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Title: Oblomov

Author: Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov

Translator: C. J. Hogarth

Release date: May 10, 2017 [eBook #54700]
Most recently updated: November 2, 2025

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/54700

Credits: David Widger

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OBLOMOV ***

OBLOMOV

By Ivan Goncharov
Translated From The Russian By C. J. Hogarth

London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd.

1915

CONTENTS
OBLOMOV
PART I
I
II
III

IV
V
PART II
I
II
III
PART III
I
II
III
IV
PART IV
I
II
III
IV
V
VI

OBLOMOV

PART I

I

O
ne morning, in a flat in one of the great buildings in Gorokliovaia
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. He was a fellow of a little over thirty, of medium height,
and of pleasant exterior. Unfortunately, in his dark-grey eyes there was an
absence of any definite idea, and in his other features a total lack of
concentration. Suddenly a thought would wander across his face with the
freedom of a bird, flutter for a moment in his eyes, settle on his half-opened
lips, and remain momentarily lurking in the lines of his forehead. Then it
would disappear, and once more his face would glow with a radiant
insouciance which extended even to his attitude and the folds of his night-
robe. At other times his glance would darken as with weariness or ennui.
Yet neither the one nor the other expression could altogether banish from
his countenance that gentleness which was the ruling, the fundamental,
characteristic, not only of his features, but also of the spirit which lay
beneath them. That spirit shone in his eyes, in his smile, and in his every
movement of hand and head. On glancing casually at Oblomov a cold, a
superficially observant person would have said, “Evidently he is good-
natured, but a simpleton;” whereas a person of greater penetration and
sympathy than the first would have prolonged his glance, and then gone on
his way thoughtfully, and with a smile as though he were pleased with
something.
* One of the principal streets of Petrograd.

Oblomov’s face was neither reddy nor dull nor pale, but of an indefinite
hue. At all events, that was the impression which it gave—possibly because,
through insufficiency of exercise, or through want of fresh air, or through a
lack of both, he was wrinkled beyond his years. In general, to judge from
the extreme whiteness of his bare neck, his small, puffy hands, and his soft
shoulders, one would conclude that he possessed an effeminate body. Even
when excited, his actions were governed by an unvarying gentleness, added
to a lassitude that was not devoid of a certain peculiar grace. On the other
hand, should depression of spirits show itself in his face, His glance would

grow dull, and his brow furrowed, as doubt, despondency, and apprehension
fell to contending with one another. Yet this crisis of emotion seldom
crystallized into the form of a definite idea—still less into that of a fixed
resolve. Almost always such emotion evaporated in a sigh, and shaded off
into a sort of apathetic lethargy.
Oblomov’s indoor costume corresponded exactly with the quiet outlines
of his face and the effeminacy of his form. The costume in question
consisted of a dressing-gown of some Persian material—a real Eastern
dressing-gown—a garment that was devoid both of tassels and velvet
facings and a waist, yet so roomy that Oblomov might have wrapped
himself in it once or twice over. Also, in accordance with the immutable
custom of Asia, its sleeves widened steadily from knuckles to shoulder.
True, it was a dressing-gown which had lost its pristine freshness, and had,
in places, exchanged its natural, original sheen for one acquired by hard
wear; yet still it retained both the clarity of its Oriental colouring and the
soundness of its texture. In Oblomov’s eyes It was a garment possessed of a
myriad invaluable qualities, for it was so soft and pliable that, when
wearing it, the body was unaware of its presence, and, like an obedient
slave, it answered even to the slightest movement. Neither waistcoat nor
cravat did Oblomov wear when indoors, since he loved freedom and space.
For the same reason his slippers were long, soft, and broad, to the end that,
whenever he lowered his legs from the bed to the floor without looking at
what he was doing, his feet might fit into the slippers at once.
With Oblomov, lying in bed was neither a necessity (as in the case of an
invalid or of a man who stands badly in need of sleep ) nor an accident (as
in the case of a man who is feeling worn out) nor a gratification (as in the
case of a man who is purely lazy). Rather, it represented his normal
condition. Whenever he was at home—and almost always he was at home
—he would spend his time in lying on his back. Likewise he used but the
one room—which was combined to serve both as bedroom, as study, and as
reception-room—in which we have just discovered him. True, two other
rooms lay at his disposal, but seldom did he look into them save on
mornings (which did not comprise by any means every morning) when his
old valet happened to be sweeping out the study. The furniture in them
stood perennially covered over, and never were the blinds drawn up.

At first sight the room in which Oblomov was lying was a well-fitted
one. In it there stood a writing-table of redwood, a couple of sofas,
upholstered in some silken material, and a handsome screen that was
embroidered with birds and fruits unknown to Nature.
Also the room contained silken curtains, a few mats, some pictures,
bronzes, and pieces of china, and a multitude of other pretty trifles. Yet even
the most cursory glance from the experienced eye of a man of taste would
have detected no more than a tendency to observe les convenances while
escaping their actual observance. Without doubt that was all that Oblomov
had thought of when furnishing his study. Taste of a really refined nature
would never have remained satisfied with such ponderous, ungainly
redwood chairs, with such rickety whatnots. Moreover, the back of one of
the sofas had sagged, and, here and there, the wood had come away from
the glue. Much the same thing was to be seen in the case of the pictures, the
vases, and certain other trifles of the apartment. Nevertheless, its master
was accustomed to regard its appurtenances with the cold, detached eye of
one who would ask, “Who has dared to bring this stuff here?” The same
indifference on his part, added to, perhaps, an even greater indifference on
the part of his servant, Zakhar, caused the study, when contemplated with
attention, to strike the beholder with an impression of all-prevailing
carelessness and neglect. On the walls and around the pictures there hung
cobwebs coated with dust; the mirrors, instead of reflecting, would more
usefully have served as tablets for recording memoranda; every mat was
freely spotted with stains; on the sofa there lay a forgotten towel, and on the
table (as on most mornings) a plate, a salt-cellar, a half-eaten crust of bread,
and some scattered crumbs—all of which had failed to be cleared away
after last night’s supper. Indeed, were it not for the plate, for a recently
smoked pipe that was propped against the bed, and for the recumbent form
of Oblomov himself, one might have imagined that the place contained not
a single living soul, so dusty and discoloured did everything look, and so
lacking were any active traces of the presence of a human being. True, on
the whatnots there were two or three open books, while a newspaper was
tossing about, and the bureau bore on its top an inkstand and a few pens;
but the pages at which the books were lying open were covered with dust
and beginning to turn yellow (thus proving that they had long been tossed
aside), the date of the newspaper belonged to the previous year, and from

the inkstand, whenever a pen happened to be dipped therein, there arose,
with a frightened buzz, only a derelict fly.
On this particular morning Oblomov had (contrary to his usual custom)
awakened at the early hour of eight. Somehow he looked perturbed; anxiety,
regret, and vexation kept chasing one another across his features. Evidently
he had fallen a prey to some inward struggle, and had not yet been able to
summon his wits to the rescue. The fact of the matter was that, overnight,
he had received from the starosta * of his country estate an exceedingly
unpleasant letter. We all know what disagreeable things a starosta can say
in his letters—how he can tell of bad harvests, of arrears of debt, of
diminished incomes, and so forth; and though this particular official had
been inditing precisely similar epistles during the past three years, his latest
communication had affected its recipient as powerfully as though Oblomov
had received an unlooked-for blow. Yet, to do Oblomov justice, he had
always bestowed a certain care upon his affairs. Indeed, no sooner had he
received the starosta’s first disturbing letter (he had done so three years
ago) than he had set about devising a plan for changing and improving the
administration of his property. Yet to this day the plan in question remained
not fully thought out, although long ago he had recognized the necessity of
doing something actually decisive.
* Overseer or steward.

Consequently, on awakening, he resolved to rise, to perform his
ablutions, and his tea consumed, to consider matters, to jot down a few
notes, and, in general, to tackle the affair properly. Yet for another halfhour
he lay prone under the torture of this resolve; until eventually he decided
that such tackling could best be done after tea, and that, as usual, he would
drink that tea in bed—the more so since a recumbent position could not
prove a hindrance to thought.
Therefore he did as he had decided; and when the tea had been consumed
he raised himself upon his elbow and arrived within an ace of getting out of
bed. In fact, glancing at his slippers, he even began to extend a foot in their
direction, but presently withdrew it.
Half-past ten struck, and Oblomov gave himself a shake. “What is the
matter?” he said vexedly. “In all conscience ’tis time that I were doing
something! Would I could make up my mind to—to———” He broke off

with a shout of “Zakhar!” whereupon there entered an elderly man in a grey
suit and brass buttons—a man who sported beneath a perfectly bald pate a
pair of long, bushy, grizzled whiskers that would have sufficed to fit out
three ordinary men with beards. His clothes, it is true, were cut according to
a country pattern, but he cherished them as a faint reminder of his former
livery, as the one surviving token of the dignity of the house of Oblomov.
The house of Oblomov was one which had once been wealthy and
distinguished, but which, of late years, had undergone impoverishment and
diminution, until finally it had become lost among a crowd of noble houses
of more recent creation.
For a few moments Oblomov remained too plunged in thought to notice
Zakhar’s presence; but at length the valet coughed.
“What do you want?” Oblomov inquired.
“You called me just now, barin?” *
* “Master” or “sir”

“I called you, you say? Well, I cannot remember why I did so. Return to
your room until I have remembered.”
Zakliar retired, and Oblomov spent another quarter of an hour in thinking
over the accursed letter.
“I have lain here long enough,” at last he said to himself. “Really, I must
rise.... But suppose I were to read the letter through carefully and then to
rise? Zakhar!”
Zakhar re-entered, and Oblomov straightway sank into a reverie. For a
minute or two the valet stood eyeing his master with covert resentment.
Then he moved towards the door.
“Why are you going away?” Oblomov asked suddenly.
“Because, barin, you have nothing to say to me. Why should I stand here
for nothing?”
“What? Have your legs become so shrunken that you cannot stand for a
moment or two? I am worried about something, so you must wait. You have
just been lying down in your room, haven’t you? Please search for the letter
which arrived from the starosta last night. What have you done with it?”

“What letter? I have seen no letter,” asserted Zakhar.
“But you took it from the postman yourself?”
“Maybe I did, but how am I to know where you have since placed it?”
The valet fussed about among the papers and other things on the table.
“You never know anything,” remarked his master. “Look in that basket
there. Or possibly the letter has fallen behind the sofa? By the way, the back
of that sofa has not yet been mended. Tell the joiner to come at once. It was
you that broke the thing, yet you never give it a thought!”
“I did not break it,” retorted Zakhar. “It broke of itself. It couldn’t have
lasted for ever. It was bound to crack some day.” This was a point which
Oblomov did not care to contest. “Have you found the letter yet?” he asked.
“Yes—several letters.”
“But they are not what I want.”
“I can see no others,” asserted Zakhar.
“Very well,” was Oblomov’s impatient reply. “I will get up and search for
the letter myself.”
Zakhar retired to his room again, but had scarcely rested his hands
against his pallet before stretching himself out, when once more there came
a peremptory shout of “Zakhar! Zakhar!”
“Good Lord!” grumbled the valet as a third time he made for the study.
“Why should I be tormented in this fashion? I would rather be dead!”
“My handkerchief!” cried Oblomov. “Yes, and very quickly, too! You
might have guessed that that is what I am wanting.”
Zakhar displayed no particular surprise or offence at this reproachful
command. Probably he thought both the command and the reproach natural.
“Who knows where the handkerchief is?” he muttered as he made a tour
of the room and felt each chair (although he could not but have perceived
that on them there was nothing whatsoever lying). “You lose everything,”
he added, opening the door into the parlour in order to see whether the
handkerchief might not be lurking there.

