And the reading, the learning, the constant stimulation and stretching of the mind! - Goncharov's ideal

The worst thing in Oblomov today.  The boring part, I mean.  The novel is a comedy, a great one.  The long first single scene is the comic highlight, but there are plenty of later returns to form, and the wind-down to the ending is entirely satisfying.  This is all Oblomov’s story.

Yet two chapters (Part 4, Chapters 4 and 8) have no jokes at all, no humor.  They are serious, sincere, and lack Oblomov, instead finishing off the stories of two supporting characters, Oblomov’s “active” friend Stoltz and one-time fiancée Olga.  I did not believe that their stories required any but a summary resolution, yet Ivan Goncharov gives them 10% of the book.  This is the purpose of calculating the percentages, by the way, to emphasize myself that the author thought this part of the book was important.

As far as Oblomov, the character, is concerned, the contents of these chapters could have been compressed into a paragraph.  The characters meet in Paris, fall in love, and marry.  They then establish the ideal household, perfectly managed, and ideal marriage, energetic and loving, while Oblomov falls into, let us say, a different ideal.  But Goncharov wants his readers to understand the machinery of perfection.

Some sample sentences:

It was with joyous serenity that she contemplated the broad expanses of life, its vast green fields and hills. (374)

Like the perpetual beauty of nature that bathed its surroundings, the interior of the house was constantly abuzz with ideas and vibrated with the beauty of human activity.  (395)

Leaving aside the question of love and marriage as such and without bringing in such issues as money, connections or position, Stoltz did nonetheless ponder the problem of reconciling his outer and hitherto ceaseless activity with an inner family life, and his role as a traveler and businessman with that of a homebound family man.  (398)

The prose is that of a different writer, a different novel.  I suspect many readers, after that last example, will say a worse writer.  In an amusing paradox, this novel about sloth is full of comic energy, while the two chapters about activity are without spark.

And the reading, the learning, the constant stimulation and stretching of the mind!  (401)

He did not actually draw her diagrams or go over tables with her, but her talked to her about everything…  Like a philosopher or artist he tenderly molded her intellectual development and never in his life had he found himself so deeply absorbed…  there had been no task so challenging as that of nurturing the restless, volcanic intellect of his life’s companion.  (402)

There is the clue – these two chapters are modeled after the fiction of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  They update the idealized love affair of Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and the idealized pedagogy of Émile, ou de l'éducation  (1762), two of the strangest books I have ever read.  Émile is particularly insane.

The characters themselves use Oblomov as a foil, discussing how they can maintain their energy and interest in their marriage and lives and avoid falling into Oblomovism.  My guess is that Goncharov more or less means all of this, and that readers are meant to choose virtue over vice, but in the end even the noble couple acknowledges their love for Oblomov:

“’I’ve felt love for many people, but never such a strong and lasting love as for Oblomov.  To know him is to love him forever; right?’”  (413)

They love him for his sincerity and “gentleness,” while I love him because his parts of the novel are well-written, but we end up in the same place.

The root cause of Oblomovism - real life and fairy tales were hopelessly intertwined

The best thing in Oblomov, Part 1, Chapter 9, “Oblomov’s Dream.”  It is a long episode, 8% of the book, 29% of Part 1.  My understanding is that it is the germ of the novel, the first part of the novel Goncharov wrote years before it was published.  The conceit is that Oblomov is sleeping in his St. Petersburg apartment, dreaming about his childhood and the estate where he grew up.  The dream is not especially dream-like, but it does explain Oblomovism.

Oblomov’s dream begins strangely, with the narrator setting the scene by insisting that it contains “no sea, no high mountains, cliffs or precipices, no dense forests, nothing at all imposing, wild or menacing” (82).  In other words, nothing sublime.  Goncharov is adopting Burkean language.  Mountains are “menacing and fearsome like the unsheathed claws and bared fangs of some wild beast going for the throat,” while the sea is “wailing and groaning like some monster doomed to eternal torment.”

There will be nothing like that in Oblomov’s dream where even “the sky seemed to crouch closer to the earth… so as to enfold it more snugly” and each season “proceeds in the orderly sequence ordained by nature” (82-3).  The landscape is purely picturesque, “ a series of charming, attractive, picture-postcard landscapes.”  The estate is nowhere near a railroad, a town, or even an ordinary road.  The arrival of a letter is not merely a rare event, but a source of confusion.

