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Subject: Eskapizm: Michael Wood reviews a new translation of Oblomov (LRB)

... These images - the drowning sun, the lingering fire, the comfy
coffin - invite us to stay with the sheer, painful complication of
Oblomov's fate, the delayed and never perfect conjoining of the person
and the clinical diagnosis. In Stolz's mouth the famous word is a
judgment, but in Oblomov's own it is something else, or rather it is
both the starkest of judgments and a cry for more capacious
understanding. When Olga finally leaves him she asks: 'When did it all
die? Who cursed you, Ilya? What did you do? You're so good, and smart,
and kind, and noble . . . and . . . you're dying! What destroyed you?
There is no name for this evil.' Oblomov says: 'Yes, there is.' Olga
waits, and Oblomov whispers: 'Oblomovshchina'. His desolation, and his
ability to say the word show how far he is from being defined by the
condition he has come to define.


    * LRB
    * 6 August 2009
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n15/print/wood01_.html

Eskapizm
Michael Wood

    * Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov, translated by Marian Schwartz  Buy this
book

This intimately funny and desperately sad novel opens with a parade of
visitors to Ilya Ilich Oblomov's Petersburg flat. Most of them are
introduced, in this new translation, by the phrase 'in walked', which
creates a wonderful sense of flatness, repetition and invasion. All but
one of the visitors are busy in some way or other, full of talk of the
world, parties, work, the latest literary news. They are going
somewhere, they have a life, and one of them is eager to steal or cadge
as much from Oblomov as he can. The very descriptions of these people
make us tired, setting us up for a largely (although not entirely)
disreputable identification with the book's slothful hero. Other
translations describe his favourite posture as lying down, but Marian
Schwartz boldly goes for 'recumbence', with its suggestion of ornate
Latin repose:

    For Ilya Ilich, 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.

Oblomov is lying down even when he is sitting up, 'thinking in his
comfortable chair', for example, 'in his lazily handsome pose', and when
the book's great drama comes to an end, his one attempt at loving
someone and caring for something other than his deep mental comfort, the
young woman who had hoped to rescue him bitterly says, 'How kind you are
to yourself,' and tells him to 'rest easy'. 'After all,' she says, 'that
is where your happiness lies.'

Oblomov is not exactly a person, and this is only partly a psychological
novel. It becomes psychological when he tries to love, and the misery of
his failure is the misery of a person; but the story of his non-life and
real death, his long kindness to himself, is really the story of a
series of stances and occasions, human possibilities squandered and
slept through. One of the novel's polemical proposals is that
squandering and sleeping are better, in many cases, than what we call
work and achievement. In which cases? The novelist Mikhail Shishkin says
in an afterword that this is 'the Russian paradox: if you want to live a
worthy life, you'd best not get off the sofa at all.' Oblomov, Shishkin
says, is a 'vital, dear and unlucky man' and morally much to be
preferred, the implication is, to all those who preach at him, pass him
by, and rip him off. Schwartz, similarly, in her translator's note,
speaks of Oblomov's 'shining soul' and his 'endearing foibles and
rationalisations'. The spirit of these remarks catches something
important. It is better to sleep than to work if the work is ignoble;
better to be a genial pampered loafer than an ugly crook. But Oblomov is
not vital or unlucky; his soul doesn't shine, and he doesn't have
foibles. His life is dim and deeply fortunate. He has money to burn and
devoted people to look after and love him. His soul is stagnant; and if
clinical depression is compatible with living like a gourmet prince, he
is depressed. This is where we need to remember, though, that he is not
exactly a person.

There is a clue about how to read him in the evocation of the one
visitor in the early part of the novel who is not active, a man without
qualities or history. Even Oblomov is an incarnation of charm, privilege
and sloth, but this man can't get anyone to remember his name or
anything about him. The writing here, which comes across in very similar
fashion in the other translations I've looked at (those of Ann Dunnigan,
David Magarshack and Natalie Duddington), offers a fine example of sly
and compassionate satire, a very rare genre indeed:

    In walked a man of indeterminate age and indeterminate physiognomy,
at that time of life when it can be difficult to guess a man's age.
Neither handsome nor ugly, neither tall nor short, neither blond nor
brunet. Nature had given him no distinctive, notable features
whatsoever, either for ill or good. Many called him Ivan Ivanich;
others, Ivan Vasilievich; still others, Ivan Mikhailich. His last name
was also cited variously. Some said he was Ivanov; others called him
Vasiliev or Andreyev; still others thought he was Alexeyev. A chance
passer-by seeing him for the first time, if told his name, would
immediately forget it, as he would his face, and would take no note of
what he said. His presence would add nothing to society, just as his
absence would subtract nothing . . .

