Reading Order
Oblomov Reading Order
Oblomov (1859) by Ivan Goncharov is one of the most unusual masterpieces in European literature — a novel in which the hero spends the entire first hundred pages in bed, getting up only because his servant insists, and in which nothing very dramatic happens across four hundred pages because the hero is constitutionally incapable of decisive action. Ilya Ilyich Oblomov is a Russian nobleman who cannot respond to any letter, visit any friend, leave his house, manage his estate, or pursue the woman he loves with any sustained energy; his friend Andrei Stoltz (a German-Russian hybrid, all efficiency and enterprise) tries repeatedly and unsuccessfully to rescue him, and Oblomov eventually settles into a comfortable domestic arrangement with a widow and ceases to do anything at all. The famous first chapter ('Oblomov's Dream') is Goncharov's masterpiece in miniature: Oblomov dreams of his childhood estate, a world of perfect somnolent contentment in which nothing ever happens and time moves with the warmth and slowness of a perpetual summer afternoon. Goncharov uses this dream to explain everything: Oblomovism is not laziness but a philosophical position, an inability to believe that anything in the modern world of activity and enterprise is worth the effort. The novel was seized on immediately as a diagnosis of the Russian gentry's moral failure; Dobrolyubov's essay 'What Is Oblomovism?' (1859) made 'Oblomovism' a permanent term in Russian cultural discourse for the disease of passive inertia that prevents social progress.
Where to start
Oblomov — this is a single novel, best read slowly and with patience for its unusual tempo; the first chapter, 'Oblomov's Dream', can be read standalone as one of the finest short pieces of Russian prose.
Complete Oblomov Book List
- 1Buy
Oblomov
Ivan Goncharov·1859·The masterpiece — Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, who cannot get out of bed, cannot act on his love, cannot manage his estate, and eventually settles into blissful domestic inertia; the diagnosis of 'Oblomovism' in Russian culture. - 2Buy
Oblomov's Dream (Oblomov's Chapter I)
Ivan Goncharov·1849·Published a decade before the full novel — the dream sequence that explains everything about Oblomov's character; a self-contained piece of extraordinary beauty about childhood, the estate, and the somnolent tempo of old Russia. - 3Buy
Obyknovennaya istoriya (A Common Story)
Ivan Goncharov·1847·Goncharov's first novel — an idealistic young man from the provinces becomes a Petersburg bureaucrat; the opposite trajectory to Oblomov, but the same concern with the Russian inability to reconcile feeling and reality. - 4Buy
Obryv (The Precipice)
Ivan Goncharov·1869·Goncharov's third and last novel — less perfectly unified than Oblomov but shares its concern with the Russian gentry's inability to act; for readers who want all of Goncharov.
Oblomov — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Oblomov really about a man who stays in bed?
Yes — the first hundred pages are almost entirely set in Oblomov's bedroom, which he is reluctant to leave. But the novel is not about laziness in the ordinary sense; it is a meditation on a philosophical position (nothing in modern life is worth the effort of getting out of bed) that Goncharov renders with perfect comic seriousness. It is also one of the funniest novels in Russian literature, at least in its first half.
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