
Oblomovka and a passive target for others to act on, we shall now
ask ourselves if this is all there is to Goncharov’s protagonist.
Shall we, in other words, leave him neatly slotted in the author’s
framework, for which he has been so clearly, purposefully, and
convincingly delineated?
Or, borrowing Oblomov’s own formula, shall we ask where is
 Fall 2013  25

the human being in all this? Have we not split up and scattered
his deep-seated essence through an enticingly lightweight and
self-evident kind of generalization and typification? Have we not
forgotten that “this unworthy vessel contains a higher principle”
[p. 29]? Have we made a rush to judgment?
Il’ia Il’ich himself, after rising with unlooked-for passion and
inspiration to the defense of a “fallen man” penned by a columnist
who writes “with just his head” and after lighting up with sincere
outrage against Penkin’s intentions of “casting” the reprobate out of
“civil life and society” (“Cast him out? But how can you cast him
out of the circle of mankind, the lap of nature, and God’s mercy?”),
cools off and calms down as easily as he had just flared up. Pulled
up short by Penkin’s exclamation (“Now look who’s gone a bit
too far!”), he himself feels that he has “indeed gone too far” and,
falling silent, he “stood there for a moment, yawned, and slowly
lay back down on the sofa” [pp. 28–29].
The smile that illuminates this scene on the one hand decreases
the emotive impact of Oblomov’s speech and, on the other, un-
expectedly reinforces and confirms the scene’s meaning, brings
a multidimensionality to the situation, and elicits a warm feeling
toward this harmless but far from faceless and certainly not brain-
less idler.
A dormouse, a bump on a log—yes of course, and even a beached
seal if you like but . . . a greasy, lubberly lump of flesh?! [The latter
phrase is from A.V. Druzhin’s 1859 review of Oblomov.—Trans.]
As well as he may fit into the parameters of the author’s Plan,
that is certainly not all there is to Oblomov. Nor can he rightly
be called an “ordinary” person, given his changes over time and
the age-specific deformations attributable to his upbringing.9 His
unconventionality becomes especially evident when he is com-
pared with Aleksandr Aduev [The protagonist of Goncharov’s An
Ordinary Story [Obyknovennaia istoriia]—Trans.], to whom he is
for some reason constantly equated, even though that comparison
only proves that, their outward social similarity notwithstanding,
Oblomov is not an evolution of that same type but a qualitatively
different rendition of it.
Despite his entirely respectable education, Aleksandr (the classic
26  russian studies in literature

ingénu) is second-rate in everything. The product of provincial

life, the result of a genteel upbringing and immoderate, bookishly
romantic effusions, he is a mimic and a poseur, who can neither
maintain the insight he has achieved nor establish himself in the
independent and mature state that can be glimpsed in his letters to
his uncle and aunt in the country. Finally, he opts again for second-
rate status, for mimicry, at which point the elder Aduev [Aleksandr’s
uncle—Trans.] not coincidentally recognizes and greets the Aduev
in him—a new initiate of mundanity and pragmatism.
But Oblomov, despite his careful recreation of Oblomovka,
whose causal role in his destiny is prescribed with scientific exac-
titude, is unique, primary, and inimitable. And no shirker written
by Gogol or anyone else (who are, yet again, often mentioned in
connection with him) can hold a candle to Goncharov’s Oblomov
in his sound and solid humanity and in the warmth and melancholy
with which the reader responds to him in his heart.
This shiftless sluggard is endowed with the gift of inward truth
and beauty. It is not only that he has never offended against those
qualities on his own account nor has “his heart . . . emitted one false
note” [p. 515]; he also has an unerring aesthetic instinct for falsity
in other people—and aesthetic it must be, since he has unfortunately
not been gifted with any pragmatic perspicacity. But he has a subtle
sense of “style,” which he gradually manifests—marginally at first,
almost imperceptibly, with a dot here and a dash there.
Oblomov’s active agency is initially eclipsed by the practical
helplessness with which he appeals to everyone who falls within
his field of vision, in hopes of becoming a target of their concern.
Even so, though, it does make an appearance, in the gentle, veiled
irony and passionately emotive accusations of his conversation
with Penkin; in the sardonic venom with which he responds to the
doctor’s advice, which has as much “real” meaning in it as do the
columnist’s yarns; in his philosophical summaries of how things
have worked out, in society and on the job, for his flourishing
acquaintances; and, needless to say, in his uneasy thoughts about
why I am the way I am; but possibly most of all in the “emotion-
riddled scenes” and “pitiful words” [pp. 89, 96] that he directs
toward Zakhar.
 Fall 2013  27

