Goncharov Oblomov

About Oblomov

Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov (1859) is the supreme portrait of inertia in world literature — the story of Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, a Russian landowner who cannot get out of bed. From his sofa in St. Petersburg, Oblomov watches the world and declines to enter it; his friend Stoltz and the woman Olga offer him love and purpose, but the pull of passive existence is too strong. The novel gave the Russian language the word 'oblomovshchina' — the condition of paralytic inertia — and made Goncharov's name synonymous with the analysis of the 'superfluous man,' a type that runs through Russian literature from Pushkin's Onegin to Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. Goncharov's trilogy — A Common Story, Oblomov, and The Precipice — traces three versions of the Russian character across the nineteenth century.