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50 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A fun and moving story of "the Russian Hamlet", August 23, 2000
Oblomov was written just a couple of years before the abolition of serfdom in Russia, a time when the landowners were still clinging to feudal ways of making money but had been exposed to (and for the most part fascinated by) more modern ways of living their upper-class lives. The title character, like many other landowners, has for some time lived in Petersburg, away from his family estate, but unlike many others he finds himself very bored with society life. Instead, he prefers to remain in his bed, entertaining a handful of guests, mulling over but never putting to paper a plan to improve his estate, and, for him most pleasantly of all, daydreaming about his simple and idyllic childhood in the country. To any outside observer, he is pathetic in this state, where he can't even finish writing a letter, so his childhood friend Stolz tries to bring him out of his torpor. Stolz fails in persuading him that going to dinner parties and taking part in high-society backstabbing is any better than lying in bed, but he does manage to rouse him to some kind of action by introducing him to his friend Olga. Olga and Oblomov fall in love, with Olga dreaming of a permanently-changed Oblomov and Oblomov dreaming of a future growing old with Olga on Oblomov's family estate. Meanwhile, circumstances force Oblomov to move into a new apartment, where the landlady takes quite a liking to him but the landlady's brother, along with one of Oblomov's longtime houseguests, conspire to defraud Oblomov. This probably only summarizes about half of the novel, but saying much more would probably give away too much of the ending. Despite the unattractiveness of Oblomov's preferred lifestyle, Goncharov manages to make Oblomov a very lovable character. The reader is brought into a fair amount of sympathy with Oblomov's nostalgia for his childhood and his innocent hopes for a peacefully happy future, and I for one was unable to blame Oblomov for wanting to stay in bed rather than put up with all the artifices and machinations of high society life. All the love affairs in the novel are mostly well put-together (though in the novel's final part Goncharov was a bit too long-winded about some of the characters' emotions), and although Oblomov receives by far the most attention, both Olga and Oblomov's servant Zahar are well- (and in the latter case quite amusingly-) drawn The main qualm I had about this book prior to reading it was that the prospect of spending 500 pages on a novel about a man who wants to do nothing but lie by himself in bed sounded a bit boring, but that turned out to be unfounded for a couple of reasons. First, Stolz and Olga do manage to get him out of bed and persuade him to take action on some fronts, even if his deeper inclinations still show throughout. Second, the first (150-page) part of the novel, which Oblomov does spend entirely in bed, surprisingly turned out for me to be the novel's most entertaining part. There were some minor technical problems with the work (in particular I thought some of the changes of scene were quite awkward), but these did not take away at all from my enjoyment of the book. Oblomov is ultimately a tragic figure, and his flaw of inaction is very much tied up with the archaic feudal system in place in Russia at the time. However, this does not prevent those of us living 141 years in the future and many thousands of miles away from sympathizing with him and having a great deal of fun as more and more about this fascinating character is revealed.
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27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Eats shoots and translates, November 10, 2006
You are best off buying the old Magarshack translation, published by Penguin Classics.
The new Pearl translation contains so many unnecessary typographical errors--comma disease, carriage returns that insert white lines in the middle of paragraphs more than once, quotation marks regularly lost track of--that the edition is too broken to use with pleasure.
Stylistically Pearl's done something different from Magarshack, "updating" the old-feeling language. This sometimes works well in dialogues between characters, but not so much in the voice of the narrator, in my opinion.
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27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The saint of sloth, January 7, 2002
Oblomov, the main character of Ivan Goncharov's novel, is widely regarded as one of the finest literary examples of the backward-looking landed gentry of mid-nineteenth century Russia. His name has even entered the Russian language in the term "oblomovshchina", meaning backwardness, inertia. The unheroic hero Oblomov is also a very fine literary creation of a fully-fledged human being. He is a melancholy idealist, a dreamer whose temperament is such that he never begins to put his dreams into action. His tragedy is that he weighs the possible obstacles to his endeavors for such a long time that, finally, he never even starts to act. Ivan Goncharov is at his best when he describes the mental processes of Oblomov that lead to his bumbling life. There is no better description of how the mind of a pessimistic person manipulates the perception of reality than in this book. "The Saint of Sloth" is the title of a review written by the critic V.S. Pritchett for the New York Review of Books. It captures nicely the two main aspects of Oblomov's character. On the one hand, Oblomov is lazy, irresponsible, pessimistic, paralyzed, complacent, slothful; but on the other hand he is idealistic, true to himself, honest, child-like, innocent, saintly. He is ultimately a lovable human being. He does not lack wisdom, he lacks resolve. As can be expected, Goncharov's book is not an action-packed thriller. On the first 50 or so pages, Oblomov barely manages to get out of his bed. A patient reader who keeps reading, however, is rewarded with a wonderfully realistic love story (including all the ups and downs), and many wise comments by the bachelor Goncharov on life, love, passion, duty and marriage.
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