Oblomov, Part Two, Chapter 4

"It's now or never!"

This is a big chapter that moves the novel on massively. I found myself talking for over 20 minutes in my video review.

First of all we get a short few paragraphs about how Stolz managed to get Ilya Ilyich out the house to go visiting. What hit me was the bit about how Ilya sees the society gossip as vacuous and pointless. I’d only just seen this Instagram Reel while doomscrolling—something I find myself doing far more than I would like!—and it was a point of connection for me. I also don’t enjoy small talk and find it draining, but I’d never really thought about why that might be. Here’s the Reel:

katastrophica

A post shared by @katastrophica

So when Ilya get tired after all these social visits, it’s completely understandable. Here’s what he says about it:

Filling a void, right? I mean I know that a lot of it is social glue. I ran a post office for years and had to chat about the weather all day long. When I’m in a good mood, I can see the value of this social interaction with my fellow man, and it’s not like I could’ve engaged with customers in a deep and meaningful way, right? I wanted to be bright and cheerful and leave customers feeling good when they left my post office, but most of the time I just couldn’t. It was grim.

Gosh, how did I get there?

It reminds me of when I was reading Crime and Punishment, which was published seven years after Oblomov. In that novel, the main character, Raskolnikov, finds himself going out of his way to avoid people while yearning for human connection. I think that’s what’s going on with Ilya, too, especially with regard to a wife and family. In fact that’s where the next couple of chapters take us.

Values

Stolz gets Ilya to think about his values and list them, something I’ve done myself over the past couple of years as a mental health exercise. He’s basically yearning for three things:

• A wife

• A family

• An estate in the country

And then Stolz asks what he’d do if money were no object. Again, this is a question I have asked myself. Ilya seems to have his ideal life worked out:

I’d mortgage everything right away and live off the interest.

We get a few pages of Ilya’s ideal life, which is bascially a life of leisure for him and his family. For me, it raises the question of meaning and purpose. Does Ilya see that coming from his family, from love and human connection? He kind of alludes to that without stating it implicity. For Stolz, as someone who is ‘diametrically opposed’, that meaning comes from hard work, from building capital, something he would do even after he’d earned enough.

“Work—both the idea and the substance—is the very point and essence of life, at least for me.”
—Stolz

Ilya’s a poet and Stolz is an entrepreneur. And when Ilya’s done waxing lyrical about his ideal life, Stolz comes up with a name for his condition:

Steven Pearl has transliterated the Russian word rather than translating it into English, which is usually rendered as oblomovism or oblomovitis. I find this fascinating. Pearl explains his reasons in his Translator’s Note at the back of the book.

Firstly, there’s a precedent for transliterating Russian words into English, eg. troika, sputnik, dacha, samovar, refusenik.

I’d often wondered myself which of the two common variants—oblomovism or oblomovitis—to use in my videos and essays. The -ism variant to me sounded like a political or religious ideology, Marxism, conseravitism, liberalism, Buddhism etc. and the -itis variant sounded like a disease. Neither was ideal for what I thought Goncharov was trying to convey, but for some reason I’d never have thought of simply transliterating the term. But I’ve seen precedent in English for -shchina transliterations, for example the Yezhovshchina, meaning the Great Purge under Stalin and led by his chief of police, Yezhov.

However, oblomovshchina is, if anything, not just a single symptom, but a syndrome.

I’m of the opinion that there’s some neurodivergence going on in our main character, whether it be ADHD or autism or some other kind of executive funtion disorder, but we still need to come up with what to call it as stated by the author and I applaud Pearl’s decision to transliterate rather than translate.

By the way, the stress would fall on the i in pronounciation thus:

The Young Oblomov

We then learn that Ilya as a younger man was not so overwhelmed by oblomovshchina. Stolz reminds him of some of his words and that he was going to travel the world.

That doesn’t sound like the Oblomov we’ve come to know, does it? And in his friend’s company, he’s able to acknowledge his insularity and to seek help. He knows that Stolz is right, but doesn’t know how to break free of the inertia. Stolz tells him that he needs to act before it’s too late:

So Ilya asks his friend for help:

And then Oblomov talks about himself in a way that, when I read this book a couple of years ago, got me thinking about depression. I suppose at that time that’s what was on my mind, having been through that horrible illness a few times through my life. This time I’m more of a mind that it’s an executive funtion disorder, although is there really a difference? Isn’t depression precisely that? Whatever it is, I found it relatable and I know that at least one of my readers did, too.

Some line, innit?

Video Review

Questions

What did this chapter bring up for you? Have you ever taken time to ponder your values or imagine what you would do with your life if money were no object?

Let’s chat!