“Where are you going?” exclaimed Oblomov. “’Tis here you must
search. I have not been into those other rooms since the year before last. Be
quick, will you?”
“I see no handkerchief,” said Zakhar, spreading out his hands and peering
into every corner. “There it is!” suddenly he croaked. “’Tis just underneath
you. I can see its end sticking out. You have been lying on it all the time, yet
you actually ask me to find it!” He hobbled away without waiting for an
answer. For a moment or two Oblomov was taken aback, but soon found
another means of putting his valet in the wrong.
“A nice way to do your cleaning!” he said. “What a lot of dust and dirt, to
be sure! Look at those corners! You never bestir yourself at all.”
“If I never bestir myself,” retorted Zakhar offendedly, “at least I do my
best, and don’t spare myself, for I dust and sweep almost every day.
Everything looks clean and bright enough for a wedding.”
“What a lie!” cried Oblomov. “Be off to your room again!”
That he had provoked Zakhar to engage in this conversation was a fact
which gave him small pleasure. The truth was he had forgotten that, once a
delicate subject is touched upon, one cannot well avoid a fuss. Though he
wished his rooms to be kept clean, he wished this task to be carried out
invisibly, and apart from himself; whereas, whenever Zakhar was called
upon to do even the least sweeping or dusting, he made a grievance of it.
After Zakhar had retired to his den Oblomov relapsed into thought, until,
a few minutes later, the clock sounded a halfhour of some sort.
“What is that?” cried Oblomov in horror. “Soon the time will be eleven,
yet I am not yet up and washed! Zakhar! Zakhar!”
Zakhar reappeared.
“Are my washing things ready?” his master inquired.
“Yes, they have been ready a long time. Why do you not get up?”
“And why didn’t you tell me that the things are ready? Had you done
that, I should have risen long ago. Go along, and I will follow you; but at
the moment I must sit down and write a letter.”

Zakhar left the room. Presently he reappeared with a much-bescribbled,
greasy account-book and a bundle of papers.
“If you are going to write anything,” he said, “perhaps you would like to
check these accounts at the same time? Some money is due to be paid out.”
“What accounts? What money?” inquired Oblomov petulantly.
“The accounts sent in by the butcher, the greengrocer, the laundress, and
the baker. All are wanting their money.”
“Always money and worry!” grumbled Oblomov. “Why do you not give
me the accounts at intervals instead of in a batch like this?”
“Because each time you have sent me away, and then put matters off until
the morrow.”
“Well, these accounts can wait until the morrow.”
“No, they cannot, for the creditors are pressing, and say they are going to
allow you nothing more on credit. To-day is the first of the month, you must
remember.”
“Ah! Fresh cares, fresh worries!” cried Oblomov gloomily. “Why are you
standing there? Lay the table, and I will rise, wash, and look into the whole
business. Is the water yet ready?”
“Quite.”
Oblomov raised himself and grunted as though he really intended to get
out of bed.
“By the way,” said Zakhar, “whilst you were still asleep the manager of
the building sent the dvornik * to say that soon you must quit the flat, since
he wants it for some one else.”
* Porter or doorkeeper.

“Very well, then. We must go. Why worry me about it? This is the third
time you have done so.”
“But they keep worrying me about it.”
“Then tell them that we intend to go.”

Zakhar departed again, and Oblomov resumed his reverie. How long he
would have remained in this state of indecision it is impossible to say had
not a ring at the doorbell resounded through the hall.
“Some one has called, yet I am not yet up!” exclaimed Oblomov as he
slipped into his dressing-gown. “Who can it be?”
Lying down again, he gazed furiously towards the door.

II

T
here entered a young fellow of about twenty-five. Beaming with
health and irreproachably dressed to a degree which dazzled the eye
with its immaculateness of linen and gorgeousness of jewellery, he
was a figure calculated to excite envy.
“Good morning, Volkov!” cried Oblomov.
“And good morning to you,” returned the radiant gentleman, approaching
the bed and looking about him for a spot whereon to deposit a hat.
However, perceiving only dust, he retained his headgear in his hand. Next
he drew aside the skirts of his coat (preparatory to sitting down), but a hasty
inspection of the nearest chair convinced him that he had far better remain
standing.
“So you are not yet up?” he went on. “And why on earth are you wearing
a nightshirt? They have quite gone out of fashion.”
“’Tis not a nightshirt, it is a dressinggown,” said Oblomov, nestling
lovingly into the ample folds of the garment. “Where are you from?”
“From the tailor’s. Do you think this frock-coat a nice one?” And he
turned himself round and round for Oblomov’s inspection.
“Splendid! Made with excellent taste!” was the verdict. “Only why is it
so broad behind?”
“The better to ride in it. It is a riding-coat. I ordered it for to-day for the
reason that this is the first of May and I am to go to the Ekaterinhov * with
Gorunov. He has just got his promotion, and we intend to cut a dash on the
strength of it. He has a roan horse—all the horses in his regiment are roans
—and I a black. How are you going-in a carriage or on foot?”
“By neither method,” replied Oblomov.
“What? To-day is the first of May, and you are not going to the
Ekaterinhov? Why, every one will be there!”
“Not quite every one,” Oblomov lazily remarked.

“You must go, though. Sophia Nikolaevna and Lydia will be occupying
two of the seats in our carriage, but the seat facing them will be vacant.
Come with us, I tell you.”
“No, I do not intend to occupy the vacant seat. What sort of a figure
should I cut on it?”
“Then, if you like, Mischa Gorunov shall lend you a horse.”
“Of what is the fellow thinking?” said Oblomov as though to himself.
“How come you and the Gorunov family to be so friendly with one
another?”
“Give me your word of honour not to repeat what I may tell you, and I
will explain.”
“Herewith I give it.”
“Very well. I am in love with Lydia.”
“Splendid! Have you been in love with her long? She seems a charming
girl.”
“I have been in love with her for three weeks,” said Volkov, with a sigh.
“And Mischa, for his part, is in love with Dashenka.”
“Who is Dashenka?”
“What! You do not know Dashenka? Why, the whole town is raving over
her dancing. To-night I am going to the Opera with Mischa, and he is to
throw her a bouquet. Well, I must be off to buy the necessary camelias for
it.”
“Come back, then, and take lunch with me. I should like to have a talk
with you, for I have just experienced two misfortunes.”
“Impossible, I fear, for I am lunching with Prince Tiumenev. All the
Gorunova—yes, and Lydia, too—are to be there. What a cheerful house it
is! And so is Tiumenev’s country place. I have heard that it is to be the
scene of numberless dances and tableaux this summer. Are you likely to be
one of the guests?”
“No—I think not.”

“What hospitality the Prince dispenses! This winter his guests averaged
fifty, and sometimes a hundred.”
“How wearisome the whole thing must have been!”
“What! Wearisome? Why, the more the merrier. Lydia, too, used to be
there—though in those days I never so much as noticed her. In fact, never
once did I do so until one day I found myself ‘vainly trying to forget her,
vainly pitting reason in the lists with love.’” Volkov hummed the
concluding words, and seated himself carelessly upon a chair. Almost
instantly he leaped to his feet again, and blushed the dust from his trousers.
“What quantities of dirt you keep everywhere!” he remarked.“’tis
Zakhar’s fault, not mine,” replied Oblomov.
“Well, now I must be off, as it is absolutely necessary that I should buy
those camelias for Mischa’s bouquet. Au revoir!”
“Come and have tea after the opera, and tell me all about it.”
“No, that is impossible, for I am promised to supper at the Musinskis’. It
is their reception day, you know. However, meet me there, and I’ll present
you.”
“What is toward at the Musinskis’?”
“What, indeed? Why, entertainment in a house where you hear all the
news.”
“Like everything else, it would bore me.”
“Then go and call upon the Mezdrovs, where the talk centres upon one
topic, and one topic alone—the arts. Of nothing else will you hear but the
Venetian School. Beethoven, Bach, Leonardo da Vinci, and so forth.”
“All of them boring subjects!” said Oblomov with a yawn. “What a lot of
pedants the Mezdrovs must be! Do you never get tired of running about
from house to house?”
“Tired? Why should I? Every morning I like to go out and learn the news,
thank God, my official duties never require my actual presence, save twice
a week, when they consist of lunching with and doing the civil to the
General. * After that I proceed to call upon any people upon whom I have
not called for a long while. Next there will be some new actress—whether

at the Russian theatre or at the French. Besides, always there is the Opera,
to which I am a subscriber. Furthermore, I am in love, and Mischa is about
to enjoy a month’s leave from his regiment, and the summer is on the point
of beginning, and Mischa and I intend to retire to his country house for a
change of air. We shall have plenty of sport there, since he possesses
excellent neighbours and they give bals champêtres. Also I shall be able to
escort Lydia for walks through the woods, and to row her about in a boat,
and to pluck flowers for her benefit. At the present moment I must leave
you. Good-bye!”
* In this case the term “General” denotes a civil grade
corresponding to the military rank of the same title.

Rising, he endeavoured to look at himself in a dust-coated mirror; after
which he departed—though returning once more to show his friend the
newest thing in Parisian gloves and an Easter card which Prince Tiumenev
had recently sent him.
“What a life!” thought Oblomov, with a shrug of his shoulders. “What
good can a man get out of it? It is merely a squandering and a wasting of his
all. Of course, an occasional look into a theatre is not a bad thing, nor is
being in love—for Lydia is a delightful girl, and pursuits like plucking
flowers with her and rowing her about in a boat even I should enjoy; but to
have to be in ten different places every day, as Volkov has——!”
He turned over on his back and congratulated himself that he at least
cherished no vain social aspirations. ’Twas better to lie where he was and to
preserve both his nerves and his human dignity....
Another ring at the doorbell interrupted his reflections. This time the
visitor turned out to be a gentleman in a dark frock-coat with crested
buttons whose most prominent features were a clean-shaven chin, a pair of
black whiskers around a haggard (but quiet and sensible) face, and a
thoughtful smile.
“Good day, Sudbinski!” cried Oblomov cheerfully.
“Good day to you,” replied the gentleman. “’Tis a long time since I last
saw you, but you know what this devilish Civil Service means. Look at that
bagful of reports which I have brought with me! And not only that, but I
have had to leave word at the office that a messenger will find me here
should I be wanted. Never do I get a single moment to myself.”

“So you were on the way to your office? How come you to be going so
late? Your usual hour used to be nine.”
“Yes, it used to be nine, but now I go at twelve.”
“Ah, I see: you have recently been made the head of a department. Since
when?”
“Since Easter,” replied Sudbinski, with a meaning nod. “But what a lot of
work! It is terrible! From eight to twelve in the morning I am slaving at
home; from twelve to five at the Chancellory; and all the evening at home
again. I have quite lost touch with my acquaintances.”
“Come and lunch with me to-day, and we will drink to your promotion,”
said Oblomov.
“No, to-day I am lunching with the Vice-Director, as well as have a
report to prepare by Thursday. You see, one cannot rely upon provincial
advices, but must verify every return personally. Are you going to the
Ekaterinhov to-day?”
“No, for I am not very well,” replied Oblomov, knitting his brows.
“Moreover, like yourself, I have some work to do.”
“I am very sorry,” said Sudbinski; “for it is a fine day, and the only day
on which I myself can hope for a little rest.”
“And what news have you?” asked Oblomov.
“Oh, a good deal-of a sort. We are required no longer to write at the end
of our official letters ‘Your humble servant,’ but merely ‘Accept the
assurance of my profound respect.’ Also we have been told that we are to
cease to make out formal documents in duplicate. Likewise, our office has
just been allotted three new tables and a couple of confidential clerks.
Lastly, the Commission has now concluded its sittings. There’s a budget of
news for you!”
“And what of our old comrades?”
“Nothing at present, except that Svinkin has lost his case.”
“And to think that you work from eight to twelve, and from twelve to
five, and again in the evening! Dear, dear!”

