Oblomov

by Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov

Then Oblomov’s nurse proceeded to draw another picture for the imagination of her charge. That is to say, she told him of the exploits of the Russian Achilleses and Ulysseses, and of the manner in which those heroes had been used to wander about Russia, and to kill and slay; and of how once they had disputed as to which of them could best drain a beaker of wine at a draught. Also, she told the boy of cruel robbers, of sleeping princesses, and of cities and peoples which had been turned into stone. Lastly, she passed to Russian demonology, to dead folk, to monsters, and to werewolves. With a simplicity, yet a sincerity, worthy of Homer, with a lifelike similitude of detail and a power of clear-cut relief that might have vied with the great Greek poet’s, she fired the boy’s intellect and imagination to a love for that Iliad which our heroes founded during the dim ages when man had not yet become adapted to the sundry perils and mysteries of nature and of life—when still he trembled before werewolves and wood demons, and sought refuge with protectors like Alesha Popovitch from the calamities which surrounded him—when air and water and forest and held alike were under the continued sway of the supernatural. Truly, the life of a mortal of those days must have been full of fear and trembling, seeing that, should he but cross his threshold, he stood in danger of being devoured by a wild beast, or of having his throat cut by a brigand, or of being despoiled of his all by a Tartar, or of disappearing from human ken without trace left! Again, celestial portents would be seen in the shape cf pillars and balls of fire, while over a freshly made grave a light would glow, and some one would seem to be walking through the forest with a lantern, and laughing horribly, and flashing bright eyes amid the gloom: And in man’s own personality much that passed his understanding would also take shape and materialize. No matter how long or how righteously a man might have lived, he would suddenly start babbling, or shout aloud in a voice not his own, or go wandering o’ nights in a trance, or involuntarily begin beating and assaulting his fellows. And just at the moment when such things happened a hen would crow like a cock, and a raven would croak from the gable! Consequently feeble mankind, peering tremblingly at life, sought in its own imagination, its own nature, a key to the mysteries which surrounded it: and it may be that the immobility, the inertia, the absence of all active passion or incident or peril which such a retired existence imposed upon man led him to create, in the midst of the world of nature, another and an impossible world, in which he found comfort and relief for his idle intellect, explanations of the more ordinary’ sequences of events, and extraneous solutions of extraordinary phenomena. In fact, our poor forefathers lived by instinct. Neither wholly giving rein to nor wholly restraining their volition, they found themselves either naïvely surprised at or overcome with terror by the evils and the misfortunes which befell them, and resorted for the causes of these things to the dim, dumb hieroglyphics of nature. In their opinion, death might come of carrying a corpse from a house head foremost instead of with feet in front, and a fire be caused by the fact of a dog having howled, three nights running, beneath a window. Hence always they were at pains to remove a dead person feet foremost—though continuing to eat the same quantity of food as before, and to sleep on the bare ground; while, with regard to a howling dog, always they drove away the animal with blows—though continuing to scatter sparks broadcast over tinder-dry floors.

To this day the Russian, though surrounded by a stern, unimaginative world of reality, loves to believe the seductive talcs of antiquity. And long will it be before he will have been weaned from that belief. In the same way, as little Oblomov listened to his nurse’s legends concerning the Golden Fleece, the great Cassowary Bird, and the cells and secret dungeons of the Enchanted Castle, he became more and more fired to the idea that he too was destined to become the hero of doughty deeds. Tale succeeded to tale, and the nurse pursued her narrative with such ardour and vividness and attractiveness of description that at times her breath choked in her throat. For she too half-believed the legends which she related; so that, during the telling of them, her eyes would shoot fire, her head shake with excitement, and her voice attain an unwonted pitch, while the child, overcome with mysterious horror, would press closer and closer to her side, and have tears in his eyes. Whether the narrative treated of dead men rising from the tomb at midnight, or of victims languishing in slavery to a monster, or of a bear with a wooden leg which went roaming the villages and farms in search of the natural limb which had been chopped from its body, the boy’s hair bristled with fear, his childish imagination alternately seethed and froze, and he experienced the harassing, the sickly sweet, process of having his nerves played upon like the strings of an instrument. When his nurse repeated the words of the bear, “Creak, creak, wooden leg! I have visited every village and farm, and have found all the women asleep save one, who is now sitting on my back, and searing my flesh, and weaving my coat into cloth;” when, also, the bear entered the right hut, and was just getting ready to pounce upon the true ravisher of his natural leg—why, then the boy could stand it no longer, but, trembling and whimpering, flung himself into his nurse’s arms with tears of terror—yet also with a laugh of joy to think that he was not in the clutches of the bear, but sitting on the stove couch beside his old guardian. Full of strange phantoms was his mind, and fear and grief had sunk deep (and, possibly, for ever) into his soul. Mournfully he gazed about him, and saw that everything in life was charged with evil and misfortune. And as he did so he would keep thinking of the magic country where neither cruelty nor noise nor grief existed, and where Militrissa Kirbitievna lived, and where folk were fed and clothed for nothing....

