Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov - Background

[Gem , Moderator]

Availability:

There are several translations available for free on the Internet Archive. Please be aware that any edition translated by C.J. Hogarth is highly abridged, including the Project Gutenberg edition, and undesirable.

Biography

Early Life
Ivan Goncharov was born on June 6, 1812, in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk) to Alexander Ivanovich Goncharov and Avdotya Matveevna, the second of six children. Alexander Goncharov was a successful and wealthy grain merchant who was respected enough to serve several terms as mayor of Simbirsk. Memorists recall Avdotya as severe and suspicious but Ivan, who loved her deeply, remembered an intelligent and caring woman.

Education
When Ivan was seven his father died and the education of the children was assumed by Nicholas Tregubov, a retired naval officer of aristocratic linage with liberal views. His cosmopolitan background is in stark contrast to the traditionalism of the merchant family. Ivan and his brother Nicholas are the first Goncharovs to receive a formal education. At the age of eight, Ivan is sent to a boarding school run by a priest. There he encounters literature and studies French and German.

In August 1822 Ivan was sent to Moscow and entered the College of Commerce. There he spent eight unhappy years, detesting the low quality of education and the severe discipline, taking solace in self-education. In 1830, Goncharov decided to quit the college, and in 1831 (having missed one year because of a cholera outbreak in Moscow) he enrolled in Moscow State University's Philology Faculty to study literature, arts, and architecture.

At the University, with its atmosphere of intellectual freedom and lively debate, Goncharov's spirit thrived. One episode proved to be especially memorable: when his then idol Alexander Pushkin arrived as a guest lecturer to have a public debate with professor Mikhail T. Katchenovsky on the authenticity of The Tale of Igor's Campaign. Among his classmates are the poet and novelist Mikhail Lermontov and men who were to shape the intellectual life of their area and the future of Russian thought: Vissarion Belinsky, Alexander Herzen, Nicholas Stankevich, Konstantin Aksakov, and Nikolay Ogaryov. However, Goncharov remained indifferent to the ideas of political and social change that were gaining popularity at the time. Reading and translating were his main occupations. In 1832, the Telescope magazine published two chapters of Eugene Sue's novel Atar-Gull (1831), translated by Goncharov. This was his debut publication.

In 1834, Goncharov graduated from the university and returned home to enter the chancellery of Simbirsk governor A. M. Zagryazhsky. A year later, he moved to Saint Petersburg and started working as a translator at the Finance Ministry's Foreign commerce department. Here, in the Russian capital, he became friends with the Maykov family and tutored both Apollon Maykov and Valerian Maykov in the Latin language and in Russian literature. He became a member of the elitist literary circle based in the Maykovs' house and attended by writers like Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Dmitry Grigorovich. His first literary works appear The Maykovs' almanac Snowdrop.

Literary Career
Goncharov's first piece of prose appeared in an issue of Snowdrop, a satirical novella called Evil Illness (1838), ridiculing romantic sentimentalism and fantasizing. Another novella, A Fortunate Blunder, a "high-society drama" in the tradition set by Marlinsky, Vladimir Odoevsky and Vladimir Sollogub, tinged with comedy, appeared in another privately published almanac, Moonlit Nights, in 1839. In 1842 Goncharov wrote an essay called Ivan Savvich Podzhabrin, a natural school psychological sketch. Published in Sovremennik six years later, it failed to make any impact, being very much a period piece, but later scholars reviewed it positively, as something in the vein of the Nikolay Gogol-inspired genre known as the "physiological essay", marked by a fine style and precision in depicting the life of the common man in the city. In the early 1840s, Goncharov worked on a novel called The Old People, but the manuscript has been lost.

A Common Story
Goncharov's first novel, A Common Story, was published in Sovremennik in 1847. It dealt with the conflict between the excessive romanticism of a young Russian nobleman who has recently arrived in Saint Petersburg from the provinces, and the sober pragmatism of the emerging commercial class of the capital. A Common Story polarized critics and made its author famous. The novel was a direct response to Vissarion Belinsky's call for exposing a new type, that of the complacent romantic, common at the time; it was lavishly praised by the famous critic as one of the best Russian books of the year. The term aduyevschina (after the novel's protagonist Aduyev) became popular with reviewers who saw it as synonymous with vain romantic aspirations. Leo Tolstoy, who liked the novel, used the same word to describe social egotism and the inability of some people to see beyond their immediate interests.