“Well, what should I do if I were not in the Service?” asked Sudbinski.
“You would just read and write on your own account.”
“But it is not given to every one to be a littérateur. For example, you
yourself write nothing.”
“No, for I have some property on my hands,” said Oblomov with a sigh.
“But I am working out a new system for it; I am going to introduce reforms
of various kinds. The affair worries me terribly.”
“Well, for my part, I must work, in order to make a little money. Besides,
I am to be married this coming autumn.”
“Indeed! And to whom?”
“To Mademoiselle Murashina. Do you remember their country villa, next
to mine? I think you came to tea with me and met her there?”
“No, I have no recollection of it. Is she pretty?”
“Yes, charming. Suppose, one day, we go to lunch with her?”
Oblomov hesitated. “Very well,” he said after a pause; “only——”
“What about next week?”
“Certainly. Next week let it be. But at the moment I have no suitable
clothes. Is your fiancêe a financial catch?”
“Yes, for her father is a State councillor, and intends to give her ten
thousand roubles, as well as to let us have half his official house (a house of
twelve rooms—the whole being furnished, heated, and lighted at the public
expense); so we ought to do very well. Herewith I invite you to be my best
man at the wedding.”
Once more the doorbell rang.
“Good-bye,” said Sudbinski. “I am annoyed that, as I surmise, I should
be wanted at the office.”
“Then stay where you are,” urged Oblomov. “I desire your advice, for
two misfortunes have just befallen me.”
“No, no; I had better come and see you another day.” And Sudbinski took
his leave.

“Plunged up to the ears in work, good ‘friend!” thought Oblomov as he
watched him depart. “Yes, and blind and deaf and dumb to everything else
in the world! Yet by going into society and at the same time, busying
yourself about your affairs you will yet__win distinction, and promotion.
Such is what they call ‘a career’! Yet of how little use is a man like that! His
intellect, his will, his feelings—what do they avail him? So many luxuries
is what they are—nothing more. Such an individual lives out his little span
without achieving a single thing worth mentioning; and meanwhile he
works in an office from morning till night—yes, from morning till night,
poor wretch!”
Certainly a modicum of quiet satisfaction was to be derived from the
thought that from nine o’clock until three, and from eight o’clock until nine
on the following day, he, Oblomov, could remain lying prone on a sofa
instead of having to trot about with reports and to inscribe multitudes of
documents. Yes, he preferred, rather, leisure for the indulgence of his
feelings and imagination. Plunged in a philosophical reverie, he overlooked
the fact that by his bedside there was standing a man whose lean, dark face
was almost covered with a pair of whiskers, a moustache, and an imperial.
Also the new-comer’s dress was studied in its negligence.
“Good morning, Oblomov,” he said.
“Good morning, Penkin,” was the response. “I should like to show you a
letter which I have just received from my starnsta. Whence have you
sprung?”
“From the newsagent’s, near by. I went to see if the papers are yet out.
Have you read my latest article?”
“No.”
“Then you ought to do so.”
“What is it about?” Oblomov asked with a faint yawn.
“About trade, about the emancipation of women, about the beautiful
April days with which we have been favoured, and about the newly formed
fire-brigade. How come you not to have read that article? In it you will see
portrayed the whole of our daily life. Over and above anything else, you
will read therein an argument in favour of the present realistic: tendency in
literature.”

“And have you no other work on hand?” inquired Oblomov.
“Yes, a good deal. I write two newspaper articles a week, besides
reviewing a number of books. In addition, I have just finished a tale of my
own.”
“What is it about?”
“It tells how, in a certain town, the governor used to beat the citizens with
his own hand.”
“The realistic tendency, right enough!” commented Oblomov.
“Quite so,” said the delighted littérateur. “In my tale (which is novel and
daring in its idea) a traveller witnesses a beating of this kind, seeks an
interview with the governor of the province, and lays before him a
complaint. At once the said governor of the province orders an official who
happens to be proceeding to that town for the purpose of conducting
another investigation to inquire also into the truth of the complaint just laid,
and likewise to collect evidence as to the character and behaviour of the
local administrator. The official in question calls together the local citizens,
on the pretext of a trade conference, and incidentally sounds them
concerning the other matter. And what do you suppose they do? They
merely smile, present their compliments, and load the governor of the town
with praises! Thereafter the official makes extraneous inquiries, and is
informed that the said citizens are rogues who trade in rotten merchandise,
give underweight, cheat the Treasury, and indulge in wholesale immorality;
wherefore the beatings have been a just retribution.”
“Then you intend the assaults committed by the governor to figure in the
story as the fatum of the old tragedians?”
“Quite so,” said Penkin. “You have great quickness of apprehension, and
ought yourself to tackle the writing of stories. Yes, it has always been my
idea to expose the arbitrariness of our local governors, the decline of
morality among the masses, the faulty organization existing among our
subordinate officials, and the necessity of drastic, but legal, measures to
counterbalance these evils. ’Tis a novel idea for a story, is it not?”
“Certainly; and to me who read so little a peculiarly novel one.”

“True, I have never once seen you with a book in your hand.
Nevertheless, I beseech you to read a poem which, I may say, is shortly to
appear. It is called ‘The Love of a Blackmailer for a Fallen Woman.’ the
identity ol the author I am not at liberty to disclose—at all events yet.”
“Pray give me an idea of this poem.”
“It exposes, as you will see, the whole mechanism of the social
movement—but a mechanism that is painted only in poetic colours. Each
spring of that engine is touched upon, and each degree of the social scale
held up to the light. We see summoned to the bar, as it were, a weak, but
vicious, lord, with a swarm of blackmailers who are engaged in cheating
him. Also various categories of fallen women are dissected—French
women, German women, and others; the whole being done with vivid and
striking verisimilitude. Certain extracts from the poem have come to my
ears, and I may say that the author is a great man—one hears in him the
notes both of Dante and of Shakespeare.”
“And whence has he originated?” asked Oblomov, leaning forward in
astonishment; but Penkin, perceiving that he had now said too much,
merely repeated that Oblomov must read the poem, and judge for himself.
This Oblomov declined to do.
“Why?” asked Penkin. “The thing will make a great stir and be much
talked about.”
“Very well: let people talk. ’Tis all some folks have to do. ’Tis their
métier.”
“Nevertheless, read it yourself, for curiosity’s sake.”
“What have I not seen in books!” commented the other. “Surely folk
must write such things merely to amuse themselves?”
“Yes; even as I do. At the same time, what truth, what verisimilitude, do
you not find in books! How powerfully some of them move one through the
vivid portraiture which they contain! Whomsoever these authors take—a
tchinovnik, * an officer, or a blackmailer—they paint them as living
creatures.”
* Government official.

“But what have those authors to worry about, seeing that if, as you say,
one chooses to take a given model for amusement’s sake, the picture is sure
to succeed? Yet no: real life is not to be described like that. In a system of
that kind there is no understanding or sympathy, nor a particle of what we
call humanity. ’Tis all self-conceit—no more. Folk describe thieves and
fallen women as though they were apprehending them in the streets and
taking them to prison. Never in the tales of such writers is the note of
‘hidden tears’ to be detected—only that of gross, manifest malice and love
of ridicule.”
“And what more would you have? You yourself have said (and very aptly
so) that seething venom, a taste for bilious incitement to vice, and a
sneering contempt for the fallen are the only ingredients needed.”
“No, not the only ones,” said Oblomov, firing up. “Picture a thief or a
fallen woman or a cheated fool, if you like, but do not forget the rest of
mankind. What about humanity, pray? Writers like yourself try to write only
with the head. What? Do you suppose the intellect can work separately
from the heart? Why, the intellect needs love to fertilize it. Rather, stretch
out your hand to the fallen and raise him weep over him if he is lost beyond
recall, but in no case make sport of him, for he is one to whom there should
be extended only compassion. See in him yourself, and act accordingly.
That done, I will read you, and bow my head before you. But in the writings
of the school of which I have spoken, what art, what poetical colouring, are
you able to discover? Should you elect to paint debauchery and the mire, at
least do so without making any claim to poetry.”
“What? You bid me depict nature—roses, nightingales, a winter’s
morning, and all that sort of thing—when things like these are seething and
whirling around us? Nay, we need, rather, the bare physiology of society.
No longer are love songs required.”
“Give me man, and man alone.” said Oblomov. “And, having given me
him, do you try to love him.”
“What? To love the usurer, the hypocrite, the peculating and stupid
official? Why should I do that? ’tis evident you have had little experience of
literature! Such fellows want punishing—want turning out of the civic
circle and the community.”

“Out of the civic circle and the community,’ you say?” ejaculated
Oblomov with a gasp as he rose and stood before Penkin. “That is
tantamount to saying that once in that faulty vessel there dwelt the supreme
element—that, ruined though the man may be, he is still a human being, as
even are you and I. Turn him out, indeed! How are you going to turn him
out of the circle of humanity, out of the bosom of Nature, out of the mercy
of God?” Oblomov came near to shouting as he said this, and his eyes were
blazing.
“How excited you have grown!” said Penkin in astonishment; whereupon
even Oblomov realized that he had gone too far. He pulled himself up,
yawned slightly, and stretched himself out sluggishly upon the sofa. For a
while silence reigned.
“What kind of books do you mostly read?’ inquired Penkin.
“Books of travel,” replied Oblomov.
Again there was a silence.
“And will you read the poem when it has come out?” continued Penkin.
“If so, I will bring you a copy of it.”
Oblomov shook his head.
“Nor my story?”
Oblomov signified assent.
“Very well, then. Now I must be off to press,” continued Penkin. “Do you
know why I came to see you to-day? I came because I wanted to propose to
you a visit to the Ekaterinhov. I have a conveyance of my own and,
inasmuch as, to-morrow, I must write an article on current events, I thought
we might jointly look over my notes on the subject, and you might advise
me as to any point omitted. We should enjoy the expedition, I think. Let us
go.”
“No, I am not well,” said Oblomov with a frown, covering himself with
the bedclothes. “But you might come and lunch with me to-day, and then
talk. I have just experienced a couple of misfortunes.”
“Ah! The whole of our staff is to lunch at St. George’s, * I fear, and then
to go on to the festival. Also, at night I have my article to write, and the

printer must receive the manuscript by daylight at the latest. Good-bye!”
* A smart restaurant in Petrograd.

“‘At night I have my article to write,’” mused Oblomov after his friend’s
departure. “Then when does he sleep? However, he is making some five
thousand roubles a year, so his work is so much bread and butter to him. Yet
to think of being continually engaged in writing, in wasting one’s intellect
upon trifles, in changing one’s opinions, in offering one’s brain and one’s
imagination for sale, in doing violence to one’s own nature, in giving way
to ebullitions of enthusiasm—and the whole without a single moment’s rest,
or the calling of a single halt! Yes, to think of being forced to go on writing,
writing, like the wheel of a machine—writing to-morrow, writing the day
after, writing though the summer is approaching and holidays keep passing
one by! Does he never stop to draw breath, the poor wretch?” Oblomov
glanced at the table, where everything lay undisturbed, and the ink had
become dried up, and not a pen was to be seen; and as he looked he rejoiced
to think that he was lying there as careless as a newborn baby—not
worrying at all, nor seeking to offer anything for sale.
“But what of the starosta’s letter and the notice to quit?” Yes, suddenly he
had remembered these things; and once more he became absorbed in
thought.
Again the doorbell rang.
“Why is every one seeking me out today?” he wondered as he waited to
see who next should enter. This time the new-comer proved to be a man of
uncertain age—of the age when it is difficult to guess the exact number of
years. Also, he was neither handsome nor ugly, neither tall nor short, neither
fair nor dark. In short, he was a man whom Nature had dowered with no
sharp-cut, distinguishing features, whether good or bad, mental or physical.
“Ha!” said Oblomov as he greeted him. “So it is you, Alexiev? Whence
are you come?”
“To tell the truth. I had not thought to call upon you to-day,” replied the
visitor, “but by chance I met Ovchinin, and he carried me off to his quarters,
whither I, in my turn, have now come to convey you.”
“To convey me to, to——?”

