Goncharov Oblomov Reading Order

Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov (1859) is one of the most unusual masterpieces in world literature: a novel whose hero cannot get out of bed. Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, a Russian landowner of comfortable means, spends the first hundred pages of the novel lying on his sofa in his St. Petersburg apartment, unable to rouse himself to deal with his estate, his correspondence, or life in any form. Goncharov surrounds him with a friend who represents the opposite type — the energetic, Westernized Andrey Stoltz — and a woman, Olga, who briefly awakens Oblomov's love and with it the possibility of change. But the Russian soil is too deep in him; he sinks back. The novel gave the Russian language the word 'oblomovshchina' — the disease of inertia, of the man incapable of will — and became the defining portrait of a national type that Turgenev, Chekhov, and the entire Russian literary tradition would continue to examine.