A State of Dressing-gown-ness

Being lazy is harder than it looks. Turning freelance was meant to be the start of my age of languor. Here it is, I thought, an escape from the relentless itch of the office and time for enjoying some of life itself, hazy philosophizing and walks over the fields.

But I don’t know how. Even when I’m certain I’ve done enough to take a day off – still under the covers with a heap of books in the afternoon, streetlights coming on outside – it all goes wrong. The guilt makes me feel ill, nervous. So I don’t laze at all, I make sure my time is filled and I’m properly dressed and ready for action. Is it Protestant programming or living in a culture founded on the importance of work and career? To Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, that Don Quixote of idlers and hero of Ivan Goncharov’s eponymous novel, I’m a pitiable figure. Slouching in his dressing-gown, he rails against the crudity of his age:

The perpetual running to and fro, the perpetual play of petty desires, especially greed, people trying to spoil things for others, the tittle-tattle, the gossip, the slights, the way they look you up and down. You listen to what they’re talking about and it makes your head spin.

To be always striving for one thing or another is inhuman, says Oblomov. Even his modest role as a Collegiate Secretary feels like slavery (especially as these Tsarist civil servants appear to have had their own version of the smartphone).

A couple of times he was awakened at night and forced to write these ‘notes’. Several times a courier came and took him from his guests – all on account of these very same ‘notes’. All of this filled him with tremendous terror and boredom. ‘When am I to live? When am I to live?’ he repeated in anguish.

