Oblómoff, as I just said, is very uncomfortable in his lodgings; moreover, the landlord, who intends to make some repairs in the house, wants him to leave; but for Oblómoff to change his lodgings is something so terrific, so extraordinary, that he tries by all sorts of artifices to postpone the undesirable moment. His old Zakhár tries to convince him that they cannot remain any longer in that house, and ventures the unfortunate word, that, after all, “others” move when they have to.
“I thought,” he said, “that others are not worse than we are, and that they move sometimes; so we could move, too.”
“What, what?” exclaimed Oblómoff, rising from his easy chair, “what is it that you say?”
Zakhár felt very ashamed. He could not understand what had provoked the reproachful exclamation of his master, and did not reply.
“Others are not worse than we are!” repeated Iliyá Iliych (Oblómoff) with a sense of horror. “That is what you have come to. Now I shall know henceforth that I am for you the same as ‘the others’.”
After a time Oblómoff calls Zakhár back and has with him an explanation which is worth reproducing.
“Have you ever thought what it meant—‘the others,’” Oblómoff began. “Must I tell you what this means?”
Poor Zakhár shifted about uneasily, like a bear in his den, and sighed aloud.
“‘Another’—that means a wild, uneducated man; he lives poorly, dirtily, in an attic; he can sleep on a piece of felt stretched somewhere on the floor—what does that matter to him?—Nothing! He will feed on potatoes and herrings; misery compels him continuously to shift from one place to another. He runs about all day long—he, he may, of course, go to new lodgings. There is Lagáeff; he takes under his arm his ruler and his two shirts wrapped in a handkerchief, and he is off. ‘Where are you going?’ you ask him.—‘I am moving’, he says. That is what ‘the others’ means.—Am I one of those others, do you mean?”
Zakhár threw a glance upon his master, shifted from one foot to the other, but said nothing.