These flares of Oblomovian eloquence have not the slightest

practical meaning: they neither change Zakhar’s attitude toward
the master nor increase his zeal and efficiency, nor do they ever
move the state of affairs in and on the subject of the apartment from
square one. This is, rather, a kind of “art for art’s sake” to which
Oblomov regularly pays homage, as is attested by the reaction of
Zakhar, who is ready to agree with everything at the drop of a hat,
“just to keep the matter from turning into one of those emotion-
riddled scenes which he found worse than bitter radish” [p. 89].
There is in those scenes (and this is enormously important) none
of Iudushka Golovlev’s phrase-mongering and malice; it is “pure
art,” intended to unburden the soul and provide an outlet for the
lively energy that still resides in that lazy body. This is where we
see both the artistry that Stoltz discerned in Il’ia and the poetic gift
that he also noted and which goes far beyond the creation of an
updated Oblomovian utopia and even beyond the long epic poem
of his romance with Ol’ga that unfolds through the plot, but is pe-
riodically actualized in oral “epic poems” on various topics that are
more often than not addressed to Zakhar (who may be far removed
from poetry of any kind but is still fated to the role of audience),
more rarely (due to his frequent absences) to Stoltz, and in their
perfected, consummate, written (!) variant, to Ol’ga.
The drawing together of Oblomov and Ol’ga reveals his unique-
ness, in which his esthetic talent has a large part to play.
By ushering Oblomov into the rather prim-and-proper home of
Ol’ga’s aunt, where “they would not only not suggest he nap after
dinner but where one did not even cross one’s legs,” Stoltz hopes
“that if he brought into Oblomov’s dreamy life the presence of an
attractive, intelligent, lively, and somewhat mocking young woman,
it would be like bringing a lamp into a darkened room, a lamp
that shed an even light in all its dark corners and a few degrees of
warmth, bringing cheer to the room.” Stoltz is counting on nothing
more than lighting up that gloomy room with a lamp’s soft light. He
has in no way “foreseen that he was introducing fireworks; Ol’ga
and Oblomov so much the more” [p. 243].
Those unexpected consequences and Il’ia Il’ich’s behavior,
which was not foreseen even by one very close to him who knew
28  russian studies in literature

him well, obviously fractures the logic of causality established

in Oblomov’s Dream that has been so assiduously maintained by
Goncharov in line with his Plan. Oblomov, who begins the novel
comfortably warm, lazily dreaming, “Amid his lazy lying about
in lazy postures,” of a woman [pp. 220–21], undergoes a dramatic
change: he feels “hot and cold all over” [p. 244], he is exhausted
by tension and emotional overload; his heart has at last waited out
“its own time, its own pathos” [p. 62], and he is now experiencing
love with all the intensity that it brings when at its acme to one
who is, for his part, gifted with the ability to give himself over
into its power.

Ol’ga inadvertently and intuitively gropes her way to the inner-

most aesthetic core of Oblomov’s personality and instantaneously
forges a path to his heart. She captivates him with music—or, more
precisely, with how organically and naturally she blends with the
music. He fears dissonance: “‘What if you sing badly?’ remarked
Oblomov naively. ‘Afterward I would feel awkward’” [p. 212].
This remark is certainly “naive” from the mundane, worldly point
of view but from the viewpoint of those aesthetic laws to which
Oblomov, secretly and unbeknownst to himself, adheres, it repre-
sents a fear of incompatibility, disharmony, imperfection.
Oblomov’s sensitive soul does not simply react to Ol’ga’s sing-
ing; instead it rings with the music and bursts into song in response:
“Oblomov flushed, grew faint, could barely hold back tears, and
had even more trouble stifling the joyous cry ready to burst from
inside him. He had not felt such spirit and strength for a long time,
a strength that seemed to rise whole from deep inside, prepared to
accomplish some great deed.” After softening that emotional incan-
descence with a joke, to prevent the reader from forgetting who is at
the center of all this—“At that moment, he would even have gone
abroad if all he had to do was embark and go”—Goncharov steps
back into the shadows and permits his hero to rise to new emotional
heights: “In conclusion she sang ‘Casta Diva.’ All the ecstasies,
the thoughts racing like lightning in his mind, the quivering that
ran through his body like needles, all this destroyed Oblomov. He
was on the verge of collapse” [pp. 213–14].
 Fall 2013  29