So Oblomov resigns from his job and sticks to his couch. After a while even social invitations make him squirm at their inconvenience. He’s frozen by a fear of disturbance to his ‘tranquility and peaceful merriment’ and begins to struggle to do anything at all. Oblomov’s retreat into frowzy lodgings might look like a one-man protest against modernity or bureaucracy or capitalism, but it’s really a consequence of something even bigger, the digging out of a deeply rooted culture by the brute vitality of the nineteenth century. In response he’s following an ancient Russian habit of shutting out the storm and clinging to the warm spot by the stove. Oblomov, which was published in 1859, grew out of an initial sketch, Oblomov’s Dream, a portrait of life on a sleepy country estate, rustic and dilapidated in its rut of feasting and napping and storytelling. It makes some sense of Oblomov’s condition, the family history at home in Oblomovka and the way the shared love of cosy simplicity has softened his heart and his bones. It’s the Russian character expressed in diminutive pet-names, that Ilyusha- and Mishka-ness. And I think that’s what appealed to me first about the book – the idea of Oblomov refusing to give up on a golden age and its spell of simple ways and idleness. In our context, it’s attractive. I wanted it to be the defence of the drop-out, of a life more real than one dominated by work and shopping. At the back of my edition an afterword argues that Goncharov created a hero who would rather look after his soul than join the scramble for material gain. I want to believe it. But it’s impossible not to see and feel Goncharov’s disgust for his character. The novel is very much part of the argument over the future of the nation and whether it will ever be able to keep up with the West. Why can’t Russia be more modern, more efficient – and yes, why not a bit cleaner? The novel was pointed to as a cautionary tale by the Westernizers, and later by the Communists. This is what happens when you just put up with the old nobility and their old ways. His dressing-gown became the symbol of apathy, defeat, a state of depression, captured in the word halatnost or ‘dressing-gown-ness’. Goncharov’s loathing for Oblomov leads to a dismal end, his hero in a stew of laziness. Of course he doesn’t get the girl, it would have involved too much effort. He’s swindled and exploited and moves in smaller and smaller circles until his death. By comparison, on the side of the relentless, hard-working types is Oblomov’s friend from childhood, Stolz. He prospers, takes the girl for himself and together they become the concerned couple, Oblomov their pet cause. It doesn’t help that Stolz is so smug, such a schemer. There is a well-known photograph from 1856 of contributors to the pre-eminent literary journal The Contemporary, which features some members of the golden generation of Russian literature: there’s Tolstoy (still in military uniform, the young Turk); Turgenev (spry gentleman of letters); and with them Goncharov (bored, hand on head). But he was the exception in many ways. Goncharov had a long and solid career as a civil servant, including a period as an official censor of literature – at a time when the censors were a spearhead in the government’s assault upon anyone voicing democratic, revolutionary thoughts. Dostoevsky said Goncharov had the ‘soul of a bureaucrat’ and the ‘eyes of a boiled fish’. This doesn’t sound like one of the giants. His life wasn’t filled with high drama, his books didn’t go exploring either the dark depths or the lofty heights of the Russian soul. Goncharov grew up in a country home in the provinces, Oblomovka-like, with his mother and brothers and sisters, his father having died when he was 7. He never married, was reputedly shy with people and women in particular, and lived a careful life, writing his three novels (and one travelogue) in a slow and cautious way. His writing was worked on in secret, until he eventually decided to go public at the age of 35. There was one notable incident – his row with Turgenev. Goncharov convinced himself that Turgenev had pinched ideas and situations he’d discussed with him while writing his final novel The Precipice (1869) to include in his own On the Eve. He’d not stopped there. Turgenev had supposedly also palmed material off to Flaubert for Sentimental Education. At the height of the public wrangling, the disputants both happened to be walking in St Petersburg’s Summer Park. Seeing Turgenev there, Goncharov shouted as loudly as he could across the crowds of visitors that the man was ‘a thief! a thief!’, and ran away as fast as his portly body could carry him. From then on he kept his writing under lock and key to keep Turgenev’s (presumably gloved and scented) hands from lifting anything more. Goncharov isn’t much read outside Russia, where Oblomov is a proverbial character-type like Hamlet or Scrooge. But he deserves a proper look. Chekhov claimed Goncharov was a better writer than he was. Tolstoy went into ‘raptures’ over Oblomov. Even Dostoevsky, through gritted teeth, admitted that ‘God, as if for laughs, endowed him with a brilliant talent.’ Goncharov insisted he wasn’t a creative writer at all, that what he wrote was only his own memories, painstakingly recalled: ‘I have written only what I knew from experience, what I have thought, felt, loved, what I have seen and know intimately – in a word I have written my own life and that which adhered to it.’ And maybe this explains why his take on Russia’s dilemma, and the essential issue of what life is for, feels so ambivalent. While Tolstoy’s ideas land with a thump and Turgenev wafts liberalism, Goncharov’s writing is torn and his ideas unresolved. His heart and mind are different devils. All the fussing over what Goncharov intended obscures the most important thing about the novel. It’s a treat. And a surprising one after a reading of the big Russian novels (wonderful as they are) because Goncharov has a knack for bright, skipping prose; there’s a simple and affecting story, his characters are funny and real. Oblomov also includes one of the best love stories in Russian literature. Or maybe there just aren’t that many of them in that famous period. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy had other purposes in mind, too much grand opera to sing, to allow for the small and heartbreaking reality of Oblomov and Olga. No good would come from quoting any of their exchanges, they would only sound artificial – and the novel is very much of its age, with plenty of passages you wouldn’t want to read out loud. But the love story works because of its careful construction, building in the background to all the comedy of Oblomov’s daily struggle, his fights with his servant, with himself. The impossible relationship plays out within the context of a cold, slick social machinery where Oblomov can only ever fail, while we know Olga is his only reason to keep on living.

That entire day was one of gradual disappointment for Oblomov. He spent it with Olga’s aunt, a very intelligent and proper woman who was always beautifully dressed . . . with this woman what came first was the ability to live, to control oneself, to keep thought and intention, and intention and execution, in balance. Never would you catch her unprepared, at loose ends, like a vigilant enemy who, no matter how you lie in wait, always meets you with an expectant gaze aimed straight at you.

There’s no obvious comfort for dreamers in the novel, and I change my mind about Goncharov’s intentions and sympathies from one chapter to the next. But still it makes me wonder whether he’d be especially gratified to see the logical outcome of Stolz’s success. Because what’s the rejection of Oblomovism – his laziness but also his sense of poetry in ordinary life – done for Russia or for any nation that’s ditched much of its old culture in favour of smart efficiency and wealth?

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 48 © Tim Blanchard 2015