Abstract
Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov (1859) is, arguably, the first novel in literary history to devote itself to the sleep-life of its protagonist; it is also a recognizable prototype for the ‘world-from-a-bed’ school of fiction that would come into its own in the modernist writings of Kafka, Proust, Woolf and others. For Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, the apathetic St Petersburg landowner who manages to doze through most of his own Bildungsroman, sleep is a form of obstinately languorous resistance to the imperatives of capitalist productivity and compulsory heterosexuality; even so, I will suggest that Goncharov’s Schlafroman has a lingering dependence on the energies of the genre that it seeks to subvert.
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Notes
- 1.
Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov [1859], trans. David Magarshack (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), 14. Further references will be given parenthetically in the text.
- 2.
See Michael Wood, ‘Eskapizm’, London Review of Books, 35, no. 15 (August 6, 2009): 7–8, for a brief discussion of the term’s untranslatability.
- 3.
Richard Freeborn, ‘The Classic Russian Novel’, in The Routledge Companion to Russian Literature, ed. Neil Cornwell (London: Routledge, 2001), 101–10 (105).
- 4.
Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (London: Verso, 2013), 165.
- 5.
Vsevolod Setchkarev, Ivan Goncharov: His Life and His Works (Würzburg: Jal-verlag, 1974), 154.
- 6.
Renato Poggioli, ‘On Goncharov and His Oblomov’, in The Phoenix and the Spider: A Book of Essays about Some Russian Writers and their Views of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 33–48 (44).
- 7.
Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters, ed. Rosamund Bartlett, trans. Rosamund Bartlett and Anthony Phillips (London: Penguin, 2004), 180.
- 8.
Cohn, Still Life, 120.
- 9.
N. A. Dobrolyubov, ‘What is Oblomovshchina?’, in Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. J. Fineberg (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1948), 174–217.
- 10.
For more on ‘superfluous man’, see Robie Macauley, ‘The Superfluous Man’, Partisan Review 19, no. 2 (1952): 169–82; Frank Friedeberg Seeley, ‘The Heyday of Superfluous Man in Russia’, Slavonic and East European Review 31, no. 76 (December 1952): 92–112; Ellen Chances, ‘The Superfluous Man in Russian Literature’, in Cornwell, ed., The Routledge Companion to Russian Literature, 111–22.
- 11.
Dobrolyubov, ‘What is Oblomovshchina?’ 190.
- 12.
Cited in Nikolai Valentinov, The Early Years of Lenin (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 201.
- 13.
See Richard Peace, ‘Oblomov’: A Critical Examination of Goncharov’s Novel (Birmingham: University of Birmingham, 1991), 2.
- 14.
Alexandar Mihailovic, ‘“That Blessed State”: Western and Soviet Views of Infantilism in Oblomov’, in Diment, ed., Goncharov’s ‘Oblomov’, 51–67.
- 15.
Leon Stilman, ‘Oblomovka Revisited’, The American Slavic and Eastern European Review 7, no. 1 (February 1948): 45–77, offers the standard psychoanalytic rebuttal of Dobrolyubov-inspired readings of the novel. See also Nathalie Baratoff, ‘Oblomov’: A Jungian Approach: A Literary Image of the Mother Complex (New York: Peter Lang, 1990).
- 16.
John Givens, ‘Wombs, Tombs, and Mother Love: A Freudian Reading of Goncharov’s Oblomov’, in Diment, ed., Goncharov’s ‘Oblomov’, 90–109 (93).
- 17.
Anna Katharina Schaffner, Exhaustion: A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 116.
- 18.
Henry Sussman, Psyche and Text: The Sublime and the Grandiose in Literature, Psychopathology, and Culture (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993), 210 n.6; see also Kenneth E. Harper, ‘Under the Influence of Oblomov’, in From Los Angeles to Kiev: Papers on the Occasion of The Ninth International Congress of Slavists, Kiev, September 1983, ed. Vladimir Markov and Dean S. Worth (Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers, 1983), 105–18, for a lively discussion of the ‘dominance’ (107) of the hero’s personality over Oblomov’s frequently casual, sluggish and digressive narrative structure. ‘[T]he planless, drifting quality of Oblomov’s existence’, writes Harper, ‘is reflected in the haphazardly zig-zag quality of the narrative’ (109).
- 19.
V. S. Pritchett, ‘The Great Absentee’, in The Living Novel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1946), 233–40 (234).
- 20.