A few days later, Stoltz has left and Oblomov and Ol’ga are alone,
with no “intermediary” between them. There is music again, but this
time they experience and inhabit it not separately but together, as a
single, blended whole—“Both of them, outwardly transfixed, had
exploded with an inner fire and were feeling an identical trembling”—
and on the crest of the music that carries them aloft, above everything
that had only recently been filling their thoughts, their conversations,
and their lives, comes a seemingly unthinkable (seemingly impos-
sible, in fact, coming from Oblomov) declaration of love. “How
deeply you feel the music!” says an astonished Ol’ga. “No, it’s not
music . . . I feel . . . but . . . love!” replies Oblomov [p. 220].
The spontaneity of that declaration—self-evident but no less touch-
ing and significant in its naïve sincerity, immediacy, and power—is
Oblomov’s attempt to justify taking such a liberty, by telling Ol’ga
when next they meet, “Believe me, I didn’t intend . . . I couldn’t help
myself . . . If there had been a clap of thunder then, or a stone had
fallen on me, I would have said it anyway. No power on earth could
have stopped me” [pp. 227–8]. And she, astonished, bewildered,
not knowing what to do about this and how to conduct herself,
understands: “No one else would ever have said that upon seeing a
woman for the second or third time. Nor would anyone else have felt
that love so quickly. This only Oblomov could do” [p. 225].
Yes, only Oblomov could do this, and he does it from the deep-
est recesses of a realistic, rationally analytical, “modernist” novel,
where he is hedged in on all sides by markers of cause and effect
and festooned with labels, is predetermined by the dark Oblomov-
ian past and doomed to a joyless Oblomovian future, completely
divested of his own will, given over into the power of all comers,
and unable even to cope with the move from one apartment to
another (which others do for him). Contrary to all the judgments
entered and despite the birthmarks of feudalism and the historical
foredooming of Oblomovitis, he breezes his way into a romance
of the first water and inhabits a genuine love poem, complete with
tears and raptures, quarrels and reconciliations, with a lilac branch
in his hand and music in his soul—the same lovely, romantic poem
that, like an unattainable mirage in the desert, had already enticed
young striplings such as Lenskii and the younger Aduev and that
30  russian studies in literature

not only handed itself to Il’ia Il’ich but was recited by him without
a single false note.
He has not simply “caught up with life,” he has tasted its sweet-
ness (“My God! How fine it is to live in this world!” [p. 288]) and he
conveys that feeling to Ol’ga (“I felt so good . . . before” [p. 281]).
Before . . . because at the very acme of his love, once again
applying his unerring aesthetic instinct, he guesses that this poem
cannot have a happy ending, that the inevitable migration of the
relationship toward the pedestrian will substantially modify love’s
melody, that the wilted lilac branches will need to be replaced
with something more long-lived, that an endless cycle of exhaus-
tion, self-destruction, and resurrection cannot be sustained . . . He
had more than once compared Ol’ga in his mind to his refined
Oblomovian ideal, and in the early days, in the spring of his love,
it had seemed to him that “the ideal of embodied serenity and
life’s happiness . . . was Olga—to a tee!” [p. 224]. He would not
become disenchanted in her but, on the contrary, would become
more and more enchanted, although from time to time he has been
perplexed by her “coldness” in contrast to his ardor (as we learn,
at one point he is musing, by no means randomly and not by way
of abstract theory, that “one must rein in passion, stifle and drown
it in marriage” [p. 222]) and has even asked himself if she loves
him or only wants to be married [p. 311]. And when he has brushed
those doubts away, they are followed by other, more serious—even
ineradicable—misgivings, which tell him that this is “Not love but
merely the presentiment of love.” “She was ready to accept love, her
heart had been waiting so keenly, and she had encountered him by
chance, by mistake. As soon as someone else appeared she would
come to her senses and be horrified at her mistake!” [pp. 270–71].
Not only Oblomov but possibly his creator too is unconsciously
quoting “Her soul awaited . . . someone’s touch. / And now at last
the wait has ended” and “Another! No! In all creation / There’s no
one else whom I’d adore.”*

*Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, trans. James E. Falen (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1998), pp. 60, 74.
 Fall 2013  31