“To Ovchinin’s. Already Alianov, Pchailo, and Kolhniagin are there.”
“But why have they collected together? And what do they want with
me?”
“Ovchinin desires you to lunch with him, and then to accompany him and
the rest of us to the Ekaterinhov. Likewise he has instructed me to warn you
to hire a conveyance. Come, get up! ’Tis fully time you were dressed.”
“How am I to dress? I have not yet washed myself.”
“Then do so at once.”
With that Alexiev fell to pacing the room. Presently he halted before a
picture which he had seen a thousand times before; then he glanced once or
twice out of the window, took from a whatnot an article of some sort, turned
it over in his hands, looked at it from every point of view, and replaced the
same. That done, he resumed his pacing and whistling—the whole being
designed to avoid hindering Oblomov from rising and performing his
ablutions. Ten minutes passed.
“What is the matter with you?” asked Alexiev suddenly.
“What is the matter with me?”
“I mean, why are you still in bed?”
“I cannot tell you. Is it really necessary that I should get up?”
“Of course it is necessary, for they are waiting for us. Besides, you said
that you would like to go.”
“To go where? I have no such desire.”
“Only this moment you said we would go and lunch at Ovchinin’s, and
then proceed to the Ekatennhov!”
“No, I cannot. It would mean my going out into the damp. Besides, rain
is coming on. The courtyard looks quite dark.”
“As a matter of fact, not a single cloud is in the sky, and the courtyard
looks dark only because you never have your windows washed.”
“Well, well!” said Oblomov. “By the way, have I yet told you of my
misfortunes—of the letter from my starosta, and of the notice given me to
quit this flat?”

“No,” answered Alexiev. “What about the letter?”
The document not being immediately forthcoming, Zakhar was
summoned to search for it; and after it had been discovered beneath the
counterpane Oblomov read it to his friend—though passing over certain
greetings, added to inquiries as to the recipient’s health. The gist of the
epistle was that the bulk of the crops on Oblomov’s estate were likely to fail
for want of rain.
“Never mind,” said Alexiev. “One must never give way to despair.”
“And what would you do in my place?”
“I should first of all consider matters. Never ought one to come to a hasty
decision.”
Crumpling the letter in his hands, Oblomov leaned forward with his
elbows on his knees, and remained in that posture for a considerable time—
his brain flooded with disturbing reflections.
“I wish Schtoltz would come!” at length he remarked. “He has written
that he is about to do so, but God knows what has happened to him! He
could solve the situation.”
Suddenly the doorbell rang with such vehemence that both men started,
and Zakhar came hurrying out of his pantry.

III

T
he next moment there entered the room a tall, loosely built man who
evidently did not believe in refinement of costume, nor was in any
way ashamed of the fact. This was Mikhei Andreievitch Tarantiev, a
native of the same district as Oblomov. Though an individual of rough,
sullen mien, and of rather an overbearing manner, he did not lack a certain
keen ruggedness of wit; nor could any one be a better judge of mundane
questions in general, nor a better resolver of tangled juridical problems
(though usually he behaved rudely to the person who had sought his advice
on these matters). Nevertheless, his abilities stopped short at a talent for
verbal exposition; and no sooner was he called upon to transmit a theory
into action than his whole bearing underwent a change, and in every case he
discovered practical difficulties in the way of what he conceived to be the
best course to take.
“How are you?” he said brusquely as he extended a hairy hand. “What do
you mean by lying in bed like a log? Presently it will be twelve o’clock, yet
you are sprawling about on your back!” The other forestalled him by
hurriedly slipping his feet into his slippers, or the new-comer would have
pulled him out of bed.
“I was just about to rise,” said Oblomov with a yawn.
“Yes; I know how you rise—how you go rolling about until lunch-time!
Zakhar, come and help your master to dress!”
Zakhar entered and glared at Tarantiev. Raising himself on his elbow,
Oblomov stepped from the bed like a man who is thoroughly worn out, and,
dropping into an arm-chair, sat there without moving, Meanwhile Zakhar
pomaded, parted, and combed his master’s hair, and then asked him if he
desired to wash.
“Presently,” said Oblomov. “Do you wait a little.”
“Ah! So you are here?” said Tarantiev suddenly as he turned to Alexiev.
“I had not seen you. By the way, what a swine is that kinsman of yours!”

“What kinsman?” inquired Alexiev with a stare. “I do not possess a single
relative.”
“I mean Athanasiev. Surely he is a relative of yours? I know he is.”
“My name is Alexiev, not Athanasiev,” said the other. “And I repeat that I
do not possess a single relative.”
“But he is just like you an ugly man, as well as (like yourself, again) a
man of the name of Vassili Nikolaitch?”
“Nevertheless he is no kinsman of mine. Besides, my first names are Ivan
and Alexeitch.”
“Well, he is exactly like you, and a swine besides. You can tell him that
when next you meet him.”
“I neither possess his acquaintance nor have ever set eyes upon him,”
said Alexiev, opening his snuffbox.
“Give me a pinch,” put in Tarantiev. “You use the plain stuff, and not the
French, do you? Why not use the French? Never have I seen a swine like
that relative of yours. On one occasion I borrowed of him fifty roubles. That
was two years ago. And fifty roubles are not a very large sum, are they?
They are a sum which he might well have forgotten, mightn’t he? Yes, he
very well might. But as a matter of fact, he remembered it. Not a month had
passed before he took to saying, whenever he met me: ‘How about that
debt?’ I assure you I found him a perfect nuisance! And only yesterday he
walked into our office, and said to me: ‘I expect you have just received your
salary, and are therefore in a position to repay me?’ Well, I handed him over
my salary, even though he had come there for the express purpose of
shaming me in public. I had much ado not to put him out of the door. ‘Poor
fellow, you need the money, I suppose?’ As though I had not needed it! Am
I such a rich man that I should quietly let him pouch fifty roubles?
Oblomov, hand me a cigar.”
“The cigars are in that box there,” said Oblomov, pointing to a whatnot.
He was still posed in his usual lazy but becoming attitude—he was still
taking no notice whatever of what was being done or said around him, but
contemplating his small white hands.

“What a rubbishy weed!” Tarantiev remarked, after sending out a puff of
tobacco smoke and inhaling another.
“You have come too early in the morning,” suggested Oblomov with a
yawn.
“Then I am boring you, am I?”
“No; I was merely making a remark. Usually you arrive at lunch-time,
but to-day you have come an hour beforehand.”
“I have come an hour beforehand because I wish to find out what there is
likely to be to eat at dinner. As a rule you provide such rubbishy stuff.”
“You had better go into the kitchen and inquire.”
Taramiev departed for the purpose,
“We are to have beef and veal,” he remarked, on returning. “Ah, friend
Oblomov, though a landowner, you haven’t the smallest notion how to live.
Your ménage is the ménage of a tradesman. Have you bought that Madeira
yet?”
“I don’t know,” replied Oblomov, scarcely noticing what had been said.
“You had better inquire of Zakhar. At all events there will be some sort of
wine.”
“What? The rubbishy old stuff which you bought of a German dealer?
You ought to go to the English Store for your wines.”
“Very well. Please send to the Store for some.”
“Money first, please!”
Oblomov fumbled in a cashbox, and produced therefrom a ten-rouble,
note.
“Madeira costs seven roubles the bottle,” he said. “Here are ten roubles.
You will be given change at the Store.”
Tarantiev hastened to cram the note into his pocket.
“Likewise, do you feel like hiring a conveyance and going to the
Ekaterinhov today?” he inquired. “If so, you might take me with you.”
Oblomov shook his head.

“I have met with two misfortunes,” he remarked. “In the first place, I am
to be turned out of this fiat.”
“Because you haven’t paid your rent, I suppose?”
“No, that is not the reason. I always pay in advance. Tell me what had
better be done.”
“Who made me your adviser? Do you think I give advice for nothing?
Ask him, rather”—and Tarantiev pointed to Alexiev—“or else that kinsman
of his.”
“No, no. Tell me what I ought to do.”
“I should advise you to move to another flat.”
“I could have said that myself.”
“To the flat of a friend of mine in the Veaborg Quarter,” continued
Tarantiev.
“What? To a flat in the Veaborg Quarter? In winter the whole district is
overrun with wolves!” *
* The Veaborg Quarter is one of the most outlying suburbs of
Petrograd.

“True, at times they come there from the Neva Islands, but my friend’s
house has high walls to it, and, in addition, she and her family and a
bachelor brother are nice people, and not like that fellow over there.” He
pointed to Alexiev.
“But what has all this to do with me?” said Oblomov irritably. “I tell you
I am not going to move there.”
“You fool!” exclaimed Tarantiev. “In that house you would be much
quieter and more comfortable than you are here, and you would pay less,
and you would have larger quarters. Besides, it is a more respectable place
than this. Here one has to sit at a dirty table on which the pepper-pot is
empty, the vinegar bottle the same, the knives are not clean, the tablecloth is
falling to pieces, and dust, dust, dust, lies everywhere. Give me my cab-
fare, and I will go and secure you the flat at once. Then you can move into
it to-morrow.” Tarantiev started to leave the room.

“Stop, stop!” cried Oblomov. “I tell you I am not going to the Veaborg
Quarter. Pray exercise your wits in contriving how I may remain where I
am. Moreover, I have a still more important affair on hand. That is to say, I
have just received from my starosta a letter concerning which I should be
glad of your advice.”
With that he searched for the document, found it after some difficulty,
and read it aloud.
“So you hear what the starosta says as to drought and a failure of the
crops? What ought I to do?”
“The prime necessity,” replied Tarantiev, “is complete quiet for you. That
you would get at the house of the friend of whom I have just spoken; and I
could come to see you every day.”
“Yes, yes,” said Oblomov. “But what about this affair of the starosta?”
“The starosta is lying. He is a thief and a rogue. Why, I know an estate,
only fifty versts from yours, where the harvest of last year was so good that
it cleared the owner completely of debt. That being so, why have the crops
on your estate threatened to fail? Clearly the starosta is a robber. If I were
there I’d teach him! Do you suppose this letter to be a natural, an honest
one? No, no more than we can suppose that that sheep’s head over there he
pointed to Alexiev again—“is capable of writing an honest letter, or his
kinsman either.”
“Whom am I to appoint in the starosta’s place?” asked Oblomov.
“Another man might prove even worse than he.”
“You yourself had better go to the estate, and stay there for the summer,
and then move into my friend’s house. I will see that her rooms shall be
ready for you—yes, I will see to it at once. Personally, I should have sold
that property of yours, and bought another. Hand it over to me, and I will
very soon make the folk there aware that I am alive!”
The upshot of it was that Oblomov accorded a half-hearted consent to
Tarantiev’s procuring him a new lodging, and also to his writing to the
governor of the district where his (Oblomov’s) property was situated. After
that Tarantiev departed, stating that he would return to dinner at five
o’clock.

