Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov [2]
Some critics – Russian and Western – have held a more benign view. Recent years have witnessed a tendency to vindicate Oblomov, to see his massive inertness (a good part of the book is over before he gets out of bed) as an antidote to the endless striving of Faustian man. He has even been proposed as a candidate for sainthood.
In over fifty years of literary activity Ivan Goncharov managed to write only three novels: Oblomov, A Common Story (1847) and The Precipice (1869; sometimes translated as The Ravine). He also left a handful of short stories and a charming account of his journey to Japan as a member of a naval expedition, The Frigate Pallas: Notes of a Journey (1858). Unlike genteel Oblomov, Goncharov worked for a living. Literature was the love of free time wrested from his duties as a bureaucrat in the government service, including a stint as a censor. He came from a family of merchants in the Volga town of Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk). The Goncharovs had officially risen to the status of gentry in the semi-feudal Russian system as a reward for the military service of Ivan’s grandfather, but they continued to earn their living from the grain trade. Almost all his fellow writers were from the landed gentry, the lucky ones living on revenues from their estates.
Goncharov came to maturity in the dark years of Nicholas I’s despotic rule (1825–55). He belonged to a remarkable generation, the so-called ‘men of the forties’. Dostoevsky, Turgenev and the poet Nekrasov appeared in print in that decade; Tolstoy followed on their heels in the early fifties; the influential critic Vissarion Belinsky and the brilliant Alexander Herzen were at the height of their powers.
The mood was anti-romantic, though romanticism proved more resilient than many supposed. Emotionalism, fantasy, metaphysical aches were out of fashion; sobriety, accuracy of depiction, ‘ordinary’ life were in. Russians were becoming more aware of their country’s economic and social backwardness. Their fathers had triumphed over Napoleon only to discover the higher standard of living of the defeated. ‘Action’, ‘work’, ‘deeds’ were slogans of the day. The son of practical-minded merchants responded to the new rhetoric, running the hero of his first novel through an education in the value of sensible activity and emotional restraint.
A Common Story follows a deflationary plot line characteristic of nineteenth-century realism, slipping from ‘great expectations’ to ‘lost illusions’. Alexander Aduyev, an innocent from the provinces, comes to the capital with high hopes of fortune and love, but stumbles through a series of comic mishaps. For emerging realism, parody was the major weapon against romanticism. (Even The Frigate Pallas may be read as a parody of expectations travellers garnered from books.) An aspiring writer, Aduyev identifies finding himself with finding a style. His inflated speech is mocked at every turn, especially by his uncle Peter, a successful but dry entrepreneur.
The novel ends with an ironic twist. Alexander, upon turning himself into a calculating businessman like his uncle, is surprised by the news that Peter in his young years also went through a heady romantic phase. Alexander has repeated his uncle’s career even to the backache that comes with success. Neither youthful enthusiasm nor middle-age scepticism are adequate responses to the problem of living. Instead of a didactic defence of the bourgeois virtues, Goncharov’s first novel is a wry comment on the way of the world, the ‘common story’ of growing up.
Though Oblomov turns on a similar opposition of practical action and sentimental drift, it is much richer, more deeply felt. It does not tell the story of a career to be made but of a life to be saved. The writing