Hamlet in Bed

OBLOMOV (485 pp.)--Ivan Goncharov--Penguin (paperback; 85/).

A writer may vaccinate his age with a masterpiece but decades sometimes pass before it takes. In 1859 Iyan Goncharov.

a dandified bachelor bureaucrat from St.

Petersburg, needled Russia with a masterly seriocomic study of a chronic lazybones whom he called Oblomov. The book was largely ignored by readers rushing to buy the latest novel--A Nest of Gentlefolk--by Turgenev. Literate Russians eventually recognized Goncharov's genius, but after nearly a century, his major work is still little known in the West. Probably no finer introduction exists than the supple, perceptive new English translation (the first in 25 years) by David Magar-shack, himself the author of two good biographies of Chekhov and Turgenev.

Novelist Goncharov was incapable of firing off the demoniac, soul-searching pyrotechnics of a Tolstoy or a Dostoevsky, but with quiet irony and firm psychological realism he stirred his TNT in a teacup.

Artful Dodges. Thirtyish, and sheltered from the cradle up, the novel's hero, Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, is an absentee gentleman landlord on the skids, vegetating contentedly in a St. Petersburg flat while his estates and his income go to pot. The book first finds him in bed, for Oblomov is a Russian Hamlet, except for a lower I.Q., and his daily question is: To get up or not to get up? His room is a maze of cobwebs and clutter. Friends drop in and try to lure him into making the social rounds, but he shoos them off. Parasitical cronies cadge a few rubles from him, while his decrepit old manservant grumps and bemoans the good old days. For a good 100 pages, Author Goncharov drains every drop of social comedy from the venal parade around Oblomov's bed, and from Oblomov himself, frittering away the morning and afternoon with artful dodges before finally getting up.

Oblomov is not wholly bad, or unlovable. He is tenderhearted and his daydreams are crammed with good intentions of visiting his estates, and building schools, roads and hospitals for his serfs.

Beautiful music moves him to tears. One evening he cries at a friend's house while a statuesque, oval-faced girl named Olga is singing, and she falls in love with him.

Olga is only 20 but already an Ibsen-type "New Woman," independent, intelligent, indefatigable. She thinks she can reform Oblomov. He tramps the hills with her, reads poetry to her, and resolves to salvage his wasted life. But Oblomov's only school has been the nursery of self-indulgence, and he cannot bring himself to graduate. He decides, elegantly, that he should have stood in bed. The responsibilities of marriage petrify him. He pleads lack of funds and postpones the date. He develops Victorian scruples about being seen unchaperoned with Olga.

Eventually he holes up in his flat, dreading Olga's knock, which one day comes, along with a final, heartbroken question: " 'Why has it all been ruined? . . .

Who laid a curse on you, Ilya? What have you done? You are kind, intelligent, tender, honorable, and--you are going to wrack and ruin! What has ruined you? There is no name for that evil.' " 'Yes, there is,' he said in a hardly audible whisper.

"She looked at him questioningly with her eyes full of tears.

" 'Oblomovitis!' he whispered." The curse of Oblomovitis or Oblomo-vism dogs Ilya implacably down the stairwell of personal decay, until one night he exits from life as he entered the novel, in bed.

Pre-Freudian Insights. Oblomov has been much praised as social prophecy, with Oblomovism interpreted as the stifling dead calm of inertia in the eye of the hurricane which history calls the Russian Revolution. To the 20th century reader, Oblomov is even more remarkable for its pre-Freudian insights. Analysts' couches today sag with the victims of mental illness, psychological blocks, self-hatred, death wishes, or just plain immaturity--in a word. Oblomovism.

As for Ivan Goncharov, he was not immune to the curse he described in his hero. Though he lived to be 79 and died in 1891, he wrote only one minor novel after Oblomov. Obsessed with the idea that Turgenev had robbed him of his just fame, Goncharov took to accusing him of plagiarizing his plots, and spotting the novelist once in a St. Petersburg park, yelled: "Thief! Thief!" A stroke left Author Goncharov half-blind and he died half-mad, no stranger to Oblomovism.

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