    Can such a man be likeable? Does he love, hate and suffer? He must -
you would think - love and not love, and suffer, because no one is freed
from that. But somehow he managed to love everyone. There are men like
that . . . they are always kind. Although they say people like that are
kind because they love everyone, in essence they love no one and are
kind only because they are not mean.

There is a bite at the end of this passage, and an indication of what's
wrong with Oblomov as well as Ivanov/Vasiliev/Andreyev/Alexeyev. The
apparent message of the book, that work is better than sloth (or if you
prefer, that sloth is better than work), is only apparent. Doing nothing
- the lifelong ambition of Beckett's characters, for example - may well
be better than doing something, and is often philosophically more
interesting. But being nobody cannot be a consummation to be wished. And
before the bite there is a fine comic pathos in the sight of this
invisible and unretainable man, a picture of a condition many of us have
felt is ours, at least some of the time, our life as seen by those who
think we don't have a life.

Both Oblomov and his many-named friend are instances of the 'superfluous
men' who, in Shishkin's words, 'fan out through the pages of Russian
novels'. But most of these figures do, surreptitiously or not, add a
great deal to society, and Goncharov has taken away all the Byronic
glamour, the touch of aristocratic nonchalance that comes with supposed
superfluity in Pushkin, Lermontov and Turgenev. Oblomov is 'the sole
owner of 350 souls, which he had inherited in one of the more distant
provinces, practically in Asia', and he does nothing for or against
these souls except spend the income they generate. It's true that
Goncharov understands the appeal of such abstinence, but his long
portrait of the pleasures of idleness is as remorseless as kindly comedy
can be. In a section called 'Oblomov's Dream', effectively his idealised
memory of his childhood, we see a world of enchanted, stationary time,
where everything conspires to protect the self and the community against
threats to calm and wellbeing. The very place is a trope aimed at the
horrors of noisy Romanticism: 'There is no sea, no tall mountains,
cliffs or chasms, no slumberous forests - nothing grandiose, wild, and
gloomy.' 'No poet or dreamer would be content with even the general view
of this modest and unpretentious locale. They would not see there an
evening in the Swiss or Scottish taste . . . ' There isn't going to be
anything resembling 'a gloomy ruin' or 'a mighty castle', and Scott is
explicitly named as purveying what we are not to find in the estate of
Oblomovka. This is a place where 'happy people lived thinking that life
simply could not be otherwise'; where a busy day for the master is to
watch the servants doing what they always do. Oblomov's father was not
'idle', the narrator discreetly says: 'All morning he sat by the window
and gave his undivided attention to everything going on outside.' Then
something terrible happens: a letter arrives. Having scolded the
unfortunate muzhik who accepted the missive from the post office in a
local town, the family soon finds a solution. Who says they have to open
it? 'It's not going anywhere,' they say to themselves repeatedly. After
four days they look at the letter. It's from a former resident asking
for a recipe. This is not too bad, but they can't find the recipe, don't
want to make the huge effort of putting pen to paper, and are
disinclined to pay the postage. They decide to send the recipe, if they
find it, with someone who's travelling in the right direction. The
narrator comments, 'no one knows whether Filipp Matveyevich ever saw the
recipe.'

The very idea of the interruption vanishes, and this spectacular
aversion to all idea of change is Oblomov's inheritance just as much as
the 350 souls and the land and crumbling buildings 'practically in
Asia'. His version of the letter, which drives the whole plot of the
novel, is the double difficulty of needing to do something about the
estate and to find a new flat in Petersburg. He confines the management
of the estate to a rogue - a friend finally detects the roguery and puts
things in order - and when he finds a new place to live he turns it into
an urban Oblomovka. He dies there 'without pain or suffering, like a
clock someone had forgotten to wind'. There are worse deaths, certainly,
but the image of the abandoned mechanism suggests a sort of mindless
loneliness, and the rest of the death scene becomes a version of the
whole novel in miniature. 'No one observed his final minutes or heard
his death rattle.' His former landlady, now his wife, a woman whose sole
ambition is to serve him rather than save him, finds him 'resting gently
on his deathbed, as if it were a bed of dreams, except that his head had
slipped off the pillow and his hand was pressed convulsively to his
heart, where his blood had evidently pooled and stopped'. Even a life
dedicated to repose can end in agitation, and that agitation itself will
end only in death.

Superfluous men were a social class as much as a romantic fiction, and
this dimension of the novel still matters a great deal. A ruling class
that doesn't rule - just steals, say - will always be a great subject.
But at the heart of Oblomov is an existential worry that certainly
includes the political but spills out into almost any area of activity
we can imagine. It's a simple but perhaps unanswerable question: 'When
does one live?' At the point where it first appears literally, Oblomov
is wondering what to do with what he has learned from his reading.
'When, ultimately, does one put to use that capital of knowledge, most
of which will never be good for anything in life? Political economy, for
instance, algebra, geometry - what am I going to do with these at
Oblomovka?' How can any of this help him sleep his life away, that is,
and does he need any help? The mild kick in the question is that we may
not be sure how such studies will help us even if we are not planning
(or don't have the opportunity) to live in an Oblomovka of our own.

