Oblomov

The long first morning is not padding but the argument: the stillness must be felt in duration before the Dream explains it, and the slow years on the Vyborg side are the book’s answer to the summer with Olga. Remove either and the novel loses its proof. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the subtractive test bites in three places. The procession of visitors in Part One, each showing a career Oblomov declines, is a needed device, but four could be three without loss, and its satire of Petersburg occupations is the most dated stratum. The swindle of Tarantyev and Mukhoyarov is mechanical and could be shorter. Stolz’s Part Four chapters with Olga are needed, but told rather than dramatised.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The novel brings a condition into the open that can be stated and holds: a soul formed by an estate where nothing had to be done, because others did it, keeps that estate within it as a law of the will. It cannot be argued out of the condition, because the condition is also its goodness. The Dream discloses the origin: the afternoon sleep of the whole of Oblomovka, the child not allowed to run, the tales in which wishes are granted to the idle. The disclosure is double. Oblomov is wronged by no one but himself and is the purest heart in the book; Stolz, the remedy, is hollow at a point the book will not hide; Olga loves a project and learns so.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The register is comic and elegiac, and the book’s height comes rarely and quietly. The Dream rises to a sustained idyll touched with dread: the sleeping estate in the heat, the ravine no one enters, the stillness as a kind of death. Olga singing “Casta diva”, the aria from Bellini’s Norma, is the one moment Oblomov is lifted out of himself, and the lilac branch carries the summer. The last pages rise most: Agafya Matveyevna after his death, understanding that her life had shone and gone out, and the grave on the Vyborg side with the lilac planted by it. Between these the book runs level by design, its pleasures those of comedy and observation. Few summits, all real.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The archetype is built, not evoked. Oblomovka is the sleeping kingdom and the lost Eden at once, a place outside time where meals and sleep are the only events, and the plot is the attempt to leave it and the return to it: the house on the Vyborg side, with Agafya’s elbows, her pies and her endless darning, is Oblomovka recreated in the city, and he dies there. The nanny’s tales of the fool given everything without work are planted in the Dream as the myth he will live. The particular man, with his dressing gown and his unanswered letter from the bailiff, never dissolves into the type. Below the top because the mythic structure is single and its range narrower than the great epic novels’.

Score: 8.9 / 10

The inheritance is the superfluous man of Pushkin and Lermontov and the inert landowners of Gogol, Manilov and, in the surviving chapters of the second part of Dead Souls, Tentetnikov. Goncharov’s turn is to make the superfluous man’s defining quality not ennui, pride or wit but inertia itself, and to build a long novel round a hero who does not get up for its first quarter. The stake was real: a novel whose principal action is not acting risks boring its reader to death, and the slowness is still its standing charge. The second turn is the sympathy: the idle man is the moral centre and the active man the doubtful one. Held at the gate because the narration itself is conventional.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The form is the knowledge in the large. Part One’s single morning, set against the years of the rest, makes the reader live inertia as duration before learning its cause; the Dream, placed at the end of Part One rather than at the start, turns from what he is to why, and does it as a dream, the one form in which Oblomovka can still exist. The arc is circular, from the sofa on Gorokhovaya Street through one summer of motion to the sofa on the Vyborg side; a straight novel of failure could not say that he goes home. The summer is told in the season’s time, the lilac blooming and fading, and the Vyborg years in no time at all. Charged: the Stolz chapters are a container.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The evidence is return, long and varied. Dobrolyubov’s social reading came first and has not exhausted the book; it was read differently at once, and Soviet criticism kept the class reading. Later readers have found a quietist or contemplative defence of Oblomov, a study of depression or of a child kept from independence, a comic novel of one of the great pairs of master and servant, and an early literature of the refusal of work. Each reading has to account for the same scenes, and the question whether the book endorses Stolz has never settled. Its formal depth is less inexhaustible than its semantic depth: the narration does not hide much, and the depth is in what it shows rather than in how it is told.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The field is the Russian novel of the nineteenth century, the richest field of its century. The force is a real reorganisation of what a Russian novel could make of the gentry hero: the full portrait of the type the superfluous-man tradition had sketched, and the proof that a book could hold its reader with a hero who does nothing. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its language and century large and specific, Dobrolyubov’s essay making the book a public argument on the eve of the Emancipation and its word entering the language. Abroad it is read and admired, and its hero is a reference, but it did not redirect the European novel. A fixture of its field, not a turning point of the order of Dead Souls.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Survival is demonstrated over a hundred and sixty-seven years, the text whole and read without a break. Presence is strong. The novel has been taught in Russian schools continuously, through the Soviet years and after; it is translated into the major languages and several times into English, by Duddington, Magarshack, Pearl and Schwartz at least; it was filmed by Mikhalkov; and its hero’s name is common speech in Russian. The surface fixed to its moment, serfdom, the chancellery, the bailiff’s letters, is the condition of its disclosure, and the book has plainly outlived it. Charged: its presence outside Russia is real but not the widest of its span, so it stands at the top of the usual figure for its age and not above it.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged on Goncharov’s Russian as far as this reading carries it; the music of the Russian sentence is neither credited nor charged. The command is the plastic, painterly rendering of a world in its objects and gestures: the dust and cobwebs in the flat, the dressing gown, the slipper Oblomov feels for with his foot, Agafya’s bare elbows moving at work. The comedy with Zakhar, whose quarrel over being compared to “others” is one of the great scenes of master and servant, is exact in rhythm and in social nuance. The Dream’s long sentences are the prose of heat and sleep. Charged: the narrator tells what he could show, chiefly with Stolz; Olga’s development in Part Four is analysed more than dramatised; the swindle runs on coincidence and on villains of one note.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the farce of Zakhar and the elegy of the grave on the Vyborg side. They obey one law, that Oblomov’s world goes on as it was made unless something stronger than wishing intervenes, and nothing does; comedy and grief are the same inertia seen from two sides. The Dream and the Petersburg satire hold together too, the visitors being what Oblomovka would have to become if it moved. The element that strains the law is Stolz: built to a schema, German method and Russian heart, and set up as the counter-principle, he behaves by the author’s need rather than by the novel’s physics, and the marriage chapters of Part Four turn the book for a time from novel to essay.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Held round one man, which is the novel’s strength and its limit. One consciousness from childhood to death; the family twice, the household of the Dream and the household of Agafya; labour in its absence and its presence, the serfs who keep Oblomovka, Zakhar’s grudging service, Stolz’s commerce, Agafya’s ceaseless housework; class and the economy of the estate; the state in the chancellery Oblomov fled and the officials who rob him; love in two kinds; the natural order in the Dream’s seasons and the summer at the dacha; and history in the question of what Russia’s gentry is to become. The sacred enters only at the margins, the city beyond a few streets hardly at all, war and the larger public world not at all.

Score: 8.3 / 10