So the entire household, the entire estate, is suffused with the spirit of Oblomovism.  It appears to be a family trait.  But that is not enough.  Oblomov, in the first part of the dream, is seven years old.  This is one source of Oblomovism:

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.  (88)

The other source is the imagination, centered on his nanny telling him fairy tales:

The adult Ilya Ilyich, of course, eventually came to realize that there were no such things as rivers of milk and honey or good fairies, and cheerfully dismissed his nanny’s tales with a smile, but the smile was not entirely genuine and was always accompanied by a wistful sigh.  For him, real life and fairy tales were hopelessly intertwined and, in spite of himself, the thought that life was not a fairy tale and fairy tales were not life, depressed him at times.  (97)

Three great accounts of childhood on a Russian estate were published during the 1850s, Leo Tolstoy’s Childhood (1852) and its sequels, Sergey Aksakov’s A Russian Gentleman (1856) and its sequels, especially Years of Childhood (1858), and “Oblomov’s Dream.”  It is a curious conjunction.  My guess is that the pace of progress had become so fast that writers were looking backwards, whether twenty years for the young Tolstoy or seventy for Aksakov, to tally up the changes.

Oblomov’s inactivity is some kind of retreat to childhood.  It is a protest against the passage of time, a protest against existence.  Thus to his friend Stoltz, a person of the world, Oblomov seems to be rejecting life.  In a sense he is.

Oblomov and Oblomovism - some contrasting characters

I promised on Twitter that this piece would be more coherent than yesterday’s.  Likely an error.  But I will number my points for clarity.  The book at hand is Ivan Goncharov’s 1859 Oblomov.

1.  Oblomov was once a student, a civil servant, a man who attended the  theater and kept up with fashionable books, the usual stuff of his class, the landowner who leaves the estate for St. Petersburg.  But he gradually withdrew from all of that until he ended up where we find him at the beginning and throughout the first 30% of Oblomov, on his couch, in his dressing-gown,  living off the dwindling proceeds of the mismanaged estate he inherited.

Based on the behavior of the friends who appear throughout the opening part of the novel, Oblomov’s complete removal from society is fairly recent.  They assume he is still mobile, eccentric but not a recluse.

We know the truth soon enough, though, that Oblomov has settled into a “deep and all-pervasive inertia” as Stefanie at So Many Books calls it, a Russian Bartlebyism where Oblomov prefers not to, whether the act is painful or pleasurable, necessary or frivolous.  He does not always act, by which I mean do nothing, as he prefers.  But the tendency is clear enough, the desire for an existence that suspiciously resembles non-existence (thus the temptation to invoke Buddhism).

This is Oblomovism or oblomovshchina (Pearl explores but does not translate the word).  Torpor as ideology.

2.  The novel operates by a contrast of characters.

a.  The servant Zakhar is genuinely lazy.  He prefers ease.  After describing Oblomov on the first page of the novel, Goncharov turns to the filthy apartment – the “back of one couch had collapsed and the wood veneer had come unstuck in places,” “mirrors had ceased to reflect anything,” and the pages of the “two or three” open books “had yellowed, were covered in dust, and had clearly been discarded long ago” (2-3).  This is the result of Zakhar’s laziness, not Oblomov’s, who “would actually have liked to see everything clean, only he wanted it to somehow happen by itself, spontaneously and in a flash” (8).

This makes for good comedy.

b.  Oblomov’s friend Stoltz and his eventual fiancée Olga are active people.  They are convinced that they can overcome Oblomov’s inertia, and they are to some degree correct – the key is to apply constant goading, which is exhausting and likely not worth the effort.  But they both try.  Stoltz is half-German and is allowed some comedy of a satiric variety; Olga is taken all too seriously.

The progress of the love affair between Olga and Oblomov occupies the middle 47% of the novel.

c. Then there is Agafya Matveyevna, Oblomov’s landlady in the latter half of the book, who is an embodiment of domestic activity.  She unquestioningly supplies Oblomov with food, cleaning, care, and even sex – Oblomov does have a sex drive, but just barely.  Bartleby eventually rejects the basic elements of life, while Oblomov takes them for granted.  Someone always provides.