With Tarantiev’s departure a calm of ten minutes reigned in the
apartment. Oblomov was feeling greatly upset, both by the starostas letter
and by the prospect of the impending removal. Also, the tumultuous
Tarantiev had thoroughly tired him out.
“Why do you not sit down and write the letter?” asked Alexiev. “If you
wish I will clean the inkstand for you.”
“Clean it, and the Lord bless you!” sighed Oblomov. “Let me write the
letter alone, and then you shall fair-copy it after dinner.”
“Very well,” replied Alexiev. “But now I must be off, or I shall be
delaying the Ekaterinhov party. Good-bye!”
Oblomov did not heed him, but, sinking back into a recumbent position
in the armchair, relapsed into a state of meditative lethargy.

IV

Z
akhar, after closing the door successively behind Tarantiev and
Alexiev, stood expecting to receive a summons from his master,
inasmuch as he had overheard the fact that the latter had undertaken
to write a letter. But in Oblomov’s study all remained silent as the tomb.
Zakhar peeped through the chink of the door, and perceived that his master
was lying prone on the sofa, with his head resting on the palm of his hand.
The valet entered the room.
“Why have you lain down again?” he asked.
“Do not disturb me: cannot you see that I am reading?” was Oblomov’s
abrupt reply.
“Nay, but you ought to wash, and then to write that letter,” urged Zakhar,
determined not to be shaken on.
“Yes, I suppose I ought. I will do so presently. Just now I am engaged in
thought.”
As a matter of fact, he did read a page of the book which was lying open
—a page which had turned yellow with a month’s exposure. That done, he
laid it down and yawned.
“How it all wearies me!” he whispered, stretching, and then drawing up,
his legs. Glancing at the ceiling as once more he relapsed into a voluptuous
state of coma, he said to himself with momentary sternness: “No—business
first.” Then he rolled over, and clasped his hands behind his head.
As he lay there he thought of his plans for improving his property.
Swiftly he passed in review certain grave and fundamental schemes
affecting his plough-land and its taxation; after which he elaborated a new
and stricter course to be taken against laziness and vagrancy on the part of
the peasantry, and then passed to sundry ideas for ordering his own life in
the country.
First of all, he became engrossed in a design for a new house. Eagerly he
lingered over a probable disposition of the rooms, and fixed in his mind the

dimensions of the dining-room and the billiard-room, and determined which
way the windows of his study must face. Indeed, he even gave a thought to
the furniture and to the carpets. Next, he designed a wing for the building,
calculated the number of guests whom that wing would accommodate, and
set aside proper sites for the stables, the coachhouses, and the servants’
quarters. Finally he turned his attention to the garden. The old lime and oak-
trees should all be left as they were, but the apple-trees and pear-trees
should be done away with, and succeeded by acacias. Also, he gave a
moment’s consideration to the idea of a park, but, after calculating the cost
of its upkeep, came to the conclusion that such a luxury would prove too
expensive—wherefore he passed to the designing of orangeries and
aviaries.
So vividly did these attractive visions of the future development of his
estate flit before his eyes that he came to fancy himself already settled
there, and engaged in witnessing the result of several years’ working of his
schemes.
On a fair summer’s evening he seemed to be sitting at a tea-table on the
terrace of Oblomovka—sitting under a canopy of leafy shade which the sun
was powerless to penetrate. From a long pipe in his hand he was lazily
inhaling smoke, and revelling both in the delightful view which stretched
beyond the circle of the trees and in the coolness and the quiet of his
surroundings. In the distance some fields were turning to gold as the sun,
setting behind a familiar birch-grove, tinged to red the mirror-like surface of
the lake. From the fields a mist had risen, for the chill of evening was
falling, and dusk approaching apace. To his ears, at intervals, came the
clatter of peasantry as they returned homewards, and at the entrance gates
the servants of the establishment were sitting at ease, while from their
vicinity came the sound of echoing voices and laughter, the playing of
balalaiki, * and the chattering of girls as they pursued the sport of goriclki.
** Around him, also, his little ones were frisking at times climbing on to his
knee and hanging about his neck; while behind the samovar *** was seated
the real ruler of all that his eyes were beholding his divinity, a woman, his
wife!... And in the dining-room—a room at once elegant and simply
appointed—a cheerful fire was glowing, and Zakhar, now promoted to the
dignity of a major-domo, and adorned with whiskers turned wholly grey,

was laying a large, round table to a pleasant accompanying tinkle of crystal
and silver as he arranged, here a decanter and there a fork.
* Three-stringed, lute-like instruments.

** A sort of catch-as catch-can.

*** Tea-urn.

Presently the dreamer saw his wife and himself sit down to a bountiful
supper. Yes, and with them was Schtoltz, the comrade of his youth, his
unchanging friend, with other well-known faces. Lastly, he could see the
inmates of the house retiring to rest....
Oblomov’s features blushed with delight at the vision. So clear, so vivid,
so poetical was it all that for a moment he lay with his face buried in the
sofa cushions. Suddenly there had come upon him a dim longing for love
and quiet happiness; suddenly he had become athirst for the fields and the
hills of his native place, for his home, for a wife, for children....
After lying face downwards for a moment or two, he turned upon his
back. His features were alight with generous emotion, and for the time
being he was—happy.
Again the charming seductiveness of sleep-waking enfolded him in its
embrace. He pictured to himself a small colony of friends who should come
and settle in the villages and farms within a radius of fifteen or twenty
versts of his country house. Every day they should visit one another’s
houses—whether to dine or to sup or to dance; until everywhere around him
he would be able to see only bright faces framed in sunny days—faces
which should be ever free of care and wrinkles, and round, and merry, and
ruddy, and double-chinned, and of unfailing appetite. In all his
neighbourhood there should be constant summertide, constant gaiety,
unfailing good fare, the joys of perennial lassitude.... “My God, my God!”
he cried in the fullness of his delight: and with that he awoke. Once more to
his ears came the cries of hawkers in the courtyard as they vended coal,
sand, and potatoes; once more he could hear some one begging for
subscriptions to build a church; once more from a neighbouring building
which was in course of erection there streamed a babel of workmen’s
shouts, mingled with the clatter of tools.

“Ah!” he sighed with a sense of pain. “Such is real life! What ugliness
there is in the roar of the capital! When shall I attain the life of paradise—
the life for which I yearn? Shall I ever see my own fields, my own forests?
Would that at this moment I were lying on the grass under a tree, and gazing
upwards at the sun through the boughs, and trying to count the birds which
come and go over my head!”
But what about the plans for improving the estate? And what about the
starosta and the flat? Once again these things knocked at his memory.
“Yes, yes,” he answered them. “Seichass—presently.”
With that he rose to a sitting posture on the sofa, lowered his legs to the
level of his slippers, and slipped the latter on to his feet; after which he sat
still for a little while. At length he attained a wholly erect posture, and
remained meditating for a couple of minutes.
“Zakhar! Zakhar!” he shouted as he eyed the table and the inkstand. “I
want you to, to——” Further he failed to get, but mutely pointed to the
inkstand, and then relapsed into thought.
The doorbell rang, and a little man with a bald head entered.
“Hullo, doctor!” Oblomov exclaimed as he extended one hand towards
his guest, and with the other one drew forward a chair. “What chance brings
you here?”
“The chance that, since all of you decline to be ill, and never send for me,
I am forced to come of myself,” replied the doctor jestingly. “But no,” he
added, in a more serious tone. “The truth is, I had to visit a neighbour of
yours on the upper floor, and thought I might as well take you on the way.
How are you?”
Oblomov shook his head despondently. “Poorly, doctor,” he said. “I have
just been thinking of consulting you. My stomach will scarcely digest
anything, there is a pain in the pit of it, and my breath comes with
difficulty.”
“Give me your wrist,” said the doctor. He closed his eyes and felt the
patient’s pulse. “And have you a cough?” he inquired.
“Yes—at night-time, but more especially while I am at supper.”

“Hm! And does your heart throb at all, or your head ache?” He then
added other questions, bowed his bald pate, and subsided into profound
meditation. At length he straightened himself with a jerk, and said with an
air of decision—
“Two or three years more, of this room, of lying about, of eating rich,
heavy foods, and you will have a stroke.”
Oblomov started.
“Then what ought I to do, doctor? Tell me, for Heaven’s sake!”
“Merely what other people do—namely, go abroad.”
“Pardon me, doctor, but how am I to do that?”
“Why should you not? Does money prevent you, or what?”
“Yes, yes; money is the reason,” replied Oblomov, gladly catching at the
excuse, which was the most natural one that could possibly have been
devised. “See here—just read what my slarosta writes.”
“Quite so, but that is no business of mine,” said the doctor. “My business
is to inform you that you must change your mode of life, and also your
place of residence. You must have fresh air—you must have something to
do. Go to Kissingen or to Ems, and remain there during June and July,
whilst you drink the waters. Then go on to Switzerland, or to the Tyrol, and
partake of the local grape cure. That you can do during September and
October.”
“Oh the devil take the Tyrol!” murmured Oblomov under his breath.
“Next, transfer yourself to some dry place like Egypt, and put away from
you all cares and worries.”
“Excellent!” said Oblomov. “I only wish that starostas’ letters like this
one reached you!”
“Also you must do no thinking whatsoever.”
“No thinking, you say?”
“Yes—you must impose upon the brain no exertion.”
“But what about my plans for my estate? I am not a log, if you will
pardon my saying so.”

“Oh, very well. I have merely been warning you. Likewise, you must
avoid emotion of every kind, for that sort of thing is sure to militate against
a successful cure. Try, rather, to divert yourself with riding, with dancing,
with moderate exercise in the open air, and with pleasant conversation—
more especially conversation with the opposite sex. These things are
designed to make your heart beat more lightly, and to experience none but
agreeable emotions. Again, you must lay aside all reading and writing. Rent
a villa which faces south and lies embowered in flowers, and surround
yourself also with an atmosphere of music and women.”
“And may I eat at all?”
“Yes, certainly; but avoid all animal and farinaceous food, as well as
anything which may be served cold. Eat only light soups and vegetables.
Even in this great care will need to be exercised, for cholera, I may tell you,
is about. Walk eight hours out of every twenty-four; go in for shooting.”
“Good Lord!” groaned Oblomov.
“Finally,” concluded the doctor, “go to Paris for the winter, where,
surrounded by a whirlpool of gaiety, you will best be able to distract your
mind from your habitual brooding. Cultivate, theatres, balls, masquerades,
the streets, society friends, noise, and laughter.”
“Anything else?” inquired Oblomov, with ill-concealed impatience. The
doctor reflected a moment.
“Yes; also get the benefit of sea air,” he said. “Cross over to England, or
else go for a voyage to America.”
With chat he rose to take his leave. “Should you carry out these
instructions to the letter——” he began.
“Yes, yes. Of course I shall carry them out!” said Oblomov bitterly as he
accompanied the physician to the door.
The doctor having departed, Oblomov threw himself back into an arm-
chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and remained sitting in an almost
unthinking heap. Roused by Zakhar to consider once more the question of
changing his quarters, he engaged in a long and heated conversation with
the valet. Eventually he dismissed the man to his den, but could not dismiss
from his own mind certain comparisons which Zakhar had drawn between

his master’s life and the life of ordinary people. How strange that suddenly
there should have dawned in him thoughts concerning human fate and
destiny! All at once he found his mind drawing a parallel between that
destiny and his own existence; all at once questions of life arose before his
vision, like owls in an ancient ruin flushed from sleep by a stray ray of
sunlight. Somehow he felt pained and grieved at his arrested development,
at the check which had taken place in his moral growth, at the weight which
appeared to be pressing upon his every faculty. Also gnawing at his heart
there was a sense of envy that others should be living a life so full and free,
while all the time the narrow, pitiful little pathway of his own existence was
being blocked by a great boulder. And in his hesitating soul there arose a
torturing consciousness that many sides of his nature had never yet been
stirred, that others had never even been touched, and that not one of them
had attained complete formation. Yet with this there went an aching
suspicion that, buried in his being, as in a tomb, there still remained a
moribund element of sweetness and light, and that it was an element which,
though hidden in his personality, as a nugget lies lurking in the bowels of
the earth, might once have become minted into sterling coin. But the
treasure was now overlaid with rubbish—was now thickly littered over with
dust. ’Twas as though some one had stolen from him, and besmirched, the
store of gifts with which life and the world had dowered him; so that always
he would be prevented from entering life’s field and sailing across it with
the aid of intellect and of will. Yes, at the very start a secret enemy had laid
a heavy hand upon him and diverted him from the road of human destiny.
And now he seemed to be powerless to leave the swamps and wilds in
favour of that road. All around him was a forest, and ever the recesses ox
his soul were growing dimmer and darker, and the path more and more
tangled, while the consciousness of his condition kept awaking within him
less and less frequently—to arouse only for a fleecing moment his
slumbering faculties. Brain and volition alike had become paralysed, and, to
all appearances, irrevocably—the events of his life had become whittled
down to microscopical proportions. Yet even with them he was powerless to
cope—he was powerless to pass from one of them to another. Consequently
they bandied him to and fro like the waves of the ocean. Never was he able
to oppose to any event elasticity of will; never was he able to conceive, as
the result of any event, a reasoned-out impulse. Yet to confess this, even to
himself, always cost him a bitter pang: his fruitless regrets for lost

opportunities, coupled with burning reproaches of conscience, always
pricked him like needles, and led him to strive to put away such reproaches
and to discover a scapegoat....
Once again Oblomov sank asleep; and as he slept he dreamed of a
different period, of different people, of a different place from the present.
Let us follow him thither.

