BORIS DRALYUK
Ivan Goncharov
OBLOMOV
Translated by Stephen Pearl
540pp. Alma Classics. £7.99.
978 1 84749 344 6
Although Ivan Goncharov was never a prolific author, producing only three novels in as many decades, his masterpiece, Oblomov (1859), has earned him a permanent place in the top tier of nineteenth-century Russian novelists. And yet, despite high praise from James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, who adopted "Oblomov" as a pen name in his correspondence, Goncharov has had as hard a time breaking into the canon of Russian classics in English as his titular hero has getting out of bed. Stephen Pearl's deft translation may finally give both the author and his creation the push they need.
Goncharov's sluggish progress towards recognition in English is not altogether surprising. Oblomov, a 500-page narrative centring on a stunted character whose brief, half-hearted awakening comes to naught hardly fits the mould of the Russian novel as English readers saw it at the turn of the twentieth century. It does not appear to be a novel of ideas, offering little insight into the grand universal questions of crime and punishment or war and peace, and lacking the moral weight of, say, Anna Karenina. If anything, Oblomov's fecklessness might call to mind certain of Chekhov's characters, like The Cherry Orchard's impotent Ranevskys, who let their estate disappear from under them. Indeed, it's worth noting that Chekhov himself was just beginning to win an English-speaking audience when C. J. Hogarth published the first English translation of Goncharov's novel in 1915 and a modernist sensibility more congenial to plotless depictions of intractable human complexities was taking root.
But Goncharov was not a modernist, and Oblomov is, if only in part, a novel of ideas. Russian readers were quick to recognize an essentially Russian mentality, if not pathology, in the unbudging Ilya Ilyich Oblomov – the oblomovshchina that Pearl, in his thoughtful and informative afterword, rightly calls "not just a single symptom, but a syndrome". From the time of the novel's publication, left-wing critics like Nikolay Dobrolyubov interpreted Ilya Ilyich as a type, and oblomovshchina as a national malady. Oblomov's apathy and lethargy were not to be understood as individual idiosyncrasies, but as a malignant infantilism conditioned by the institution of serfdom. Russia's barbarous feudal system allowed its landowning Oblomovs to go to seed; in turn, these Oblomovs, reliant on income from estates they cannot be bothered to visit, as well as the care of aggrieved but loyal manservant-nannies like Ilya Ilyich's Zakhar, brought Russia to a standstill. Decades later, Lenin – who was born in Goncharov's hometown, Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk) – would take up this reading of oblomovshchina and apply it to his own political ends, condemning all foot-draggers on the road to socialism as latter-day Oblomovs, regardless of class origins. In Speak, Memory (1951), Vladimir Nabokov, who was never a proponent of big ideas in fiction, calls Goncharov one of the "stupefying bores" of Russian literature; he points up the "Leninist" legacy of his novel in The Gift (1939), with Fyodor protesting to a fellow émigré: "Don't tell me you have a kind word for Oblomov – that first 'Ilyich' who was the ruin of Russia – and the joy of social critics?"
Goncharov, for his part, was overjoyed by Dobrolyubov's long essay on his novel. As Galya Diment notes in her introduction, he even went so far as to claim that the critic had helped him better understand his own work. It is indeed impossible to ignore the ideas embedded in Oblomov: the conflict between ineffectual romantic contemplation, associated with the slothful "Asiatic" component of the Russian character, and productive rational action, associated with modern Europe. Goncharov presents almost too neat a contrast between the indolent Ilya Ilyich, with his iconic "dressing gown of Persian cloth, a real oriental robe without the slightest European touch", and his best friend Andrey Ivanovich Stoltz, a driven, diligent, yet kind-hearted half-German, half-Russian entrepreneur. Stoltz introduces Oblomov to a dynamic and intellectually curious young woman, Olga Ilyinskaya, and the pair fall in love. Inspired by Stoltz's encouragement and his love for Olga, Oblomov embraces a life of action, leaving his gown behind and tending to his affairs. But this new Ilya Ilyich is tragically short-lived, flourishing for a single symbolic summer. Settling back into his old ways, and into his decadent gown, Oblomov withdraws from his responsibilities and his relationship with Olga, who goes on to marry Stoltz. Oblomov, meanwhile, marries his widowed landlady, Agafya Matveyevna, spending "days on end lying on his divan, doing nothing but admire the way her bare elbows moved to and fro as she plied her needle and thread". He regresses into childhood and lives in a "kind of golden frame . . . surrounded exclusively by a circle of good-hearted, simple, loving people, unanimous in devoting their existence to supporting his and insulating him against noticing or feeling anything". It is Stoltz and Olga who inherit the future.
But if we reduce Oblomov to an exploration of social types and social forces, we will rob it of its remarkable charms, its psychological depth, and its rich ambiguities. These ambiguities – which continue to resonate with readers and trouble any schematic interpretation of the novel – haunt Oblomov's hilarious, infuriating, yet touching relationship with his manservant Zakhar, who both resents his master and cannot imagine life without him. They also haunt Goncharov's evocation of Ilya Ilyich's childhood home on the Volga, the beguilingly idyllic and disturbingly stifling Oblomovka. The chapter devoted to Oblomovka and Ilya Ilyich's relationship with his mother, which was first published separately in 1849 as "Oblomov's Dream", is a key to the novel's continued appeal, and Vladimir Korolenko's penetrating comment of 1912, cited by Diment, has lost none of its force: "Goncharov, of course, mentally rejected 'oblomovshchina', but deep inside he loved it with profound love beyond his control". This inner conflict comes to life in Pearl's imaginative translation: "Oblomov, seeing in his dream his long-dead mother, started quivering with joy and his heart contracted with a fierce spasm of love for her as two warm tears slowly slid from beneath his eyelids and hung motionlessly on his lashes. His mother smothered him with passionate kisses and devoured him hungrily and anxiously with her eyes". The blurred boundaries between dream and reality, between selfless and selfish love, lend this chapter its peculiar power, and Pearl has done full justice to its spirit and tone, occasionally choosing verbs that are stronger than Goncharov's – such as "smothered" for "showered" (osypala).
Pearl's translation first appeared with the New York press Bunim and Bannigam in 2006, largely escaping the notice of British readers. Its republication with Alma Classics should bring this masterly Oblomov the audience it deserves in the United Kingdom as well. Pearl's approach is more adventurous than that of his predecessors. His text flows naturally, capturing Goncharov's carefully modulated tone, the gentleness of his humour, and the colloquial flavour of his dialogue. Pearl is particularly adroit in his handling of idioms, and is sensitive to important differences in Russian and English usage. For instance, while describing his hero in the third paragraph, Goncharov twice uses the word dusha, which is usually translated as "soul", but occurs far more frequently than the English word and is far broader in implication, incorporating "heart" and "mind". While other translators have settled for the more literal "soul" or "spirit", Pearl offers a daring and evocative alternative, introducing the words "essence" and "being":
Sometimes an expression of something like weariness or boredom would darken his brow; but neither the weariness nor the boredom could for a minute erase the mildness, which was not merely the dominant expression of his face, but the very essence of his whole being – an essence that glowed naked and clear in his eyes, in his smile, in the least movement of his head or his hand.
Stephen Pearl has indeed caught the very essence of Oblomov.
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