In 1849 Sovremennik published Oblomov's Dream, an extract from Goncharov's future second novel Oblomov, (known under the working title The Artist at the time), which worked well on its own as a short story. Again it was lauded by the Sovremennik staff. Slavophiles, while giving the author credit for being a fine stylist, reviled the irony aimed at patriarchal Russian ways. The novel itself, though, appeared only ten years later, preceded by some extraordinary events in Goncharov's life.

In 1852 Goncharov embarked on a long journey through England, Africa, Japan, and back to Russia, on board the frigate Pallada, as a secretary for Admiral Yevfimy Putyatin, whose mission was to inspect Alaska and other distant outposts of the Empire, and also to establish trade relations with Japan. The log-book which it was Goncharov's duty to keep served as a basis for his future book. He returned to Saint Petersburg on February 25, 1855, after traveling through Siberia and the Urals, this continental leg of the journey lasting six months. Goncharov's travelogue, Frigate "Pallada" ("Pallada" is the Russian spelling of "Pallas"), began to appear, first in Otechestvennye Zapiski (April 1855), then in The Sea Anthology and other magazines.

In 1858 Frigate "Pallada" was published as a separate book; it received favorable reviews and became very popular. For the mid-19th century Russian readership, the book came as a revelation, providing new insights into the world, hitherto unknown. Goncharov, a well-read man and a specialist in the history and economics of the countries he visited, proved to be a competent and insightful writer. He warned against seeing his work as any kind of political or social statement, insisting it was a subjective piece of writing, but critics praised the book as a well-balanced, unbiased report, containing valuable ethnographic material, but also some social critique. Again, the anti-romantic tendency prevailed: it was seen as part of the polemic with those Russian authors who tended to romanticize the "pure and unspoiled" life of the uncivilized world. According to Nikolay Dobrolyubov, The Frigate Pallada "bore the hallmark of a gifted epic novelist."

Oblomov
Throughout the 1850s Goncharov worked on his second novel, but the process was slow for many reasons. In 1855 he accepted the post of censor in the Saint Petersburg censorship committee. In this capacity, he helped publish important works by Ivan Turgenev, Nikolay Nekrasov, Aleksey Pisemsky, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a fact that brought resentment from some of his bosses. According to Pisemsky, Goncharov was officially reprimanded for permitting his novel A Thousand Souls to be published. Despite all this, Goncharov became the target of many satires and received a negative mention in Herzen's Kolokol. "One of the best Russian authors shouldn't have taken this sort of job upon himself," critic Aleksander Druzhinin wrote in his diary. In 1856, as the official publishing policy hardened, Goncharov quit.[7]

In the summer of 1857 Goncharov went to Marienbad for medical treatment. There he wrote Oblomov, almost in its entirety. "It might seem strange, even impossible that in the course of one month the whole of the novel might be written... But it'd been growing in me for several years, so what I had to do then was just sit and write everything down," he later remembered. Goncharov's second novel Oblomov was published in 1859 in Otechestvennye Zapiski. It had evolved from the earlier "Oblomov's Dream", which was later incorporated into the finished novel as Chapter 9. The novel caused much discussion in the Russian press, introduced another new term, oblomovshchina, to the literary lexicon and is regarded as a Russian classic.

In his essay What Is Oblomovshchina? Nikolay Dobrolyubov provided an ideological background for the type of Russia's 'new man' exposed by Goncharov. The critic argued that, while several famous classic Russian literary characters – Onegin, Pechorin, and Rudin – bore symptoms of the 'Oblomov malaise', for the first time one single feature, that of social apathy, a self-destructive kind of laziness and unwillingness to even try and lift the burden of all-pervading inertia, had been brought to the fore and subjected to a thorough analysis.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, among others, considered Goncharov a noteworthy author of high stature. Anton Chekhov is quoted as stating that Goncharov was "...ten heads above me in talent." Turgenev, who fell out with Goncharov after the latter accused him of plagiarism (specifically of having used some of the characters and situations from The Precipice, whose plan Goncharov had disclosed to him in 1855, in Home of the Gentry and On the Eve), nevertheless declared: "As long as there is even one Russian alive, Oblomov will be remembered!"