Not only over the Oblomovkan children, but also over the Oblomovkan adults, did this legend exercise a lifelong sway. Every one in the house and the village alike—from the barin and his wife down to the blacksmith Tarass—became a trifle nervous as evening drew on, seeing that at that hour every tree became transformed into a giant, and every bush into a robbers’ den. The rattle of a shutter, the howl of the wind in the chimney, caused these folk to turn pale. At Epiphany-tide not a man or a woman of them would go out of doors after ten o’clock at night; and never during the season of Easter would any one venture o’ nights into the stable, lest there he should be confronted by the domovoi, by the horse demon.

At Oblomovka everything was believed in—including even ghosts and werewolves. Had you informed an inmate of the place that a haycock was walking about in the fields, he would have believed it. Had you spread abroad a rumour that (say) a certain sheep was not a sheep at all, but something else, or that Martha or Stepanida had become turned into a witch, the company would thenceforth have walked in terror both of the sheep and of the maidservant. Never would their heads have thought it necessary to inquire why the sheep had ceased to be a sheep, or why Martha or Stepanida had become turned into a witch. Rather these credulous folk would have thrown themselves upon any doubter—so strong was Oblomovka’s belief in supernatural phenomena.

Later, little Oblomov came to see that the world is ordered on a simple plan, and that dead folk never rise from the tomb, and that no sooner do giants appear than they are clapped into booths, as robbers are cast into prison: yet, though his actual belief in such marvels vanished, there remained behind a sediment of terror and of unaccountable sadness. Nothing was to be apprehended from monsters—that he knew full well; but always he stood in awe of something which seemed to be awaiting him at every step; and, if left alone in a dark room, or if fated to catch sight of a corpse, he would tremble with that sense of oppressive foreboding which his infancy had instilled into his very being. Inclined, of a morning, to laugh at his fears, of an evening Lis countenance paled again.

In the next dream Oblomov saw himself a boy of thirteen or fourteen. By this time he was going to school at the village of Verkievo, five versts from Oblomovka, where an old German named Schtoltz kept a small educational establishment for the sons of neighbouring gentry. Schtoltz had a son of his own—one Andrei, a boy almost of the same age as Oblomov; while likewise he had been given charge of a boy who did few lessons, for the reason that he suffered from scrofula and was accustomed to spend most of his days with his eyes and ears bandaged, and weeping quietly because he was not living with his grandmother, but, rather, in a strange house and amid hardhearted folk who never petted him or baked him his favourite pies. These three boys constituted the only pupils. As for the tutor himself, he was both capable and strict—like most Germans; wherefore Oblomov might have received a good education had Oblomovka stood five hundred versts from Verklevo. As it was, the atmosphere, the mode of life, and the customs of Oblomovka extended also to Verklevo, and the one place represented a sort of replica of the other, until only old Schtoltz’s establishment stood clear of the primordial mist of laziness, of simplicity of morals, of inertia, and of immobility for which Oblomovka was distinguished. With the scenes, the incidents, and the morals of that mode of life young Oblomov’s mind and heart had become saturated before even he had seen his first book. Who knows how early the growth of the intellectual germ in the youthful brain begins? Can we, in that youthful consciousness, follow the growth of first impressions and ideas? Possibly, even before a child has learnt to speak, or even to walk, or even to do more than to look at things with the dumb, fixed gaze which his elders call “dull,” it has already discerned and envisaged the meaning, the inter-connection, of such phenomena as encompass its sphere—and that though the child is still powerless to communicate the fact, whether to itself or to others.