For detailed discussion of the significance of dreams in the novel see Faith Wigzell, ‘Dream and Fantasy in Goncharov’s Oblomov’, in From Pushkin to ‘Palisandriia’: Essays on the Russian Novel in Honor of Richard Freeborn, ed. Arnold McMillin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990), 96–111 and Wallace, Scanning the Hypnoglyph, 37–41.
- 21.
Letter to Ivan Ivanovich Lkhovsky, 2 August 1857, in Diment, ed., Goncharov’s ‘Oblomov’, 145.
- 22.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 164–68.
- 23.
Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 169.
- 24.
Dobrolyubov, ‘What is Oblomovshchina?’ 187.
- 25.
Anne Lounsbery, ‘The World on the Back of a Fish: Mobility, Immobility, and Economics in Oblomov’, Russian Review 70, no. 1 (2011): 43–64 (49).
- 26.
Poggioli, ‘On Goncharov and His Oblomov’, 42.
- 27.
Poggioli, ‘On Goncharov and His Oblomov’, 48.
- 28.
See Amy C. Singleton, No Place Like Home: The Literary Artist and Russia’s Search for Cultural Identity (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), chapter 4, for a discussion of the novel’s parodic intertextual relations with Homer.
- 29.
Baratoff argues that the gown stands for Oblomov’s ‘extreme introversion, regression, utter passivity and an attempt to ignore outer reality’. ‘Oblomov’: A Jungian Approach, 35; Milton Ehre describes it as a ‘recurring emblem of Oblomov’s doom’. Oblomov and His Creator (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 209.
- 30.
See Larry R. Andrews, ‘The Spatial Imagery of Oblomovism’, Neophilologus 72, no. 3 (July 1988): 321–34, for a reading of the novel as a case study in neurotic self-enclosure where the dressing-gown—‘a symptom of incomplete self-definition’ (321)—is the most intimate of the protective layers that Oblomov interposes between himself and otherness.
- 31.
Letter to Sofya Nikitenko, 25 February 1873, in Diment, ed., Goncharov’s ‘Oblomov’, 155.
- 32.
‘No one can say Oblomov is a divided man, he is as perfectly integrated as a blancmange’. Pritchett, ‘The Great Absentee’, 237.
- 33.
Wigzell, ‘Dream and Fantasy in Goncharov’s Oblomov’, 105.
- 34.
For an indication of some of the possible convergences between queer theory and critical sleep studies, see José Esteban Muñoz, ‘The Sense of Watching Tony Sleep’, in After Sex? On Writing since Queer Theory, ed. Janet Halley and Andrew Parker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 142–50. In the light of Muñoz’s suggestive remarks about the ‘ontological humility’ (142) of the sleeper, Stolz—Stolz is the German word for ‘pride’—might be seen as representing the ontological pride or arrogance of one who constantly seeks to bend reality to his relentlessly wakeful will.
- 35.
Wallace, Scanning the Hypnoglyph, 110, 243.
- 36.
Wallace, Scanning the Hypnoglyph, 243.
- 37.
Peace, ‘Oblomov’, 29–30.
- 38.
The term is Fredric Jameson’s. See Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979), 58.
- 39.
Miller, Jane Austen, Or the Secret of Style, 16. See Simon Karlinsky, ‘Russia’s Gay Literature and Culture: The Impact of the October Revolution’, in History of Homosexuality in Europe and America, ed. Wayne R. Dyres and Stephen Donaldson (New York: Garland, 1992), 347–64 for a succinct account of changing social and legal constructions of homosexuality in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia.
- 40.
See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), chapter 1, ‘Gender Symmetry and Erotic Triangles’.
- 41.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Robert Mighall (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), 91.
- 42.
See S. F. Blake, ‘Sherlock Holmes’s Dressing-Gown(s)’, The Baker Street Journal 10, no. 2 (April 1960): 86–89.
- 43.
Macauley, ‘The Superfluous Man’, 179.
- 44.
Yvette Louria and Morton I. Seiden, ‘Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov: The Anti-Faust as Christian Hero’, Canadian Slavic Studies 3, no. 1 (Spring 1969): 39–68 (68).
- 45.
Pritchett, affectionately and half-seriously, suggests that Oblomov is ‘ripe for canonisation’ (‘The Great Absentee’, 233). For a startlingly straight-faced version of the same argument, see Louria and Seiden, ‘Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov’.
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Greaney, M. (2018). From Bildungsroman to Schlafroman: Goncharov’s Oblomov . In: Sleep and the Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75253-2_4
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