Read this if you…
- Can relate to a lazy guy
- Like the idea different strokes for different folks
- Like well developed characters that remind you of real people
Skip this if you…
- don't want a book focused on small interactions
The 
Take
Awesome small interactions. Zakhar and oblomov together are great. The different but both important worldviews of stoltz vs oblomov is great. I thought Olga oblomov went a bit too long but still made sense and was excellent. Lots of great realist observations about people
The lineage through Oblomov
- Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin. Oblomov built on it. - Ilya Ilyich Oblomov is the apotheosis of a type Pushkin invented thirty years earlier in _Eugene Onegin_ — the clever, well-bred Russian who is constitutionally incapable of action. Critics line them up in a single descent: Onegin, then Pechorin, then Oblomov, each more inert than the last. - Goncharov inherits the diagnosis but removes the Byronic glamour. Onegin's listlessness still has a duel and a doomed romance in it; Oblomov's has a sofa, a dressing gown, and a dream of a manor that no longer exists.
- Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol. Oblomov built on it. - Goncharov came up inside the Gogol-launched 'natural school,' the realist movement Belinsky built around _Dead Souls_ and 'The Overcoat,' and Oblomovka — the sleepy, serf-attended manor that breeds Oblomov's paralysis — is the natural school's method applied to a single estate. - Gogol's Manilov, the landowner who plans grand improvements and accomplishes nothing, is the direct ancestor of Oblomov's dreaming inertia. Goncharov takes the comic minor type and gives it a whole novel and a national diagnosis: _Oblomovism_.
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Oblomov built on it. - The master-servant comedy of Oblomov and Zakhar is built on the model of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza: the same affectionate friction, the same gap between a grand interior life and a shabby reality, the same way the reader laughs and aches at once. - The debt is traced directly in the scholarship — J. D. Hainsworth's 'Don Quixote, Hamlet, and Negative Capability: Aspects of Goncharov's Oblomov' (1980) reads the Oblomov-Zakhar pair against Cervantes' knight and squire.
Depicted in Art
Oblomov's slovenly, grumbling old manservant Zakhar stands in his shabby coat, the comic foil who shares his master's torpor.
Konstantin Ivanovich Tikhomirov
The dressing-gowned Oblomov reclines while his servant Zakhar attends him, the master-and-man pair locked in their shared idleness.
Konstantin Nikolaevich Chichagov, 1885
The energetic Stolz strides into the gloom of Oblomov's cluttered apartment, rousing his idle friend from the divan.
Vladimir Tabourine, 1898
Recommended Editions
Stephen Pearl
Alma Classics · 2014
The one to start with. Pearl's prize-winning version flows like real English, catching Goncharov's gentle comedy and colloquial dialogue without going slack, and this Alma edition is the in-print one with a working buy link.
Please support us by purchasing through these links, at no extra cost to you!
Notable Quotes
One morning, in a flat in one of the great buildings in Gorokhovaia Street, the population of which was sufficient to constitute that of a provincial town, there was lying in bed a gentleman named Ilya Ilyitch Oblomov.
Screen & Stage
Posters via The Movie Database (TMDB)
"Oblomov is a truly great work, the likes of which one has not seen for a long, long time. I am in raptures over Oblomov and keep re-reading it."