Thus for a long time past young Oblomov may have remarked and understood what was being said and done in his presence; for a long time past he may have understood why his father, in plush breeches and a wadded, cinnamon-coloured coat, walked to and fro with his hands behind his back, and took snuff, and sneezed, while his mother passed from coffee to tea, and from tea to dinner, in the daily round, and his father always refused to believe how many sheaves had been cut and reaped, but was for ever looking out for derelictions of duty, and, a handkerchief in his hand, holding forth on the subject of irregularities, and turning the whole place upside down. Briefly, for a long time past the boy may have decided in his mind that that, and no other, order of life was the right one. For how else could he have decided? In what manner did the “grown-ups” of Oblomovka live? God only knows whether they ever asked themselves for what purpose life had been given them. Did they, at all events, return themselves any answer to that question? No, no answer at all, since the whole thing seemed to them at once simple and clear. Had they, then, never heard of a hard life wherein people walk with anxious hearts, and roam the face of the earth, and devote their existence to everlasting toil? No, the good folk of Oblomovka had no belief in disturbing the mind; they never adopted as their mode of life a round of ceaseless aspirations somewhither, and towards an indefinite end. In fact, they feared the distraction of passion as they did fire; and as, in other spheres, men’s and women’s bodies burn with the volcanic violence of inward and spiritual flame, so the souls of the denizens of Oblomovka lay plunged in an undisturbed inertia which possessed their ease-loving organisms to the core. Consequently, life did not stamp them, as it stamped others, with premature wrinkles; nor did it deal out to them any morally destructive blows or misfortunes. These good-humoured folk looked upon life as, rather, an idyll of peace and inactivity—though an idyll occasionally broken by such untoward incidents as sicknesses, losses, quarrels, and rare bouts of labour. That labour they endured as a punishment formerly imposed upon their forefathers also; yet they never loved it, and invariably escaped its incidence whenever they found it possible so to do. Such an avoidance they considered permissible, for never did they worry themselves with vague moral or intellectual questions. In this manner they flourished in constant health and cheerfulness: for which reason most of them lived to a green old age. Men of forty would look like youths, and old men, instead of battling with the approach of a hard and painful end, lived to the utmost possible limit, and then died, as it were, unawares, and with a gentle chilling of the frame, and an imperceptible drawing of the closing breath. No wonder that in these days folk say that the people used to be more robust!

Yes, it was more robust, for the reason that in those days parents did not hurry to explain to a boy the meaning of life, and to prepare him for life as for something at once difficult and solemn. No, they did not weary a child with books which would cloud his head with questions likely to devour the heart and the intellect, and to shorten existence. Rather, the standard of life was furnished him and taught him by parents who had received it ready-made from their parents, together with a testamentary injunction to preserve the integrity, the inviolability of that standard as they would have done that of the Vestal flame. As things were done in the time of Oblomovkan fathers and grandfathers, so were they done in the time of the present Oblomov’s tenure of the estate. Of what needed he to think? Concerning what needed he to trouble his head? What needed he to learn? What ends needed he to compass? The Oblomovs required nothing—their life flowed like a peaceful river, and all that they had to do was to sit on the bank of that river, and to observe the inevitable phenomena which, successively, and unsought, presented themselves to the eyes of each observer.

Before the vision of the steeping Oblomov there next uprose a series of living pictures of the three chief acts of Oblomovkan life, as played in the presence of his family, of his relatives, and of his friends—namely, the three acts of birth, of marriage, and of death. This was succeeded by a varied procession of minor incidents of life, whether grave or gay—of baptisms, birthdays, family festivals, Shrovetides, Easters, Convivial feasts, family gatherings, welcomes, farewells, and occasions of official congratulation or condolence. These passed before Oblomov’s vision with solemn exactitude, and also he beheld the bearing of familiar faces at these ceremonies, according as they were affected by vanity or by care. No matter what the festival might be—whether a betrothal or a solemn wedding or a name-day—every possible social rule had to be consulted, and no mistake made as to where each person was to sit, what presents, and to what value, ought to be given, who was to walk with whom at the ceremony, and what signals had best be made during its course.

Do you think, then, that goodly children would not result from such formal unitings? For answer you would need but to look at the rosy, heavy little cupids which the mothers of the place carried or led by the hand. Every one of those mothers would have insisted that their little ones were the plumpest, the whitest, and the healthiest children possible. Another local custom was to make a lark-pie as soon as spring came in. Without it spring would not have been spring at all, for observances of this kind comprised the whole life, the whole scientific knowledge, of the inhabitants, all of whose joys and sorrows were bound up with Oblomovka, and whose hearts beat high at the anticipation of such local rites and feasts and ceremonies. Yet no sooner had they christened, married, or buried an individual than they forgot both the latter and his (or her) fate, and relapsed into their usual apathy until aroused by a new occasion—by a baptism, a wedding, or other happening of the kind. Directly a child was born the parents made it their first care to perform over the little one every ceremony prescribed by decorum, and then to follow up the christening with a banquet. Thereafter the child’s bringing up began according to a system dictated by the mother and the nurse for his healthy development, and for his protection from cold, from the evil eye, and from sundry other inimical influences. Indeed, no pains were spared to keep the youngster in good appetite and spirits. Also as soon as he was able to fend for himself, and a nurse had become a superfluity, his mother would be seized with a desire to procure for him a helpmeet as strong and as ruddy as himself; whereupon there would ensue a further epoch of rites and feastings, until eventually a marriage had been arranged. Always this consummation represented the epitome of life’s incidents, and as soon as it was reached there began a repetition of births, rites, and banquets, until, finally, a funeral ceremony interrupted the festivities—though not for long, since other faces would appear to succeed the old ones, and children would become youths and maidens, and plight their troth to one another, and marry one another, and produce individuals similar to themselves. Thus life stretched out in a continuous, uniform chain which broke off imperceptibly only when the tomb had been reached.