Oblomov

The dressing gown is Persian, vast, worn soft from years of wear; the divan has long since taken the shape of its owner. For something close to a hundred and fifty pages, Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, a Russian gentleman of thirty-two with a steady income and an estate going quietly to ruin, tries to get out of bed and cannot. Visitors come and go, each busier and hollower than the last, while Goncharov watches his hero fail to rise with a tenderness that slowly becomes the argument: this stillness is worth our whole attention. Oblomov even gave a word to the language, Oblomovism, for the sweet paralysis of a man who would rather dream his life than live it. Yet the book loves him far too much to leave it a diagnosis. When Olga nearly wakes him, and he nearly lives, you lean toward the page; when he sinks at last into the warm, fed, undemanding calm of a widow's house, the grief is real, because he understood exactly what he was trading away, and chose the divan anyway.