[Gem , Moderator]

The Precipice

A moderate conservative at heart, Goncharov greeted the Emancipation reform of 1861, embraced the well-publicized notion of the government's readiness to "be at the helm of [social] progress", and found himself in opposition to the revolutionary democrats. In the summer of 1862 he became an editor of Severnaya Potchta (The Northern Post), an official newspaper of the Interior Ministry, and a year later returned to the censorship committee.

In this second term Goncharov proved to be a harsh censor: he created serious problems for Nekrasov's Sovremennik and Russkoye Slovo, where Dmitry Pisarev was now a leading figure. Openly condemning 'nihilistic' tendencies and what he called "pathetic, imported doctrines of materialism, socialism, and communism", Goncharov found himself the target of heavy criticism. In 1863 he became a member of the State Publishing Council and two years later joined the Russian government's Department of Publishing. All the while he was working on his third novel, The Precipice, which came out in extracts: Sophia Nikolayevna Belovodova (a piece he himself was later skeptical about), Grandmother and Portrait.

In 1867, Goncharov retired from his censorial position to devote himself entirely to writing The Precipice, a book he later called "my heart's child", which took him twenty years to finish. Towards the end of this tormenting process Goncharov spoke of the novel as a "burden" and an "insurmountable task" that blocked his development and made him unable to advance as a writer. In a letter to Turgenev he confessed that, after finishing Part Three, he had toyed with the idea of abandoning the whole project.

In 1869 The Precipice, a story of the romantic rivalry among three men, condemning nihilism as subverting the religious and moral values of Russia, was published in Vestnik Evropy. Later critics came to see it as the final part of a trilogy, each part introducing a character typical of Russian high society of a certain period: first Aduev, then Oblomov, and finally Raisky, a gifted man, his artistic development halted by "lack of direction". According to scholar S. Mashinsky, as a social epic, The Precipice was superior to both A Common Story and Oblomov.

The novel had considerable success, but the leftist press turned against its author. Saltykov-Shchedrin in Otechestvennye Zapiski ("The Street Philosophy", 1869), compared it unfavorably to Oblomov. While the latter "had been driven by ideas assimilated by its author from the best men of the 1840s", The Precipice featured "a bunch of people wandering to and fro without any sense of direction, their lines of action having neither beginning nor end," according to the critic. Yevgeny Utin in Vestnik Evropy argued that Goncharov, like all writers of his generation, had lost touch with the new Russia. The controversial character Mark Volokhov, as leftist critics saw it, had been concocted to condemn 'nihilism' again, thus making the whole novel 'tendentious'. Yet, as Vladimir Korolenko later wrote, "Volokhov and all things related to him will be forgotten, as Gogol's Correspondence has been forgotten, while Goncharov's huge characters will remain in history, towering over all of those spiteful disputes of old."

Later years
Goncharov planned a fourth novel, set in the 1870s, but it failed to materialize. Instead, he became a prolific critic, providing numerous theater and literature reviews; his "Myriad of Agonies" (Milyon terzaniy, 1871) is still regarded as one of the best essays on Alexandr Griboyedov's Woe from Wit. Goncharov also wrote short stories: his Servants of an Old Age cycle as well as "The Irony of Fate", "Ukha" and others, described the life of rural Russia. In 1880 the first edition of The Complete Works of Goncharov was published. After the writer's death, it became known that he had burnt many later manuscripts.

There is some speculation about Goncharov having an undiagnosed mental illness as towards the end of his life Goncharov wrote an unusual memoir called An Uncommon Story, in which he accused his literary rivals, first and foremost Ivan Turgenev, of having plagiarized his works and prevented him from achieving European fame. Some critics claimed that the book was the product of an unstable mind, while others praised it as an eye-opening if controversial piece of writing. It wasn't published until 1924.