V

W
e find ourselves transported to a land where neither sea nor
mountains nor crags nor precipices nor lonely forests exist—
where, in short, there exists nothing grand or wild or immense.
Of what advantage, indeed, is the grand, the immense? The ocean
depresses the soul of man, and at the sight of its boundless expanse of
billows—an expanse whereon the weary eye is allowed no resting-place
from the uniformity of the picture—the heart of man grows troubled within
him, and he derives no solace from the roaring and mad rolling of the
waves. Ever since the world began, those waves have sung the same dim,
enigmatical song. Ever since the world began, they have voiced but the
querulous lament of a monster which, everlastingly doomed to torment,
utters a chorus of shrill, malicious cries. On the shores of the sea no bird
warbles; only the silent gulls, like lost spirits, fit wearily along its margin,
or circle over its surface. In the presence of that turmoil of nature the roar
even of the wildest beast sounds weak, and the voice of man becomes
wholly overwhelmed. Yes, beside it man’s form looks so small and fragile
that it is swallowed up amid the myriad details of the gigantic picture. That
alone may be why contemplation of the ocean depresses man’s soul. During
periods, also, of calm and immobility his spirit derives no comfort from the
spectacle; for in the scarcely perceptible oscillation of the watery mass he
sees ever the slumbering, incomprehensible force, which, until recently, has
been mocking his proud will and, as it were, submerging his boldest
schemes, his most dearly cherished labours and endeavours.
In the same way, mountains and gorges were not created to afford man
encouragement, inasmuch as, with their terrible, menacing aspect, they
seem to him the fangs and talons of some gigantic wild beast—of a beast
which is reaching forth in an effort to devour him. Too vividly they remind
him of his own frail build; too painfully they cause him to go in fear for his
life. And over the summits of those crags and precipices the heavens look
so remote and unattainable that they seem to have become removed out of
the ken of humanity.

Not so that peaceful corner of the earth upon which our hero, in his
slumber, opened his eyes. There, on the contrary, the heavens seemed to hug
the earth—not in order that they might the better aim their thunderbolts, but
in order that they might the closer enfold it in a loving embrace. In fact,
they hovered low in order that, like a sheltering, paternal roof, they might
guard this chosen corner of the earth from every adversity. Meanwhile the
sun shone warm and bright during half the year, and, withdrawing, did so so
slowly and reluctantly that it seemed ever to be turning back for one more
look at the beloved spot, as though wishing to give it one more bright,
warm day before the approaching weather of autumn. Also the hills of that
spot were no more than reduced models of the terrible mountains which, in
other localities, rear themselves to affright the imagination. Rather, they
resembled the gentle slopes down which one may roll in sport, or where one
may sit and gaze dreamily at the declining sun. Below them, toying and
frisking, ran a stream. In one place it discharged itself into a broad pool, in
another it hurried along in a narrow thread, in a third it slackened its pace to
a sudden mood of reverie, and, barely gliding over the stones, threw out on
either side small rivulets whereof the gentle burbling seemed to invite sleep.
Everywhere the vicinity of this corner of the earth presented a series of
landscape studies and cheerful, smiling vistas. The sandy, shelving bank of
the stream, a small copse which descended from the summit of that bank to
the water, a winding ravine of which the depths were penetrated by a rill, a
plantation of birch-trees—all these things seemed purposely to be fitted into
one another, and to have been drawn by the hand of a master. Both the
troubled heart and the heart which has never known care might have
yearned to hide themselves in this forgotten corner of the world, and to live
its life of ineffable happiness. Everything promised a quiet existence which
should last until the grey hairs were come, and thereafter a death so gradual
as almost to resemble the approach of sleep.
There the yearly round fulfils itself in a regular, serene order. As the
calendar ordains, spring comes in in March, when turbid rivulets begin to
run from the hills, and the earth, thawing, steams with tepid vapour. Then
the peasant, doffing his sheepskin, goes out in shirtsleeves alone, and
shades his eyes with’ his hand as gladly he shrugs his shoulders and drinks
his fill of the gleaming sunlight. Then, with a shaft in either hand, he draws
forth the cart which has been lying bottom upwards, under the tiltshed, or
examines and sounds with his foot the plough which has been reposing in

the penthouse. All this is in preparation for the usual routine of toil, since in
that region spring sees no return of sudden snowstorms to heap the fields
and crack the branches. On the other hand, Winter, like a cold,
unapproachable beauty, retains her character until the lawful season of thaw
has arrived. Never does she mock one with unexpected softenings of the air;
never does she triple-harness the earth with unheard-of degrees of frost.
Everything proceeds according to rote—according to a generally prescribed
order of nature. Although, in November, there begin snow and frost which,
towards the festival of Epiphany, increase to the point of freezing to an
icicle the beard of the peasant who has stepped out of his hut for a breath of
fresh air, the sensitive nose can, by February, detect the kindly odour of
approaching spring.
Next, the summer is peculiarly ravishing. Only in that particular spot can
one find that fresh, dry perfume which is the scent neither of laurel nor of
lemon, but of mingled wormwood, pine, and cherry-blossom. Only there,
also, can one find those bright days when the sun’s rays are warm, but never
scorching, and the sky remains cloudless for three mouths on end. As the
bright days draw on they lengthen, week by week; and during that period
the evenings are hot and the nights stifling, while the stars twinkle in the
heavens with the welcoming mien of friends. And when rain at length
arrives, how beneficent is its coming! Boisterously, richly, merrily it spates
forth, like the large, hot tears of a man unexpectedly relieved of care; and as
soon as ever it has passed the sun appears with a new smile of love, to dry
the fields and the hillocks, and to cause all the countryside to assume an
answering smile of delight. How gladly, too, the peasant greets the rain!
“The good rain washes us, and the sun will dry us again,” is his saying as he
exposes his face to the tepid downpour and lets it play upon his shoulders
and back. Moreover, in that region thunder is never terrible, but, rather,
benevolent, and always occurs at one particular season (generally on Saint
Elias’ Day, in order that the people’s established tradition may be fulfilled *
). Also it would appear that, every year, both the number and the intensity of
the peals remain the same—as though for each year the heavenly treasury
had allotted a given measure of electricity. But of terrible and destructive
storms that country can shew no record.
* Namely, that, should thunder occur on that day, the whole
of the ensuing year will be prosperous, since the peals
represent the saint’s passage to heaven.

Nor has the country whereof I am speaking ever been visited with the
Egyptian or other plagues. Never has any member of its population beheld a
dire manifestation of Heaven, nor a thunderbolt, nor an unlooked-for
darkness; nor do venomous vermin abide there, and the locust comes not
thither, and lions, tigers, bears, and wolves are unknown ( owing to the fact
that the country contains no fastnesses for them to dwell in). In short, over
the fields and around the village wander only lowing cattle, bleating sheep,
and cackling poultry.
Yet none but God knows whether a poet or a visionary would find
himself satisfied with the natural features of this peaceful spot. Such
gentlemen, we know, love to gaze upon the moon, and to listen to. the
strains of nightingales; they love to see Luna clothe herself in coquettish,
aureate cloud, and then glide mysteriously through the boughs of trees, and
send forth clusters of silver beams to delight the eyes of her worshippers’!
But in this country of Oblomov’s dream no one knows such a moon; there
Luna’s features, as she looks down upon the villages and the fields,
resembles, rather, a polished, cheery copper basin, and in vain would the
poet fasten ravished eyes upon her, for she would return his gaze with the
same indifference as that with which a round-faced rustic beauty meets the
eloquent, passionate glances of a town gallant.
Nor has a nightingale ever been heard in that country—perchance for the
reason that the region contains no shaded arbours or gardens of roses. But
what an abundance of quails it can show!—so much so that in summer,
when the harvest is in course of being gathered, urchins can catch them
even in their hands! Yet it must not be supposed that thereafter the quails
furnish a gastronomic dainty. Such an outrage would be repugnant to the
moral sense of the inhabitants, since the quail is a bird, and therefore legally
prohibited from being used for food. Consequently it lives but to delight the
popular ear with its song, and in almost every house there hangs beneath the
eaves a wicker cage wherein a member of that feathered species sits
penned.
Even the general aspect of this modest, unaffected spot would fail to
please the poet or the visionary. Never would it be theirs to behold a scene
in which all nature—woodland, lake, cotter’s hut, and sandy hillside—is
burning with a purplish glow, while sharply defined against a purple
background may be seen moving along a sandy, winding road, a cavalcade

of countrymen in attendance upon some great lady who is journeying
towards a ruined castle—a castle where they will find awaiting them the
telling of legends concerning the Wars of the Roses, the eating of wild goats
for supper, and the singing of ballads to the lute by a young English damsel
—a scene of Scottish or Swiss flavour of the kind which has been made
familiar to our imagination by the pen of Sir Waiter Scott.
Of this there is nothing in our country.
How quiet and dreamy are the three or four villages which constitute that
restful region! They lie not far from one another, and seem to have been
thrown into their respective positions by some giant hand, and ever since to
have maintained those positions. In particular, one hut stands on the edge of
a ravine, with one-half its bulk projecting over the declivity, but supported
on three props. Within it some three or four generations have spent happy,
peaceful lives; for though it looks scarcely large enough to house a chicken,
it is none the less tenanted by a well-to-do peasant and his wife. Onisim
Suslov is the peasant’s name, and he cannot stand upright in his abode. The
veranda actually overhangs the ravine, and to reach it one has with one
hand to grasp the herbage, and, with the other, the gable before setting foot
upon the structure itself. Another of the huts is, as it were, gummed to the
side of a hill, like a swallow’s nest, while three others stand close beside it,
and two are situated at the bottom of the ravine.
In the village all is quiet. The doors of its solitary little dwellings stand
open, but not a soul is to be seen. Only the flies circle and buzz in clusters.
Were you to enter one of the huts, you would call aloud in vain, for your
only answer would be the deathlike silence, except that here and there you
might hear the gasping of an invalid or the deep cough of some old woman
who is living out her days upon the stove. Also, there might appear from
behind the fence a long-haired, barefooted youngster of three, clad only in a
shirt, who would gaze mutely at the new-comer, and then timidly hide
himself again.
The same deep silence, the same deep peace, lies also upon the fields.
Only somewhere over the distant soil there can be seen moving, like an ant,
a sunburnt ploughman. Occasionally he leans upon his plough to clear his
forehead of the sweat. Even the manners of that region are possessed of a
still restfulness which nothing can disturb. Never has a robbery or a murder

