Recommendations
Books Like Oblomov
Books for readers who loved Goncharov's portrait of beautiful, total inertia
Ivan Goncharov's 1859 Oblomov is one of the most unusual European novels — the hero cannot get out of bed for the first hundred pages, and nothing very dramatic happens across four hundred; it is a meditation on a philosophical position (nothing in modern life is worth the effort) rendered with perfect comic seriousness. These eight books share its quality: the portrait of inertia as a worldview, the anti-hero who fails to act on anything, and the tradition of the 'superfluous man' in European literature.
- 1Buy on Amazon
Fathers and Sons
by Ivan Turgenev
Bazarov's nihilism is explicitly directed at the Oblomov generation — the 1840s liberal idealists who dreamed beautifully and did nothing; the two novels define the Russian generational conflict of the century.
- 2Buy on Amazon
The Diary of a Superfluous Man
by Ivan Turgenev
The original 'superfluous man' of Russian literature — the educated, sensitive provincial who cannot act on anything; the type that Goncharov expanded into Oblomov's magnificent stasis.
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Buy on AmazonStoner
by John Williams
William Stoner, an academic who never quite takes hold of his own life — Williams's quiet American tragedy is the closest contemporary analogue to Oblomov's resigned failure to engage with the world.
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Buy on AmazonThe Stranger
by Albert Camus
Meursault's existentialist indifference to his own life is the philosophical extreme of Oblomov's passivity — the man who finds nothing worth the effort of strong feeling or decisive action.
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Buy on AmazonBartleby, the Scrivener
by Herman Melville
The ultimate portrait of inertia — Bartleby who 'would prefer not to' is Oblomov reduced to a single phrase and a single office; the American cousin of Goncharov's great study of the will's failure.
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Buy on AmazonThe Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Stevens who devoted his life to serving the wrong cause with perfect efficiency — a man who acted perpetually but never in the direction of his own life; inertia enacted as endless activity.
- 7Buy on Amazon
A Month in the Country
by Ivan Turgenev
Turgenev's play of a summer estate, a woman who cannot act on her feelings, and the young tutor who makes everything impossible — the Oblomov atmosphere of suppressed feeling and beautiful inaction in dramatic form.
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Buy on AmazonPedro Páramo
by Juan Rulfo
A ghost town of people who cannot move on — a different kind of stasis, but the atmosphere of lives suspended, waiting, and unable to engage with time is Oblomov's condition pushed to its magical-realist extreme.
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