Oblomov (Classics S.)

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Summary: Oblomov
Review: Oblomov is a lazy man. He is a reasonably well off - but not rich - Russian aristocrat, enjoying the labour that his three hundred serfs provide, but not really aware of either the scope of his holdings, or exactly what it takes for the town of Oblomovka to produce the thousands of roubles he is provided with each year. Once an energetic young man, ready to change the word with ideas and action, he has faded into a fat, lazy slob.

He has a very few friends. All but one of these friends visit Oblomov to leech money and food from him, and he happily allows it because he knows there will always be more. They sit around all day talking of nothing, or sleeping, or eating. That has been their life, thanks to the hard work of Oblomov's serfs, for the past decade. Oblomov's only useful friend, Stolz, tries desperately to coax him back into the real world, attempting to interest him in plays, opera, socialisation, anything at all. But Oblomov is not interested, content to while away his life inside his dirty rooms, eating and sleeping, sleeping and eating.

And yet, Oblomov is a sympathetic character. Perhaps this is because we have all had feelings of laziness, we have always questioned the reasons for living an active, energetic life. Oblomov reasons that a man could spend thirty years working hard to provide himself ease and comfort in his old age, or he could simply begin the ease and comfort now, when he is a young man. He internalises at great lengths over the path he has chosen, and surprisingly, his ideas and choices seem valid. Perhaps not something an ordinary person could choose - we don't all have peasants and villages in our name - but if we did, why not? Why not choose a life of easy living, of good meals and (arguably) good company?

Soon into the story, Oblomov is dealt the twin blows of having to move from his apartments, and finding out that his village is no longer providing the level of money he is used to. Here he shows his true colours, seemingly unable to act, unable to do much of anything. He puts the signing of papers and the writing of letters off until tomorrow, always tomorrow, and it is almost too late when Stolz saves the day. He implores Oblomov, telling him that his current lifestyle is unhealthy, and that he will be dead within the decade if he continues such activities - or rather, no activities at all.

It it not Stolz who awakens him from his slumber. No, he meets a young woman, Olga, and falls in love. To be honest, when this thread of the novel began, I wasn't too impressed. It seemed as though the moral of the story would be that love conquers all, an answer that I did not think would be within Oblomov's character. Thankfully, Goncharov did not use this easy solution, instead keeping Oblomov true to himself. The results are sad, but satisfactorily inevitable.

Throughout the novel, Goncharov introduces various side plots to illustrate how easy it is to take advantage of an idle aristocrat who has simply no idea of his own finances. The text makes it seem as though most of the nobility had no real concept of what is involved in getting from fallow earth to grown wheat to money in their hand. Oblomov comes across as the 'ultimate' aristocrat, one so removed from the reality in which he exists that he does not, for all intents and purposes, have any reality at all. Were Oblomov to suddenly die one day, his serfs would never know, his family are dead already, and his leeching friends would simply move on to another fool. As the perfect man of culture, Oblomov has nothing at all.

Towards the end of the novel, events become rushed, with years being skipped with almost every paragraph. But this serves to heighten the point Goncharov is trying to make. Oblomov's life is seen to be as ineffectual as possible, and even when he does make some small changes, the ripples quickly fade away. After his love affair is over, Oblomov considers his way of life validated, sinking even further into the stupor he had been carefully cultivating for years.

There are moments of humour within the novel. Oblomov's servant, Zakhar, is as pathetic as his master, and the interactions between the two are quite hilarious at times. Similarly, the scenes of love between Oblomov and Olga are touching, and accurately capture the naive adolescent love that everyone endures, only realising after the fact how ignorant those feelings really were. Almost all of the characters are very well done, with the possible exception of Stolz, who, as Goncharov himself said, is 'too good to be true', 'the idea peeping through him too nakedly'. He is, however, still an interesting enough character, but the times when the narration turns to him are admittedly weaker than when on any other character.