or a similar happening been known there; never have the inhabitants
succumbed to strong passions, or experienced hazardous adventures.
Indeed, what passions, what adventures would have the power to move
them? No man has ever strayed beyond his own circle, for the local
inhabitants dwell far from other men, and both the nearest village and the
nearest country town lie distant from twenty-five to thirty versts.
True, at given seasons the peasants cart their grain to the river wharf
which lies nearest to them, and once a year, also, they attend a fair; but they
maintain no relations beyond these. In fact, all their interests are centred in
themselves. True, they know that eighty versts away there stands the
provincial capital; but few of them have ever journeyed thither. Also they
know that beyond it stand Saratov and Nizhni Novgorod—likewise they
have heard that such places as Moscow and Petrograd exist, and that on the
farther side of them dwell folk who are known as Germans and French; but
beyond that point there begins for them, as it did for the ancients, a
mysterious world of unknown countries which are peopled with monsters
and two-headed giants, and bounded on the outer side by a void of mist,
and, again, by the colossal fish which bears the world on its bark.
Moreover, since this peaceful corner of the universe is almost inaccessible,
there filters thither but few items of news concerning the great white
universe. * Indeed, even traders in rustic wares who live twenty versts away
know no more than they do. Likewise, it never enters into their heads to
compare their lot with those of other men—to inquire whether other men
are rich or poor, comfortable or in need, for these peasants live in the
fortunate belief that no circumstances could ever be different to their own—
that all other folk must surely be living even as they are, and that to live in
any other fashion would be a sin. Were you to assure them that others
plough, sow, reap, or sell their produce in any way than that which obtains
in this particular spot, the inhabitants would not believe you. That being so,
how could any element of vexation or disturbance ever come nigh them?
True, they resemble the rest of humanity in that they have their cares and
weaknesses and obligations of lax-payment and fits of laziness and
lethargy; but these press upon them but lightly, and occasion no real stirring
of the blood. Indeed, during the past five years not a single soul of that local
population of hundreds has died either a violent death or a natural. Even
should a man or a woman expire of old age or a senile disease, it is not long
before the rest have got ever their astonishment at the unusual occurrence.

In the same way, after the trader Tarass had come near to steaming himself
to death in his hut, and had had to be revived with cold water, the affair
caused scarcely any stir in the neighbourhood.
* As distinguished from the black universe, the unknown.

Of crimes, one only—that of theft of produce from market gardens—is at
all prevalent. Also, once two pigs and a chicken mysteriously disappeared.
True, the latter event threw the district into something of a turmoil, but was
unanimously ascribed to a pedlar who, the previous evening, had passed
through the district on his way to a fair. In general, such untoward incidents
are of the greatest rarity.
However, in a ditch in a paddock near the bridge once there was found
lying a man—apparently a member of a party which had just traversed the
neighbourhood en route for the country town. Some boys were the first to
notice him, and at once they came running home with a horrifying tale of a
great serpent or werewolf which was crouching in a hole. To this they added
a statement that the said creature had pursued them, and come near to
devouring Kuzka. From far and near the peasants armed themselves with
hatchets and pitchforks, and proceeded to the ditch en masse.
“Whither away?” the old men said reprovingly. “Are you mad? What do
you want to do? Leave things alone, and no harm will come of it!”
Nevertheless the peasants set forth, and, when about a hundred paces
from the spot, began to adjure the monster in varying terms. But no answer
was returned. Next, after halting a moment, the party advanced a little
further. The man seemed still to be lying in the ditch, with his head resting
against a fence, while beside him lay a satchel and a cudgel (on the latter of
which was slung a pair of boots). Yet the peasants could not summon up the
necessary courage to approach him or to touch him.
“Hi, friend!” they shouted—one scratching his head and another the back
of his neck. “What are you doing there? Who are you? What’s the matter?”
The traveller made as though to raise his head a little, but failed.
Evidently he was ill or tired out. Then a peasant ventured to touch him with
a pitchfork.
“Don’t interfere with him, don’t interfere with him!” cried the rest. “How
do we know what he is, seeing that he refuses to speak? Leave him alone,

friends!”
“Yes, we had better go away,” added certain others. “What has he to do
with us? Harm might come of him.”
So all returned to the village, and told the elder men that, lying in a ditch,
there was a strange man who would not speak, and whose identity was
known only to God.
“If he does not belong to these parts, leave him alone,” advised the elders
from the spot where, with hands on knees, they were sitting resting on a
bank. “Yes, leave him to himself. ’Tis no use your going there.”
This, then, was the corner of the world whither Oblomov passed in his
sleep. Of the three or four scattered villages in the region, one was named
Sosnovka, and a second Vavilovka—the two being distant from one another
about a verst. Together they constituted Oblomov’s hereditary estate, and
bore the joint title of Oblomovka. In Sosnovka stood the manor-house and
the farm, while five versts from the village there lay the hamlet of Verklevo
—once the property of the Oblomovs, but long since passed into other
hands. The same hamlet had attached to it a number of outlying huts. As a
whole, Verklevo belonged to a rich landowner, a constant absentee, and the
estate was managed by a German bailiff. There you have the geography of
this remote corner of the world.
Oblomov dreamed that, aged seven, he awoke in his little cot at home.
He felt merry and full of life. What a goodly, handsome, plump youngster
he was, with cheeks of such rotundity that, however desperately any other
young scamp might have tried to rival them by inflation of his own, no
competitor could possibly have succeeded. Oblomov’s nurse had long been
waiting for him to awake, and now she began to draw on for him his
stockings. This he refused to allow her to do; which end he attained by
frisking and kicking, while she tried to catch hold of his leg, and the pair
laughed joyously together. Finally, she lifted him on to her lap, and washed
him, and combed his hair; after which she conducted him to his mother. On
seeing his long-dead parent, the sleeping Oblomov’s form trembled with
delight and affection, and from under his unconscious eyelids there stole
and remained two burning tears....

Upon him his mother showered affectionate kisses, and gazed at him with
tender solicitude to see whether his eyes were clear and healthy. Did he in
any way ail? she inquired. Had he (tiffs to his nurse) slept quietly, or had he
lain awake all night? Had he had any dreams? Had he been at all feverish?
Lastly, she took him by the hand, and led him to the sacred ikon. Kneeling
with one arm around his form, she prompted him in the words of the
prayers, while the boy repeated them with scanty attention, since he
preferred, rather, to turn his eyes to the windows, whence the freshness and
scent of a lilac-tree was flooding the room.
“Shall we go for a walk to-day, mamma?” suddenly he asked.
“Yes, darling,” she replied hastily, but kept her gaze fixed upon the ikon,
and hurriedly concluded the sacred formula. Yet into the words of that
formula her very soul was projected, whereas the little one repeated them
only in nonchalant fashion.
The prayer over, they went to greet his father, and then to take morning
tea. Beside the table Oblomov could see seated the aunt of eighty who had
always lived with them. Never did she cease to grumble at the ancient
serving-maid who, her head trembling with senility, stood behind her chair
to wait upon her. Also there were present three old maiden ladies who were
distant relatives of his father’s; a weak-minded gentleman named
Chekmenev, who, the brother-in-law of Oblomov’s mother, was the owner
of seven serfs, and happened to be staying with Oblomov’s parents; and
certain other old men and women. The latter, the domestic staff and retinue
of the Oblomov family, caught hold of the little Ilya Ilyitch, and started to
heap him with caresses and attentions—so much so that he had much ado to
wipe away the traces of these unsought kisses. Then there began the feeding
of the child with rolls, biscuits, and cream; after which his mother bestowed
upon him another embrace, and sent him out to walk round the garden and
the courtyard and the lake—accompanying her farewell with particular
instructions to the nurse that never must she leave the child alone for a
single moment, nor yet must she allow him to approach the horses, the
dogs, or the goat, nor yet must she take him far from home. Above all
things, never must the nurse suffer him to approach the ravine, which was
the most dreaded spot in the neighbourhood, and bore an evil reputation.
Once there had been found there a dog which confessed itself a mad one,
inasmuch as it had run headlong from folk who chased it with hatchets and

pitchforks, and had disappeared behind a neighbouring hill. Likewise to the
ravine carrion was carted, while robbers and wolves and various other
creatures which never existed in the world at all were supposed to dwell
there.
But to these warnings of his mother’s the child paid little heed. Already
he was outside, in the courtyard. With gleeful surprise (as though for the
first time in his life) he went the round of his parents’ establishment, with
its gates sagging outwards, its dinted roof where lichen grew, its tottering
veranda, its various annexes and outbuildings, and its overgrown garden.
Also he yearned to ascend to the hanging gallery which girdled the house,
that thence he might see the river; but the gallery was now in decay, and
scarcely able to hold together, so that none but the servants trod it, and at no
time did the gentry walk there. Heedless of his mother’s warnings, however,
the little Oblomov was on the point of making for its seductive steps when
the nurse showed herself on the veranda, and caught hold of him. Next, he
rushed from her towards the hay-loft, with the intention of scaling its steep
ladder; and just had she time to destroy successive schemes of ascending to
the pigeon-cote, of penetrating to the cattle-yard, and—Heaven preserve us
all!—of making his way to the ravine!
“God bless the child!” exclaimed the nurse. “Will you be quiet, then,
young sir? You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” Indeed, the whole day, as
well as every day and every night, was spent by her in similar alarums and
excursions, in alternations of torture and relief on the child’s account, in
terror because he had fallen and broken his nose, in gratification at his
warm, childish caresses, and in dim anxiety concerning his ultimate future.
Only these and like emotions made her old heart beat and her old blood
grow warm; only these retained in her the drowsy life which, but for them,
would long ago have flickered out.
Yet the child was not always mischievous. Sometimes he would grow
suddenly quiet as, sitting beside her, he gazed fixedly before him with his
childish intellect taking in the various phenomena which presented
themselves to his vision. Such phenomena were sinking fast into his mind,
to grow and ripen there even as it grew and ripened.
The morning was a splendid one, and the air still fresh, since the sun had
not yet attained much height. From the house, from the trees, from the

dovecote, and from the gallery there streamed long shadows which formed,
in the garden and in the orchard, cool corners which invited meditation and
sleep. Only in the distance a rye-held was glowing with flame, and the river
sparkling and flashing in the rays of the sun until actually it hurt the eyes to
look at it.
“Why is it so dark in one place and bright in another?” asked the child.
“Will it soon be bright everywhere?”
“Yes. That is because the sun has come out to meet the moon, and at
times keeps frowning because he cannot catch sight of her. By and by he
will catch sight of her. Then he will send out his light once more.” The child
pondered, and gazed at the scene around him. Before him he could see
Antip driving the watercart, with another Antip, ten times as large as the
real one, accompanying him, and the barrel of the cart looking as large as a
house, and the horse’s shadow covering the whole of the pond. Then the
shadows seemed to take two strides across the pond, and then to move
behind the hill, though the figure of Antip had not yet left the courtyard. In
his turn the child took a couple of strides, and then a third, to see if he too
would end by disappearing behind the hill, which he had a great longing to
ascend, for the purpose of ascertaining what had become of the horse.
Consequently he set on towards the gates but only to hear his mother calling
from a window—
“Nurse, nurse, do you not see that the boy has just run out into the
sunshine? Pray bring him back into the shade, or he will get a sunstroke,
and be ill, and sick, and unable to eat! Besides, he might run down into the
ravine!”
“Oh, the naughty darling!” the nurse muttered to herself as she dragged
him back on to the veranda. The child looked about him with the keen,
observant glance of a “grown-up” who is debating how best a morning can
be spent. Not a trifle, not a circumstance, escaped the child’s inquisitive
attention, so that insensibly the picture of his home life engraved itself upon
his mind, and his sensitive intellect nourished itself on living examples, and
involuntarily modelled its programme of life on the life which surrounded
it.
Never at any time could it be said that the morning was wasted in the
Oblomovs’ establishment. The sound of knives in the kitchen, as they