After transferring his life from a poetic to a prosaic register and

almost dying in the process, Oblomov retains his aesthetic intuition,
his sense of proper proportion, his ability to stay in tune with his
circumstances, to accept even the smallest trifle with gratitude,
while preserving his crystalline soul independent and unscathed.
Note his unselfish delight on hearing the news that Stoltz and
Ol’ga have become husband and wife: “[T]ell her . . . that I met her
in order to lead her onto this path, and that I bless that meeting and
bless her on her new path!” [p. 477]. Note the childlike artlessness of
his slightly tipsy account of his new life: “Come, drink up, Andrei.
Really, drink up. Splendid vodka! Olga Sergeyevna won’t make you
anything like this! . . . She’ll sing ‘Casta diva,’ but she doesn’t know
how to make vodka like this. And she won’t make you a pie like this
with chicken and mushrooms! Only at Oblomovka did they ever
bake like this and now here!” And for an instant it even seems to
him that it can all be combined together: “Agafia Matveyevna
could teach Olga Sergeyevna to keep house” [pp. 480–81]. But
when Stoltz, on Ol’ga’s insistence, offers to remove him from
“this swamp,” Oblomov, “fully conscious of his reason and will”
rejects this extraneous, inappropriate, and incongruous plan: “I
have said goodbye forever to the world into which you want to
draw me. You can’t weld or put back together two split halves.
I’ve grown so attached to this pit, that if you try to tear me away,
it will be my death” [p. 531].
What looks from the outside like an utter and unambiguous
defeat may also be perceived as the protagonist’s rejection of his
own special status as a gentleman: “It is difficult to picture Il’ia
Il’ich living in Pshenitsyna’s house and holding forth on ‘the oth-
ers,’” Mikhail Otradin remarks.10 But there, in the house on the
Vyborg side, Oblomov gradually stops “holding forth” on anything
at all. He no longer even badgers Zakhar with “pitiful words” and
“emotion-riddled scenes,” and composes no more of his oral epics
on society and everyday life. By a bitter irony of fate and pursuant
to the inexorable logic of a novel that ends as it began, the last flare
of Oblomovian eloquence is dedicated to his genteel helplessness
and is directed to Pshenitsyna’s “dear brother,” asking him how he
can “wiggle out of this” [p. 395].
32  russian studies in literature

Still even this final (per the Plan) return of Oblomov to Oblo-
movka has more than a societal motivation behind it; it also has
a broader and deeper—a philosophical—meaning. The poem is
over and desires are a thing of the past. They have come to pass,
albeit not in their poetic iteration. Life is no longer “moving on”
(“It’s peaceful here, and quiet, Andrei, and no one gets in the way,”
says Oblomov during one of his last meetings with Stoltz [p. 430]).
The words have run out (“Oh, Ilya! If only you would look on this
a little philosophically!” says Stoltz ruefully [p. 432]) and along
with the words, life too, disturbed now by no one and nothing, has
quietly dried up, melted away, and run out.
It is not that “Oblomov centers on extinction and aging”11 but,
rather, that the living of life is here likened, in enhanced and meta-
phorical style, to the year’s natural cycle. Oblomov did say at the
beginning that his life “began with the fading away,” that “I’ve
never known what it’s like to have a flame of either salvation or
destruction burn in my life” [p. 199], yet this is not a summarization
but a benchmark, a kind of low-pitched, hard-won springboard.
The novel begins with a vernal awakening, in the direct, figurative,
metaphorical and symbolic senses of the word, and, although Oblo-
mov categorically refuses to be part of the First of May festivities
at Ekaterinhof (since he would far rather go back into hibernation),
random harbingers of spring plague him until Stoltz appears, fol-
lowed by Ol’ga, and his life enters that crisp, clean, and always
delightful season when everything bursts into flower.
The novel’s high point coincides with high summer and is docu-
mented as such by the protagonist himself:
The lilacs have gone . . . This moment will go too, like the lilac! . . .
Love too? Love? But I thought it hung over lovers like a sultry noon and
nothing could move or breathe in its atmosphere. There is no peace in
love either, and it is constantly changing, constantly moving forward,
forward—“like all of life,” as Stoltz used to say. The Joshua has yet to
be born who would tell it, “Stop and don’t move!” What will happen
tomorrow? [p. 288]