3.  Perhaps Oblomovism is a disease of the rich.  Goncharov performs a demonstration.  At one point, Oblomov loses all but a subsistence income.  His clothes fall apart, his luxuries disappear, but he barely seems to notice (Oblomovism is monstrously egotistical).  He eats his barley soup with the same gusto with which he used to eat oysters (see pp. 384-5).  He prefers luxury, but as with a clean room it is not worth sacrificing a single nap.  Oblomov is not above money, which is a common source of anxiety for him.  He is beyond money.

Goncharov is clear enough about why Oblomov is an Oblomovist, but I will save that for tomorrow.  It is the best thing in the novel.

It's not a dressing gown - notes on Oblomov

Plenty of guff and hot air has been generated about the “Russian soul,” for example by Tatyana Tolstaya in her foreword to the 2006 Stephen Pearl translation of Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov – “anyone who wants to understand the inscrutable Russian soul should start by reading Oblomov” (xi).  I might then guess that one aspect of the Russian culture is a predilection for self-puffery if that were not a universal human trait.  The title character of the 1859 Oblomov is a universal type; of course the fact that the type is set within a Russian context matters, as do the specific actions and thoughts of the character who within the novel is decidedly not a type but an individual, living a fiction life different from other real and fictional people like him, and so do the actions and thoughts of the supporting characters, Oblomov’s friends and servants, different than the friends and servants of other Russian and non-Russian Oblomov-like people, and also unique and perhaps even determining is the style of the author who tells his story in his own way, one that is not especially universal, although he is certainly not as distinct a stylist as Turgenev or Dostoevsky.

Tolstaya suggests that there are affinities between Oblomov and Buddhism, and quotes as her authority on Buddhist spirituality the Russian rock star Boris Grebenshikov (p. x);  at this point I realized that the whole thing was a put on of some sort.  So no more talk of Russianness or Russian souls as I write about Oblomov.

Ilya Ilyich Oblomov is so lazy, or perhaps depressed, or maybe something else – neither of the first two conditions describe Oblomov correctly – that he has trouble moving off of his couch, and something more than trouble doing anything else, for example changing out of his dressing gown (“’It’s not a dressing-gown – it’s more of a kimono,’ said Oblomov, wrapping the voluminous folds of the gown lovingly about  himself” (I.2).  Or such is the case in the first act of the play, the only part of the book I can remember anyone mentioning.

I mean first part of the novel, although what immediately struck me is how much of it might as well be a play.  It has a single set, takes place over a continuous eight or nine hours, the action consists of a series of visitors, and an amusing servant even has some physical bits, dropping trays and so on.  It is mostly dialogue and action, or really inaction.  The stage version, to really get the spirit right, should move in real time, including long stretches where the audience just watches Oblomov doze for a half hour.  Novels are magical – a half hour nap passes in no time, unless we are in the amazing Chapter 9, “Oblomov’s Dream,” to which I might return later.

The first part introduces Oblomov and his servant, both outstanding characters, and is often hilarious.  It is justly the best known part of the book.  It is also only 30% of the novel.  In the other 70 percent, Oblomov leaves, the couch, gets dressed, and falls in love.  Supporting characters are given their own stories.  It turns out there is more to the novel than lazing in a kimono.  Perhaps I will write about some of that; perhaps something else.

Traveling with Ivan Goncharov

The Frigate Pallada (1858) is Ivan Goncharov’s enormous account of a Russian diplomatic expedition to Japan on which he was secretary to the commander of the warship in the book’s title.  The travelogue simply follows Goncharov’s route – the Baltic Sea, England, Madeira, Cape Town, and so on.  Goncharov’s activities are often described in minute detail; fortunately, he is a skilled writer with a strong sense of humor, curious about the world but deeply concerned about his own comforts.

Why, oh why is it impossible to get good tea in China?  Every kind of tea grows in this country; the problem is with the word “good”…  What the English call good tea or simply tea (it is all the same to them) is… a tea that stings the tongue and your palate like almost everything the English eat and drink.  They like their food to be a scrubbing brush that combs your throat.  And they require their tea to be like their Indian sauces and peppers, that is, some sort of poison. (352)

Goncharov looks forward to the day when the English learn to simmer their tea, not “boil [it] like cabbage, as they do now.”

Goncharov’s exact role as secretary is not clear to me, presumably because that sort of detail did not belong in a public book.  He seems to have written an entirely separate official journal.  Thus, some of the diplomatic details are hazy.

