Feeling Lazy? Curl Up with Oblomov
You probably have ten different places to be today, or at least it feels like it. Although that may be a little overwhelming, it’s a familiar feeling. A neatly cluttered schedule—that’s modern life, and perhaps you’re even proud of it. To the title character of Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, however, you are to be pitied. Of his friend in a similar situation, he thinks, “…to be ten places in one day—the poor man!” As for himself, Oblomov refuses to leave his bed for the first third of the classic Russian novel.
Marian Schwartz’s translation from the 1862 version creates a portrait of a member of the Russian gentry in the nineteenth century. Unable to decide upon the meaning of his life, Oblomov exemplifies the Russian idea of the “superfluous man.” Unlike Western heroes and characters, who may find meaning in their family and daily life, the superfluous man is aristocratic and idealistic but incapable of taking action. The meaning of life, according to his countrymen, is finding and fulfilling a noble cause. But because he cannot define such a cause, he flounders. For Oblomov, states Goncharov, “recumbence was neither a necessity, as it would be for an ill or sleepy man, nor an occasional occurrence, as for someone who was weary, nor a pleasure, as for a lazy man; it was his normal state.”
So enduring has the novel proved in Russian culture that the neologism “oblomovshchina” became synonymous with laziness, inaction, and slacking—all of the hero’s negative qualities. Yet it is not his driven, active foil, the German character Stolz, but the lazy Oblomov himself, whom Goncharov’s fellow Russians have always loved (well, except for Lenin). Now, Schwartz’s translation makes both the humor and the characters’ personalities accessible and engaging to a non-Russian audience. We can’t help but laugh while he argues with his servant over whose fault the cobweb-filled, dusty house is—it’s possibly Oblomov’s, for how can the servant clean around a man who never leaves? The novel, though, is a tragedy often compared to Hamlet. Oblomov, unwilling to take part in the corruption of Russian institutions but too passive to incite revolution, loses both love and life, and yet “nothing interested him and nothing worried him.”
I ♥ Oblomov. I met the woman who became my thanks to a battered copy of Oblomov that I was reading while in college. No doubt it impressed her immensely. Now, I want to read this new translation…
http://iheartoblomov.blogspot.com/