Tomorrow inexorably transforms into today and then into yester-

day. “The summer was moving along and drawing to a close” and
 Fall 2013  33

Oblomov has “caught up with life” at last [p. 297], but natural
time continues on its relentless course. The last rendezvous with
Ol’ga in a natural setting takes place in the Summer Garden,
but . . . in autumn. “The leaves had all fallen and you could see
right through everything. The crows in the trees were cawing so
unpleasantly.” Oblomov is irritated that the meeting has been set
for dinnertime, moves indolently toward her, coldly rebuffs her
proposal to take a boat ride on the Neva, and speaks “gravely and
tediously” of his fears about how people will talk [pp. 359–60,
361, 364].
The breach in the relationship, both novelistic and romantic,
signals the coming of winter or, conversely, is elicited by winter (as
either music had once engendered love or love had become music):
“Snow was falling in fat flakes, thickly carpeting the earth,” and
Oblomov looks through the window at the snow that shrouds ev-
erything around. “‘I kept dozing off!’ he whispered then in despair,
lay down in his bed and fell into a leaden, cheerless sleep” [p. 409].
The snow has covered [zasýpal] the earth and the protagonist has
dropped off [zasypál], in line with the rhythms of nature while at
the same time out of step with them, because he runs a fever and
dies, only to resurrect after that death and live through yet another
unruffled “wintry” life, a “wintry” love—timeless, with no change
of seasons, no deity, no inspiration but with the unfailing kindness
and openheartedness that he bestows on everyone who comes close
and is capable of receiving those gifts.
In the case of Oblomov, who has emerged from the deepest
recesses of a mythological, “prehistoric” existence, the correlation
between the natural cycle and a man’s path from birth to death is
very clear to see. And the tragic vulnerability, fragility, and imper-
manence of human life in general are, furthermore, all the more
unmistakable for having been discerned through one particular
individual’s destiny. But when a lyrico-philosophical light is cast
on Oblomov’s destiny, this inevitably contradicts the rigid societal
framework in which that destiny has been embedded, the rational
plan that underlies the novel, and the infamous Oblomovitis that
is blamed for every last thing.
34  russian studies in literature

“He died. He perished for no reason at all,” is how Stoltz sums

up his friend’s life [p. 543].
And he is wrong.
Oblomov lived a full and, in its own way, beautiful life, many
of whose events are such as bring content and abundant value to
a man’s lot: he had a lifelong friend, he knew romantic love and
found prosaic love, and his death was an irreparable loss to the
several pure souls who were unstintingly attached to him.
He was a poet who left no works to posterity, but his poetry
brightened his relationships with those who were close to him; he
was a devotee of harmony and symmetry, and those laws of loveli-
ness reigned in his soul and defined the best moments of his life.
The sin of doing nothing is largely expiated by his having done no
evil, and not out of laziness either, but due to an organic inability
to commit evil, due to the absence of evil in his nature. His Dream
recounts how young Iliusha would tear the wings off a dragonfly
or watch a spider sucking the blood from a captive fly and end
“by killing both the victim and its torturer” [p. 119]. In that early,
now-legendary time, he might kick Zakhar as he was pulling on his
stockings for him. But, unlike the other seeds with which the Dream
is so profusely sown, that childish cruelty never grew to fruition
in him. It withered at the root. The adult Oblomov did once hit a
man, but that was the blackguard Tarant’ev, who had just insulted
his friend Andrei Stoltz [p. 491], and the slap given to Tarant’ev
and his expulsion from the Vyborg house and from Oblomov’s
life constitute a true “poem in action” and a long-awaited act of
justice that Oblomov performs with the full approval of Agaf’ia
Matveevna, Anis’ia, Zakhar, and the reader.
A seemingly easy prey, a “lump of dough” to those who live a
more energetic life, Oblomov plays the role of malleable target of
outside influences only in material, mundane matters. He is easy
to cheat, easy to perplex, embarrass, and frighten, but it proves
impossible to subjugate his weak will or break his fragile spirit.
Oblomov never did anything that would have led to the betrayal
of his self, his inner “I,” his closely held sense of harmony, and
his notion of what is fitting. Nor did he do what Stoltz and Ol’ga
 Fall 2013  35