Goncharov, who never married, spent his last days absorbed in lonely and bitter recriminations because of the negative criticism some of his work had received. He died in Saint Petersburg on September 27, 1891, of pneumonia. He was buried at the Novoye Nikolskoe Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. In 1956 his ashes were moved to the Volkovo Cemetery in Leningrad.

Oblomov, General Overview
Oblomov is the second novel by Russian writer Ivan Goncharov, first published in 1859. Ilya Ilyich Oblomov is the central character of the novel, portrayed as the ultimate incarnation of the superfluous man, a symbolic character in 19th-century Russian literature. Oblomov is a young, generous nobleman who seems incapable of making important decisions or undertaking any significant actions. The book was considered by some to be a satire of Russian intelligentsia.

The novel was popular when it came out, and some of its characters and devices have imprinted on Russian culture and language.

Goncharov first thought of writing Oblomov in the mid-1840s, soon after publishing his first novel A Common Story. In 1849 he wrote "Episode from an Unfinished Novel: Oblomov's Dream", a short story that was published in the literary journal Sovremennik. At that point, Goncharov had just started writing his novel, and Oblomov was published ten years later, with "Oblomov's Dream" as Chapter 9 in Part 1.

The character that would become Oblomov originally appeared in 1838 in the Maikovs' handwritten magazine written by Goncharov, as one of the protagonists in "Likhaia bolest". Nikon Ustinovich Tiazhelemko, or the pre-Oblomov Oblomov, was a slothful but rather endearing man whose name evokes in Russian the attribute "heavy" and the expression "slow to move". The work on Oblomov continued for several years after the publication of "Oblomov's Dream" but was first interrupted by the death of Goncharov's mother, and then his decision to join the around the world voyage of the naval frigate Pallas. When Pallas finally ended its journey in August 1854 in Russia's far east, Goncharov spent another half a year getting acquainted with Siberia and slowly making his way back to St. Petersburg. Although Goncharov was not working on Oblomov during his long journey it appears he was thinking about the book, as Oblomov shows up in many of his letters home. When he tried to begin writing again in February 1855, he blamed his delays and inability to write on exhaustion, loss of momentum, and a new and more demanding job as a censor. The summer of 1857 finally found Goncharov, alone in Marienbad, completely exhilarated and writing Oblomov in full swing. By the end of August, the novel was complete. He spent the following year revising and rewriting the novel until finally on January 14, 1859, Oblomov was published in Otechestvennye zapiski.

Style
Narrator
The narrator of Oblomov appears as a rather traditional third-person narrator. At the beginning of the novel, he is largely invisible and lets the characters do the talking. As the novel progresses he comes far less neutral and actually begins to not only describe the characters but he begins to judge them, like criticizing Oblomov's family for being overly protective of Ilya as a child or calling Oblomov's false friends "parasites." The narrator's strongly developed moralizing tendencies are constantly upset by an equally strong note of ambivalence that undermines his judgments. The narrator seems to be someone who may wish he knew the answers but is honest enough to admit that he does not. Goncharov is eager by the end of the novel to make a distinction between himself and the narrator by making the narrator an invented character. However, Goncharov chooses to reveal the identity of the narrator only when the revelation would not affect our reading of the novel. There are many moments when the narrator reveals himself to be uncharacteristically chatty, digressive, and not entirely "reliable". The sentiments expressed in the opening of Oblomov's dream are so much like Oblomov's own, that if it after all his dream the narrator may have to be Oblomov himself or at least his point of view.

Characterizations and Depictions
Goncharov used a lot of dialogue within his works. Therefore, the characters in Oblomov reveal themselves primarily through their own speech, with very limited comments by the author. The "colloquial exchanges here coexist with long passages that characterize the novel's inhabitants more directly."

Major Themes
Stages of life
Goncharov wrote three novels over the course of his life: Oblomov, A Common Story and The Precipice. Each novel was based heavily on autobiographical material, focusing on different epochs of life – specifically, infancy and childhood as influenced by the mother, then the "awakening of adolescence", and finally adulthood as associated with St. Petersburg, government work, and marriage. The main characters of all three books share multiple important similarities: their fathers have either been absent or largely insignificant in their upbringings, they rely heavily on their mothers even past childhood, and they travel to St. Petersburg during their university years. Goncharov himself lost his father at the age of seven, and worked in St. Petersburg as a translator after graduating from Moscow State University. Aduev, the protagonist of A Common Story, also isolates himself from reality and prefers to live within his imagination much like Oblomov does.

