Oblomov Read Free

inevitability of death but see life, on the analogy of geological rhythms, as maintaining a perpetual balance. In one place mountains crumble; elsewhere the sea piles up new land.
    Goncharov started The Precipice in 1849, when he was still in the early stages of Oblomov . The writing dragged on for twenty years. He rushed to Marienbad periodically, but the inspiration of the glorious summer of ’57 would not return. He was stuck. He had no trouble getting the words down but he couldn’t find a principle by which to connect them.
    Some time around 1860 he decided to change his procedure. A Common Story and Oblomov are biographies of a soul. They describe the course of a life, the former as part of an entertaining if thin comedy of manners, the latter with warmth of feeling and psychological penetration. Goncharov began The Precipice with similar intentions – to portray in the person of Boris Raysky ‘the insides, the heart of an artist’, but he couldn’t pull it off. In midstream, some time around 1860, he decided to accommodate changing trends on the Russian literary scene and write a political novel in a dramatic rather than biographical form. The Precipice belongs to a wave of anti-nihilist fiction (radicals were dubbed nihilists). Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and Dostoyevsky’s The Devils (also translated as The Possessed ) are two outstanding examples of the tendency.
    Goncharov’s effort is not in their league. The Precipice is overwrought and melodramatic – a far cry from the reflective manner and poetic warmth of Oblomov . It is also humourless. Living in an autocratic society that did not allow the give and take of open dialogue, many Russians saw society as divided into ‘us’ and ‘them’. Political discourse turned moralistic. The nihilist of The Precipice has bad manners and is licentious. In Oblomov the gentry estate, the central institution of Old Russia, is an ambiguous place – a dreamland of pastoral peace and an island isolated from possibilities of moral and intellectual growth. In The Precipice it is a bulwark of stability in a world of uncertain passions. Great works of art intrigue us with their complexity. Oblomov is among them.

FURTHER READING
Borowec, Christine, ‘Time after Time: The Temporal Ideology of Oblomov ’, Slavic and East European Journal , 4 (Winter 1994).
Diment, Galya, The Autobiographical Novel of Co-consciousness: Goncharov, Woolf and Joyce (Gainsville, Fl., 1994).
—(ed.), Goncharov’s Oblomov: A Critical Companion (Evanston, Ill., 1998).
—‘Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov’, in Dictionary of Literary Biography (Farmington Hills, Mich., 2001).
Dobrolyubov, N. A., ‘What is Oblomivitis’, in Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, and Dobrolyubov: Selected Criticism , ed. Ralph E. Matlaw (New York, 1962).
Ehre, Milton, Oblomov and His Creator: The Life and Art of Ivan Goncharov (Princeton, N.J., 1973).
Freeborn, Richard, The Rise of the Russian Novel: Studies in the Russian Novel from Eugene Onegin to War and Peace (Cambridge, 1973).
Gifford, Henry, The Novel in Russia from Pushkin to Pasternak (New York, 1965).
Harrison, Jane Ellen, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos (Cambridge, 1919).
Louria, Yvette, and Morton I. Seiden, ‘Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov: The Anti-Faust as Christian Hero’, Canadian Slavic Studies , 3 (Spring 1969).
Lyngstad, Alexandra and Sverre, Ivan Goncharov (New York, 1971).
Macauley, Robie, ‘The Superfluous Man’, Partisan Review , 19, no. 2 (1952).
Mays, Milton A., ‘Oblomov as Anti-Faust’, Western Humanities Review , 21 (Spring 1967).
Mirsky, D. S., A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900 , rev. edn, ed. Francis J. Whitfield (New York, 1949).
Peace, Richard, Oblomov: A Critical Examination of Goncharov’s Novel (Birmingham, 1991).
Poggioli, Renato, The Phoenix and the Spider (Cambridge, Mass., 1957).
Pritchett, V. S., The Living Novel (London, 1946).
Setchkarev, Vsevolod, Ivan Goncharov: His Life and His Works