had been trying to make him do (for his own good), but there too,
behind the outward weakness is revealed an unexpected strength
and wisdom. His friend and his ladylove forge onward and upward,
turning a deaf ear to his pleas (“Where are you going? . . . I’m tired
and can’t keep up with you” [p. 287]), not acknowledging his right
to live at a different tempo, to breathe in a different rhythm. For
them, Oblomov’s inability to keep up represents defeat, failure, ruin.
But Oblomov is other. He understands that there is no way he can
stay abreast of them, accepts that as a given, does not complain,
does not hold it against fate, and gives his blessing to the unstop-
pable motion of his friends, who, for all their good intentions, are
showing themselves too straightforward to accommodate someone
else’s dissimilarity.
“Out of this pit, this swamp, into the light and space, where there
is a healthy, normal life!” [p. 531] is how Stoltz tries to appeal to
Oblomov during his last visit, oblivious to the hopeless dissonance
between his words and Il’ia Il’ich’s condition, to the artificial and
perfunctory optimism emanating from those words in the context
of Oblomov’s mood and situation. This last meeting provides a
graphic demonstration of the fact that a person cannot be made the
target of extraneous desires, not even those dictated by the very
best intentions. A person is the agent of his destiny, is on his own,
and is in the main always alone, even when he is surrounded by
attention and love.
Oblomov’s loneliness is a very important theme of his personal-
ity and his destiny. It is comically and contrastively exploited at
the beginning, when Tarant’ev advises him to refer in a letter to
the chief of police to his wife and twelve minor children who are
being ruined by “the rebellious actions of the bailiff.” (It will, he
says, make the letter sound more “natural.”) “Where am I going
to come up with that many little ones if they ask me to present my
children?” Oblomov laughs [p. 52]. There is, however, a sad side
to this story. Having grown up in a world where twelve children in
a single family is no great wonder, a world that is entirely perme-
ated by the “familial principle,” Oblomov has never had a family
of his own, except in his dreams. Eventually Agaf’ia Matveevna
36  russian studies in literature

becomes his wife and bears him a son, Andriusha, but no “Flemish”
picture of family happiness comes of this because it has none of
the abundantly genteel existence portrayed in his dreams, because
the existential loneliness that he feels every time he watches the
sun go down is not something that this simple woman—or, for that
matter, any woman—can dispel.
The torch of loneliness is carried on by Agaf’ia Matveevna and
Zakhar, who refuse the shelter and aid offered by Stoltz. Like Oblo-
mov, they prefer their own destiny, bitter as it might be, to one that
has been handed to them by someone else. And that stoicism, reduced
here to the level of the everyday, is the development and continua-
tion of the deep-reaching Oblomovian theme that peers through all
ostentatiously societal circumstances of the plot. Although seemingly
easy prey, although on more than one occasion he has raced into the
snare of his own accord, although helpless and clueless in worldly
affairs, Oblomov is indestructible in what really matters because no
one can force him “to live a life not his own.”12
The world hunted him but never caught him.
The one who understands this best of all and expresses it more
accurately than anyone else (before pronouncing that final, tenden-
tious judgment) is Stoltz:
He has been pushed and fallen. He has cooled, fallen asleep, and finally,
been beaten and disenchanted, having lost the will to live. But he has
not lost his honesty and loyalty. His heart has not emitted one false
note, and no mud has stuck to him. No fancy lie will flatter him, and
nothing will draw him down a false path. An ocean of dirt and evil
could boil around him, the whole world could be poisoned and turned
upside down—and Oblomov would never bow down to the idol of
hypocrisy, and his soul would always be pure, bright, and honest. . . .
His is a crystalline, transparent soul. Men like this are very few, rare
pearls in the crowd! [p. 515]
At the beginning of the novel, as he fends off his intrusive visi-
tors and their vapid hyperactivity, Oblomov asks himself Where
is the human being?
And, after reading and living the novel, the reader understands:
here he is, right here . . .
 Fall 2013  37

Notes
1. I.A. Goncharov, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 8 (Moscow: Pravda, 1952), p.
141.
2. M.V. Otradin, Proza I.A. Goncharova v literaturnom kontekste (St. Pe-
tersburg: St. Petersburg State University Press, 1994), p. 96.
3. N.D. Akhsharumov, “Oblomov. Roman I. Goncharova. 1859,” in Roman
I.A. Goncharova “Oblomov” v russkoi kritike (Leningrad: Leningrad State Uni-
versity Press, 1991), p. 162.
4. A.P. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 30 vols. (Letters, 12 vols.),
vol. 3 (Moscow: Nauka, 1976), pp. 201–2.
5. This, incidentally, was how Georgii Fridlender defined the character
system in Dostoevsky’s novels, which, in terms of construction and content, can
be classified as others from the perspective of Goncharov’s novels, and even as
their opposites.
6. N.A. Dobroliubov, Izbrannye stat’i (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1978),
p. 143.
7. E.A. Krasnoshchekova, Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov: Mir tvorchestva
(St. Petersburg: Pushkinskii fond, 1997), p. 309.
8. Akhsharumov, “Oblomov,” pp. 145, 146.
9. Krasnoshchekova, Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov, p. 284.
10. Otradin, Proza I.A. Goncharova, p. 121.
11. Krasnoshchekova, Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov, p. 261.
12. Otradin, Proza I.A. Goncharova, p. 116.

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