With these thematically linked protagonists, Goncharov envisioned Oblomov as part of a thematic "trilogy", fitting between his other two novels. Goncharov imagined his novels as different reflections of a single personality; "they are but one tremendous structure, one mirror reflecting in miniature three epochs: Old Life, Sleep, and Awakening." Aduev, Oblomov, and Rajskij therefore form "but one personality in its successive rebirths." Oblomov represents the epoch of "Sleep" in Goncharov's vision. Yet many literary critics have found Goncharov's vision to be lacking. Belinski and Dobroljubov, two well-known literary critics who wrote famous reviews of Goncharov's works, failed to recognize a larger connection between Oblomov and Goncharov's other novels.

[Gem , Moderator]

There is some information in the following paragraphs about childhood and adulthood that might contain spoilers. I'm not sure if enough is said to actually be a spoiler since I haven't read far enough into the book as yet.

Childhood
Oblomov spends much of his adult life attempting to remain within his childhood, a time that he remembers for its peacefulness and the safety provided by his mother. His memory of childhood in Oblomovka is dominated by its cyclical time, with "births, celebrations, feasts...new faces take the places of the old, baby boys grow into marriageable young men who duly marry and reproduce themselves. Such is the pattern according to which life weaves itself this seamless length of identical fabric to be snipped gently only at the grave itself." The Oblomovka of his childhood keeps track of time through the cyclical events of birth, death, and natural seasons, relying on the repetition of events to pass through life. Even Oblomov's name and patronymic, Ilya Ilyich, reveal him as a repeat of his father instead of just a son. This instilling of contentment through repetition renders Oblomov ill-equipped for the expectations placed on his adulthood in a rapidly changing society.

Adulthood
Adulthood constantly discourages Oblomov, whose main desire is to retreat into the safety of his childhood sense of time. He attempts to take on jobs and responsibilities for Oblomovka, but upon realizing the tasks these require, he becomes easily defeated and retreats into metaphorical and literal sleep. Even his desire to return to Oblomovka cannot be realized, as the estate has fallen into disarray and has now become a responsibility instead of a safe haven. His main foray into adulthood comes about through Olga, who attempts to motivate him to take on responsibilities out of love for her. Particularly for Oblomov, adulthood means changing his cyclical sense of time to continually look forward instead of back. Yet he remains stuck within his childhood desire for things to stay put; loving Olga means that he does not wish to change her like she wishes to change him, but his sense of time prevents him from thinking of the future, and he, therefore, cannot progress into adulthood by marrying her.

Stoltz, in contrast, exemplifies society's expectations for adulthood in his eagerness to move forward. His own childhood is marked heavily by his father's insistence on treating him as an adult and teaching him the importance of accomplishment, which carries into his adulthood. Stoltz, unlike Oblomov, sees his life as a straight line and is therefore driven by the desire to continually move forward.

Oblomovism
The words Oblomovism and Oblomovitis (translations of Russian: oblomovshchina) refer to the fatalistic slothfulness that Oblomov exhibits.

Nikolai Dobrolyubov, in his 1859 article "What is Oblomovism?", described the word as an integral part of Russian avos'. (Russians have a word - авось (avos’) - which is almost impossible to translate, but which plays a key role in their lives. They always pin their hopes on it and it has become part of the national character. It has many shades of meaning and strong emotional connotations. It is always an expression of hope for success, even though the reasons for success are few. It is a hope and a trust in help from God and supernatural forces.) Stolz suggests that Oblomov's death was the result of "Oblomovism".

However, Elaine Blair argues in "The Short Happy Life of Ilya Ilyich Oblomov" that Oblomov is "not merely lazy." She simply says, "our hero favors very short-term pleasures over long-term ones," "he is self-conscious in a way that no farcical character or Rabelaisian grotesque would be," and "to Oblomov, to be absorbed in any task is to lose something of oneself; a person can maintain his full dignity only in repose."

