Russian literature

by kniaz Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

She also wanted to say something, but could not—moved her hand in his direction, but before it had reached his it dropped. She wanted to say “Farewell,” but her voice broke in the middle of the word and took a false accent. Then her face quivered, she put her hand and her head on his shoulder and cried. It seemed now as if all her weapons had been taken out of her hand—reasoning had gone—there remained only the woman, helpless against her sorrow. “Farewell, Farewell” came out of her sobbings....

“No,” said Olga, trying to look upon him through her tears, “it is only now that I see that I loved in you what I wanted you to be, I loved the future Oblómoff. You are good, honest, Iliyá, you are tender as a dove, you put your head under your wing and want nothing more, you are ready all your life to coo under a roof ... but I am not so, that would be too little for me. I want something more—what, I do not know; can you tell me what it is that I want? give me it, that I should.... As to sweetness, there is plenty of it everywhere.”

They part, Olga passes through a severe illness, and a few months later we see Oblómoff married to the landlady of his rooms, a very respectable person with beautiful elbows, and a great master in kitchen affairs and household work generally. As to Olga, she marries Stoltz later on. But this Stoltz is rather a symbol of intelligent industrial activity than a living man. He is invented, and I pass him by.

The impression which this novel produced in Russia, on its appearance in 1859, was indescribable. It was a far greater event than the appearance of a new work by Turguéneff. All educated Russia read Oblómoff and discussed “Oblómoffdom.” Everyone recognised something of himself in Oblómoff, felt the disease of Oblómoff in his own veins. As to Olga, thousands of young people fell in love with her: her favourite song, the “Casta Diva,” became their favourite melody. And now, forty years afterwards, one can read and re-read “Oblómoff” with the same pleasure as nearly half a century ago, and it has lost nothing of its meaning, while it has acquired many new ones: there are always living Oblómoffs.

At the time of the appearance of this novel “Oblómoffdom” became a current word to designate the state of Russia. All Russian life, all Russian history, bears traces of the malady—that laziness of mind and heart, that right to laziness proclaimed as a virtue, that conservatism and inertia, that contempt of feverish activity, which characterise Oblómoff and were so much cultivated in serfdom times, even amongst the best men in Russia—and even among the malcontents. “A sad result of serfdom”—it was said then. But, as we live further away from serfdom times, we begin to realise that Oblómoff is not dead amongst us: that serfdom is not the only thing which creates this type of men, but that the very conditions of wealthy life, the routine of civilised life, contribute to maintain it.

“A racial feature, distinctive of the Russian race,” others said; and they were right, too, to a great extent. The absence of a love for struggle; the “let me alone” attitude, the want of “aggressive” virtue; non-resistance and passive submission—these are to a great extent distinctive features of the Russian race. And this is probably why a Russian writer has so well pictured the type. But with all that, the Oblómoff type is not limited to Russia: It is a universal type—a type which is nurtured by our present civilisation, amidst its opulent, self-satisfied life. It is the conservative type. Not in the political sense, but in the sense of the conservatism of well-being. A man who has reached a certain welfare or has got it by inheritance is not willingly moved to undertake anything new, because it might mean introducing something unpleasant and full of worries into his quiet and smooth existence. Therefore he lingers in a life devoid of the true impulses of real life, from fear that these might disturb the quietness of his vegetative existence.

Oblómoff knows the value of Art and its impulses; he knows the higher enthusiasms of poetical love: he has felt both. But—“What is the use?” he asks again. “Why all this trouble of going about and seeing people? What is it for?” He is not a Diogenes who has no needs. Far from that. If his meat be served too dry and his fowl be burned, he resents it. It is the higher interests which he thinks not worth the trouble they occasion. When he was young he thought of setting his serfs free—in such a way that the step should not much diminish his income. But gradually he has forgotten all about that, and now his main thought is, how to shake off all the worries of the management of his estate. “I don’t know”—he says—“what obligatory work is, what is farmer’s work, what ownership means, what a poor farmer is and what a rich one; what makes a quarter of wheat, when wheat has to be sown and reaped, or when it has to be sold.” And when he dreams of country life on his estate he thinks of pretty greenhouses, of picnics in the woods, of idyllic walks in company with a goodly, submissive and plump wife, who looks into his eyes and worships him. The question of why and how all this wealth comes to him, and why all these people must work for him, never worries his mind. But—how many of those all over the world, who own factories, wheat fields and coal mines, or hold shares in them, ever think of mines, wheat fields and factories otherwise than in the way Oblómoff thought of his country seat—that is, in an idyllic contemplation of how others work, without the slightest intention of sharing their burdens?

The city-bred Oblómoffs may take the place of the country-bred, but the type remains. And then comes the long succession of Oblómoffs in intellectual, social, nay even in personal, life. Everything new in the domain of the intellect makes them restless, and they are only satisfied when all men have accepted the same ideas. They are suspicious of social reform, because the very suggestion of a change frightens them. Love itself frightens them. Oblómoff is loved by Olga; he, too, loves her; but to take that step—marriage—frightens him. She is too restless. She wants him to go about and to see pictures; to read and to discuss this and that; to throw him into the whirl of life. She loves him so much that she is ready to follow him without asking any questions. But this very power of love, this very intensity of life, frightens an Oblómoff.

He tries to find pretexts for avoiding this irruption of life into his vegetative existence; he prizes so much his little material comfort that he dares not love—dares not take love with all its consequences—“its tears, its impulses, its life,” and soon falls back into his cosy Oblómoffdom.

Decidedly, Oblómoffdom is not a racial disease. It exists on both continents and in all latitudes. And besides the Oblómoffdom which Goncharóff has so well depicted, and which even Olga was powerless to break through, there is the squire’s Oblómoffdom, the red-tape Oblómoffdom of the Government offices, the scientist’s Oblómoffdom and, above all, the family-life Oblómoffdom, to which all of us readily pay so large a tribute.