Nevertheless, I thought the book really came to life once the fleet arrived in Nagasaki harbor.  Perhaps I am just succumbing to the exoticism of Japan, Shanghai, and Manila.  Or perhaps my ignorance was key – I knew nothing about 1850s Manila, for example, so even the banal details were fascinating. 

More likely, though, is that once the Japanese diplomatic mission begins, the book finds a new narrative structure, the Russian attempts to deal with Japanese obstacles and deception, one more surprising and original than simple travel.  It helps that Goncharov finds the Japanese intransigence entirely reasonable and understandable.  It probably also helps me that the Russian perspective is itself unfamiliar.  Commodore Perry was in Edo bay at the exact same time, getting all of the credit for “opening” Japan.

Oblomov, the novel that made Goncharov famous, was published a year after The Frigate Pallada.  A side benefit of reading Pallada first is that I will not be tempted to confuse the slothful Oblomov with his creator, not after reading how Goncharov covers just part of his 8,000 mile return to Moscow across Siberia!

I omitted Goncharov’s first tome from my short list of Long Russian Books.  The Frigate Pallada seemed second tier, at least in English.  In Chapter 2 of Vladimir Nabokov’s The Defense, it is casually identified as Russian children’s reading, although the neurotic child in question finds it “boring,” preferring the “exact and relentlessly unfolding pattern” of Sherlock Holmes and Around the World in Eighty Days.

I read the 1987 St. Martin’s Press edition of The Frigate Pallada, the translation a work of love by Klaus Goetze.

Reading badly

That is the illusion of all writers, the belief that people open our books and read them from start to finish, holding their breath and barely pausing.  (from p. 366 of Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear, Javier Marías, 2002, tr. Margaret Julia Costa)

In context, this quotation is a bit of a joke.   The narrator of this Javier Marías novel is the one who barely pauses, who spills out words breathlessly, literally, I guess, since he is writing, but the speakers in the novel seem to have the same problem with digressions, qualifiers, and finding a place to end their flow of words.  I have trouble imagining the reader who reads this exhausting novel without pause, without many good long restorative pauses.

And then I have to consider that this novel is the first of a trilogy, the latter volumes of which may be much like this one in their discursiveness and sly concealments.   Many people are in fact reading it right now, as I type, possibly this very instant, as part of a Caravana de Recuerdos readalong opportunity.  The plan of many, and of me, too, is to read all three novels this summer, one each month, although they were published years apart from each other, in 2002, 2004 and 2007.  Perhaps a wiser reader would allow a little more space between the books.  Perhaps a more deliberate pace would allow me to be a better reader of Marías.

I say this not because I believe I read the Marías novel badly, although it is a tricky devil, but because I had actually planned to spend this week, or most of it, writing about a really substantial and brilliant book, Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1867).  Unlike, oh, I don’t know, Life in the Far West by George Frederick Ruxton, Ibsen’s long verse play is enormously complex and obviously worth attentive re-reading.  I am reading Ibsen’s book with great pleasure, but I am also reading it badly.

Confused, fragmented, distracted, jittery – that’s how I am reading it.  When I began Peer Gynt, it was so immediately rich and juicy that I had assumed that a series of posts would suggest themselves.  And they have, oh they have – a series of banal posts, any number of tedious and bad ideas.  I am not merely reading badly but thinking badly, although I suspect the one is the same as the other.

I am taking too long to finish Peer Gynt, I know that – it deserves a bit of breath-holding.  But then I look at The Frigate Pallada by Ivan Goncharov (1858), the author of Oblomov.  I have been reading this travel book about a Russian diplomatic expedition to Japan for three months, and am not half done.  It’s a wonderful book, but it feels entirely natural to slip into it now and again, to follow Goncharov’s account of a day or a week  and set it aside.  The events of the book covers a couple of years, so I will read about them faster than Goncharov lived them.  I feel that I am reading The Frigate Pallada fairly well; I am sure I am reading Peer Gynt badly.

Not that I have identified any sort of guideline – books in Category Alpha should be read with Technique Aleph.  Nonsense.  Books are full of surprises.  Peer Gynt surprises me on every page.  With luck a second reading will suggest an order to my thoughts, or perhaps another book, or another Ibsen play, will teach me to read it and think about it.

The danger of worrying about this issue at all is that it could very well mean the end of book blogs.  If I began to think too hard about what I have written here, for example -  where’s that Publish button?   Where’s that dang – oh, there it is.