Social Changes in Russia
Oblomov's place in the context of Russian history became the focus of much literary criticism when it was first published. Goncharov himself thought of Oblomov more as a treatise on human nature than as commentary on Russian society, but Dobrolyubov focused heavily on Oblomov and Stoltz as social and ethical antitheses; Oblomov became an allegory for superfluity of Russian aristocracy in a time when serfdom was soon to be abolished. As a member of the old nobility, Oblomov's inertia and fear of change represent old socioeconomic ideals that become out of place throughout the 19th century.

Critical Reception
Almost immediately upon its release in 1859, Oblomov became the subject of much discussion and literary criticism, due in large part to Dobrolyubov's essay "What is Oblomovism?". Today it is still seen as a classic of 19th-century Russian literature and a quintessential Russian novel.

"What is Oblomovism?" focused heavily on the social significance of the novel, interpreting Stoltz and Olga as social ideals in contrast to Oblomov's reliance on the past. Dobrolyubov, a follower of Vissarion Belinsky and a leading literary critic, believed strongly that literature should promote positive change, and his essay praised Oblomov as an effective warning against the Russian social disease of "Oblomovism". Aside from introducing Oblomov to a large literary circle, the essay catalyzed Oblomov's presence as a novel of social significance and became Dobrolyubov's best-known work. Goncharov himself was happy with Dobrolyubov's interpretation, writing that "there is nothing left to be said about Oblomovism, that is its meaning, after the publication of this article."

Another critic, Alexander Druzhinin, focused on the psychological and literary aspects of Oblomov, instead of the historical context. Rather than interpreting characters as either warnings or ideals of society, Druzhinin praised the portrayal of Stoltz and Olga as psychological and artistic foils to Oblomov. Druzhinin believed that Oblomov, not oblomovism, was the focus of the novel; characters and readers alike loved Oblomov, making him deserving of recognition as a unique character within Russian literary canon.

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

“[Goncharov is] ten heads above me in talent.” ―Anton Chekhov

Adaptations
Oblomov was adapted to the cinema screen in the Soviet Union by Nikita Mikhalkov in 1980, as A Few Days from the Life of I.I. Oblomov. This film was later named Best Foreign Language Film for 1981 by the U.S. National Board of Review.

In 1989 BBC TV made an English language dramatization of the novel, with George Wendt in the title role. In this version, Oblomov was a lazy modern-day Communist Party boss.

In 2005 BBC Radio 4 made a two-part English language dramatization, heralding the lead character as a tragic-comic hero for a couch potato generation. It was adapted by Stephen Wyatt, produced and directed by Claire Grove, and starred Toby Jones as the lead, supported by Trevor Peacock, Claire Skinner, Clive Swift, Gerard McDermott, Nicholas Boulton, and Richenda Carey. Olga's singing voice was provided by Olivia Robinson, with Helen Crayford on piano.

In 2008 an adaptation was produced for the English service of the Russian national broadcaster, the Voice of Russia.

Subject Bibliography
Janko Lavrin, Goncharov (1954), is a short and useful study. The chapter on Goncharov in D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature, from Its Beginnings to 1900, edited by Francis J. Whitfield (1958), is informative and interesting and provides the best background information on the period available in English.

Sources
wikipedia.com, rbth.com, penguinrandomhouse.com, encyclopedia.com

[Bigollo]

Gem wrote: "...Oblomov was adapted to the cinema screen in the Soviet Union by Nikita Mikhalkov in 1980, as A Few Days from the Life of I.I. Oblomov. This film was later named Best Foreign Language Film for 1981 by the U.S. National Board of Review..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgmy6...

If you don't mind subtitles.. It's an old and great movie.. But watch it after reading the book..

[Gem , Moderator]

Bigollo wrote: "Gem wrote: "...Oblomov was adapted to the cinema screen in the Soviet Union by Nikita Mikhalkov in 1980, as A Few Days from the Life of I.I. Oblomov. This film was later named Best Foreign Language..."

Thanks for the link!