Extract

The trouble is that no devastating or redeeming fires have ever burnt in my life.

A man lies on a sofa in St. Petersburg and cannot bring himself to get up. He intends to answer a letter, to visit his estate, to begin life in earnest, but the dressing gown is soft and perhaps tomorrow will serve. Ivan Goncharov published this novel in 1859, and it gave Russian literature its most enduring portrait of a national malaise: the paralysis of the superfluous man, the aristocrat refined into total inaction. Oblomov is maddening, comic, and finally heartbreaking, a soul of genuine warmth buried alive by his own inertia. His friend Stolz and his beloved Olga try to wake him, but the sofa always wins. Goncharov understood that sloth is not laziness but despair, the quiet refusal of a life that offers nothing worth rising for.