In the end, Oblomov is an interesting look at Russian aristocracy in the 19th century. While some elements are obviously caricatured, and Oblomov himself is - almost - too pathetic and oblivious to believe, the novel is definitely worth a look.

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Summary: To the Fan of Russian Literature
Review: For a fan of Russian literature, this book is a necessary read. Goncharov explores the problems with nobility and the caste system in a way that none of his predecessors did. He does this while largely capturing the beauty of the Russian style of writing. He offers detailed characters that each represents a different archetype. He shows you several social environments and the place each held within the system as well as what purpose they served. And mostly he accomplishes all of this while telling a very humorous and ammusing story.

I did feel that he strayed for about 100 pages in the middle. The story got away from being a Russian piece of literature and turned into a Jane Austen romance of types. I love Jane Austen and have no problem with these plot types in general, but it felt misplaced in this particular novel. For this reason, I would suggest that if you are not a fan of Russian literature yet, you introduce yourself into its world with a different piece of work, of which there are MANY.

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Summary: It was okay
Review: I thought it would condem serfdom, but instead it was mainly a love stroy that never really followed a straight line. It was hard to follow at times in the middle and never explained itself and we never got a good ending.

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Summary: a warning against laziness
Review: oblomov is a guy who never quite manages to do anything. he has great difficulties managing to do anything. finally a friend manages to convince Oblomov that he must be active, otherwise he will never escape his laziness. the psychology in the story is great. the plot is always simple, perhaps too slowly progressing. there is much humour in this book. the characters are truly believable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Summary: I LOVED IT!
Review: Our 11th grade teacher made us read this book for our Russian literature class. I absolutely loved it! It has a little bit of everything for everyone. What a marvelous, heart-rending novel!

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Summary: One of the great russian novels that you don't hear about
Review: Think russian novels and you think War & Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. You should also think Oblomov.

Ever notice how different people can approach the same problem from different angles, how the most direct will assess the issue and on the basis of this assessment take the action which seems most appropriate dealing with the consequences of these actions as they arise?

Well this is not Oblomov. Oblomov is one of those people who see's a problem, considers it, investigates all possible consequences allows himself to be buried by anxiety real and imagined and then retreats to his nice warm bed hoping that the problem will go away.

The novel is about what happens when life issues Oblomov a call to action; can he throw off his malaise, his uncertainty and live a life that society would judge as normal or will he return to his old ways of comfortable sloth.

One of Goncharov's great achievements in this novel is to portrait Oblomov as a likable and in his own way wise man.

When you finish Tolstoy or Gogol, try Goncharov I doubt that you will be disappointed

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Summary: The man who never was
Review: Tolstoy hailed Oblomov as a sublime work. Dostoevsky panned it as the work of a charlatan. Goncharov created one of the most intriguing characters in Russian literature. You might say Oblomov is the ultimate nihilist, but he doesn't know it. This is a man who has never grown up, until one day he meets a fine Russian beauty, and attempts to direct his life for the first time. The opening part of this book is first rate. Goncharov sets up his characters beautifully. "Oblomov's dream" is one of the finest pieces in Russian literature. But, like Oblomov himself, this book doesn't hold up well over the long haul. Goncharov's literary powers begin to diminish and the story becomes more diffuse without really illucidating the reader as to the lack of motivation in the character.

Fortunately, Oblomov is not without humor. The amusing relation between the protaganist and his manservant, Zahar, can be side-splitting at times. It is also quite poignant. As much as Oblomov seems to loathe his manservant, he can't bear to be without him. Zahar is the only link Oblomov has left to the family estate.

Oblomov does not stack up to the greats in Russian literature, but it is worthy of the second tier. However, it has been a book that has influenced later generations of writers, including Samuel Beckett, and has been made into a feature length movie by Nikita Mikhalkov.

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Summary: brilliant book
Review: What a fascinating novel. It's not totally unrelated to today's world, as it seems at a first glance... And there are so many connections between the author's life and the character of the story! It makes it even more interesting.