Oblomov's friend Stolz, however, the apostle of work and ceaseless
activity, believes that 'labour and life itself constitute life's
purpose'; and Olga, the young woman whom Oblomov fails to love enough,
believes that rescuing him from his lack of purpose would itself be a
good purpose for her. Stolz is engaging and friendly, and genuinely
cares for Oblomov. He is intelligent enough to understand the moral
poverty of easy optimism, and as the words in the quotation suggest, he
knows that the question of the purpose of life may just end in
tautology. This is what he says to Oblomov: 'The purpose is to live.'
But in spite of, or because of, such knowledge, Stolz is an insufferable
explainer, unable in the end to disbelieve in his own capacity to get
the hang of everything. He condescends to his wife without knowing
that's what he is doing, and he will never see the curious residue of
dignity in Oblomov's final capitulation to the comfort he can't pretend
he doesn't desire. Olga is generous and open, but there was always a
missionary element in her love for Oblomov. And although she is right to
let him go, there is a subtle rebuke to her pride in the abject devotion
Agafia Matveyevna, Oblomov's landlady/ wife, shows to her adored
tenant/husband. This innocent woman doesn't even know how much she
adores him, but we are told that in her stolid way 'she had begun to
live fully' through her love, and later are reminded that 'she had loved
so fully and so well.' She is what Oblomov had, the personification of
his immense good fortune; and in another sense she is what he never was,
a person who knew when and how to live. Even here Goncharov is not going
to let us off the hook, though. Her love was a life, but it was also a
form of unremitting servility.

Oblomov himself is not sure he is a person. He thinks he may be a type,
and that is what he is usually taken to be. Early in the novel he looks
at his fabulously slovenly servant and thinks 'Well, brother, you're
more of an Oblomov than I am' - as if he had read the book and
recognised himself. 'Stolz is intellect, strength, and the ability to
control himself, others, and his destiny . . . I'm Oblomov.' By
implication Oblomov is distraction, weakness and self-indulgence, the
opposite of whatever involves 'action, struggle and life'. He conjures
up for Stolz a vast dream of a quiet rural Eden, all good food and rest
and sunshine, with an occasional swim in the slow-flowing river, and a
boat ride in which his loving wife does the rowing and steering. Stolz
asks him if he would want to go on like that for ever, and Oblomov says:
'Till we're old and grey, to the grave. That's the life.' Stolz says
it's not the life, and when Oblomov asks him what it is, Stolz coins
what has become one of literature's most famous, if rather elusive
words. 'It's . . . Oblomovshchina,' Stolz says finally. Duddington and
Dunnigan translate this as 'Oblomovism'; Magarshack has 'Oblomovitis'. I
found myself wondering about 'Oblomovishness'. Shishkin says the word's
closest equivalent in Russian is 'eskapizm', something rather different
from its English twin, since 'Russians are trying to escape not to avoid
responsibility but to save the purity of the soul from life's iniquity.'
Schwartz, who leaves the word in Russian, tells us the suffix 'has
exclusively negative implications', and adds that it can't therefore
define Oblomov himself completely. He is its ideal instance, but it is
not all he is.

The novel itself is the enactment of this difference. Oblomovshchina is
what Oblomov longs for and finally gets, where he starts and where he
ends, what hampers him in every attempt at an active engagement of the
mind or the heart. It is a habit of daydreaming and an expression of his
'trusting heart', a fantasy of calm that is also a form of avoidance, a
real condition in which all stirrings of energy and ambition can be cast
off as disturbances. Its final figure is 'the evening sun drowning
quietly and peacefully in the sunset's fire', as Oblomov puts it to
himself when he has got rid of the alternatives; when he has 'quietly
and gradually fit himself into the simple and wide coffin of the
remainder of his existence'.

These images - the drowning sun, the lingering fire, the comfy coffin -
invite us to stay with the sheer, painful complication of Oblomov's
fate, the delayed and never perfect conjoining of the person and the
clinical diagnosis. In Stolz's mouth the famous word is a judgment, but
in Oblomov's own it is something else, or rather it is both the starkest
of judgments and a cry for more capacious understanding. When Olga
finally leaves him she asks: 'When did it all die? Who cursed you, Ilya?
What did you do? You're so good, and smart, and kind, and noble . . .
and . . . you're dying! What destroyed you? There is no name for this
evil.' Oblomov says: 'Yes, there is.' Olga waits, and Oblomov whispers:
'Oblomovshchina'. His desolation, and his ability to say the word show
how far he is from being defined by the condition he has come to define.

Michael Wood teaches at Princeton. Literature and the Taste of Knowledge
came out in 2005.