minced cutlets and vegetables, reached even to the village; while from the
servants’ quarters came the hum of a spindle, coupled with the thin, low
voice of an old woman—but a voice so low that with difficulty could one
distinguish whether she were weeping, or whether she were merely
improvising to herself a mournful “song without words.” Also, on Antip
returning with the watercart, there would advance to meet it, with pails,
cans, and pitchers, a number of maidservants and grooms, while from the
storehouse an old woman would produce a vessel of meal and a pile of
eggs, and carry them to the kitchen. There, on the cook suddenly throwing
some water out of the window, the cat Arapka—which, with eyes fixed
upon the view, had spent the morning in agitating the tip of her tail and
licking herself—came in for a splashing.
The head of the family, too, was not idle, for he spent the morning in
sitting by the window and following with his eyes everything which took
place in the courtyard.
“Hi, Ignashka, what have you there, you rascal?” he cried to a man who
happened to cross the open space.
“Some knives to be sharpened in the scullery,” the man replied, without
looking at his master.
“Very well, then. Mind you sharpen them properly.”
Next, the master stopped one of the maidservants.
“Where are you going?” he inquired.
“To the cellar to get some milk for the table,” she replied, shading her
eyes with her hand.
“Good!” he pronounced. “And see that you don’t spill any. You,
Zakharka—where are you off to once more? This is the third time I have
seen you gadding about. Go back to your place in the hall.” Whereupon
Zakharka returned to her day-dreams at the post mentioned. Again, as soon
as the cows returned from pasture, old Oblomov was always there to see
that they were properly watered. Also, when, from his post at the window,
he chanced to observe the yard-dog chasing one of the hens he hastened to
take the necessary measures against a recurrence of such conduct. In the
same way, his wife was fully employed. For three hours she discussed with
Averka, the tailor, the best ways and means of converting a waistcoat of her

husband’s into a jacket for her son—herself drawing the requisite lines in
chalk, and seeing to it that Averka should pilfer not a morsel of the cloth.
Thereafter she passed to the maids’ room, where she parcelled cut to each
damsel the day’s portion of lacemaking; whence she departed to summon
one of her personal maids to attend her in the garden, for the purpose of
seeing how the apples were swelling, which of them had fallen or were
turning ripe, which trees wanted grafting or pruning, and so forth. But her
chief care was the kitchen and the dinner. Concerning the latter she
consulted the entire household, including the aged aunt. Each member of
the family proposed a special dish, and the sum of these proposals was
taken into consideration, adjudicated upon in detail, and adopted or rejected
according to the final decision of the mistress. From time to time, also, a
maid was dispatched to the culinary regions to remind the cook of this, or to
tell her to add that, or to instruct her to change the other, while conveying to
her sugar, honey, and wine for flavouring, and also seeing to it that the said
cook was using everything which had been measured out. In fact, the
supervision of food was the first and the principal domestic preoccupation
of Oblomovka.
What calves were not fattened for the year’s festivals! What poultry was
not reared! What forethought and care and skill were not devoted to the
consumption of comestibles! Game fowls and pullets were set apart solely
for birthdays and other solemn occasions; wherefore they were stuffed with
nuts. For the same reason geese were caught several days beforehand, and
hung up in bags until wanted, in order that, being restrained from exercise,
they might put on the more fat. And what a roasting and a pickling and a
baking would sometimes take place, and what mead and kvass * were there
not brewed, and what pies were there not compounded!
* A liquor made from fermented bread crusts or fruit.

Until noon, therefore, everything at Oblomovka was in a state of bustle
and commotion. Life was indeed full and antlike and in evidence! Even on
Sundays and holidays these labour-loving ants did not desist from their toil,
for on such days the clatter of knives in the kitchen sounded louder and
more rapid than ever, a maid made several journeys from the storeroom to
the kitchen with double quantities of meal and eggs, and in the poultry-run
an added amount of cackling and of bloodshed took place. Likewise, on
such days there was baked a gigantic pie, which was eaten by the gentry on

the same and the following days, and by the maids on the third and fourth;
after which, should it survive to the fifth day, the last stale remnants, devoid
of stuffing, were given, as a special favour, to Antip, who, crossing himself,
undauntedly attacked the rock-hard fragments—though it was in the
thought that it had recently been the gentry’s pie rather than in the pie itself
that he took most delight; even as an archaeologist rejoices to drink even
the poorest wine from the shell of a thousand-year-old vessel.
All this the boy noted with his childish, ever-watchful mind. He
perceived that, after mornings thus usefully and busily spent, there ensued
noon and dinner. On the present occasion noontide was sultry, and not a
cloud was in the sky. Indeed, the sun seemed to be standing still to scorch
the grass, and the air to have ceased to circulate—to be hanging without the
slightest movement. Neither from tree nor lake could the faintest rustle be
heard, and over the village and the countryside there hung an unbroken
stillness, as though everything in them were dead. Only from afar could a
human voice be distinguished, while, some twenty sazhens * away, the
drone of a flying beetle, with the snoring of some one who had sunk into
the thick herbage to enjoy a refreshing sleep, came gently to the ear. Even
the house was possessed by a silence as of death, for the hour of post-
prandial slumber had arrived. The boy’s father, mother, and aged grandaunt,
with their attendants, could be seen disposed in various corners; and, should
any one not possess a particular corner, he or she repaired either to the hay-
loft or to the garden or to a cool resting-place among the growing hay or,
with face protected from the flies with a handkerchief, to a spot where the
scorching heat would assist digestion after the enormous dinner. Even the
gardener stretched himself out beneath a bush by the side of his plot, and
the coachman in the stable.
* The zazhen = six English feet.

Little Oblomov proceeded to peep into the servants’ hall, where the
inmates were sleeping as though slumber had become an epidemic. On the
benches, on the floor, and on the threshold they slept, while their children
crawled about the courtyard and fashioned mud pies. Indeed, the very dogs
had crawled into their kennels, since there was no longer any one to bark at.
In short, one might have traversed the entire establishment without meeting
a single soul; and everything in it could with ease have been stolen, and
removed in carts from the courtyard, since no one would have been there to

prevent the deed. The prevailing lethargy was all-consuming, all-
conquering—a true image of death; seeing that, but for the fact that from
various corners there came snores in different notes and keys, every one
seemed wholly to have departed this life. Only at rare intervals would some
one raise his head with a start, gaze around him with vacant eyes, and then
turn over to the other side.
After dinner the child accompanied his nurse for a second airing out of
doors. Yet, despite her mistress’s injunctions and her own resolves, the old
woman could not altogether resist the general call of sleep, and began to fall
a victim to the all-prevalent malady of Oblomovka. At first she kept a
vigilant eye upon her little charge, and, chiding him for his waywardness,
never let him stray from her side; but presently, after giving him strict
instructions not to go beyond the gates, nor to interfere with the goat, nor to
climb either the dovecote or the gallery, she settled herself in a shady spot,
with the ostensible intention of at once knitting a stocking and of watching
over young Oblomov. Next she took to checking him only in lazy fashion,
as her head nodded and she said to herself: “Look you, he will certainly
climb those stairs to the gallery, or else”—her eyes had almost closed—“he
will run down into the ravine.” With that her head sank forward, and the
stocking slipped from her hands. In a second her open mouth had emitted a
gentle snore, and the boy had disappeared from her vision.
Needless to say, this was the moment which the youngster had been
impatiently awaiting, for it marked the beginning of an independent
existence, and he was now alone in the wide, wide world. On tiptoe he left
the nurse’s side, and, peeping cautiously at the other slumberers, kept
stopping to throw a second glance at any one who chanced to stir, or to spit,
or to snuffle in his sleep. At last, with a tremor of joy in his heart, he made
for the gallery, ascended the creaking stairs at a run, scaled also the
dovecote, explored the recesses of the garden, listened to the buzzing of
beetles, and followed with his eyes their flight through the air. Next, on
hearing a chirping sound in the grass, he sought and captured the disturber
of the public peace, in the shape of a dragon-fly, whose wings he proceeded
to tear off, and whose body to impale upon a straw, in order that he might
see how, thus hampered, the creature would contrive to fly. Afterwards,
fearing almost to breathe, he watched a spider suck blood from a captured
fly, while the wretched victim struggled and buzzed in the spider’s claws.

Finally the tragedy was brought to an end by the boy slaying both torturer
and tortured. Next, he repaired to the moat to search for sundry small roots
which he knew of; which found, he peeled them, and then devoured the
same with relish, in the make-believe that they were the apples and
preserves which his mamma was accustomed to give him. This item
exhausted, he hied him through the entrance gates—his object in so doing
being to reach a birch copse which looked to him so close at hand that,
should he take the direct route, and not the circuitous high-road (that is to
say, should he walk straight across the moat, and through the osier
plantation), he would be able to attain his goal in five minutes. But, alas! he
felt afraid, for he had heard tales of wood goblins, of brigands, and of
fearsome wild beasts. Next, the spirit moved him to make for the ravine,
which lay a hundred paces from the garden; so, running to the edge of the
declivity, and puckering his eyes, he gazed into its depths as into Vulcan’s
crater. Suddenly to his mind recurred all the tales and traditions concerning
the spot; and terror seized him. and, half-dead, half-alive, he rushed back
and threw himself into his nurse’s arms. Awakened, she sprang up,
straightened the cap on her head, arranged her grey curls with one finger,
and pretended never to have been to sleep at all. Glancing suspiciously at
the little Ilya, and then at the gentry’s windows, she began with tremulous
hands to work the knitting needles of the stocking which had been lying in
her lap.
Meanwhile the heat had decreased, and everything in nature had revived
a little since the sun was fast declining towards the forest. Gradually the
stillness indoors also began to be broken. Here and there a door creaked,
footsteps could be heard crossing the yard, and some one sneezed in the
hay-loft. Soon from the kitchen a man came hurrying under the weight of a
huge samovar, and the entire household then assembled for tea—one man
with his face flushed and his eyes still dim, another man with red marks on
his cheek and temple, a third speaking in a voice not his own for
drowsiness, and all of them snuffling, wheezing, yawning, scratching their
heads, and stretching themselves in a semiwaking condition. It seemed that
dinner and sleep had combined to arouse an unquenchable thirst which
parched the throat, for even dozens of cupfuls of tea could not assuage it,
and, amid a chorus of sighs and grunts, resort had to be made to bilberry
wine, to perry, to kvass, and even to more medicinal methods of moistening
this avidity of gullet. The company sought relief from thirst as from a

Heaven-sent plague, and all felt as exhausted as though they were travelling
in the Arabian desert, and could nowhere find a spring.
By his mother’s side the child gazed at the strange faces around him, and
listened to the drowsy, drawling talk. Yet the spectacle delighted him, and
he found each stray word interesting.
After tea every one took up some minor occupation or another. One man
repaired to the riverside, and strolled along the brink—kicking pebbles into
the water as he did so. Another took a seat in a window, and followed with
his eyes each passing occurrence. Should a cat cross the courtyard, or a
jackdaw fly by, the watcher scanned both the one and the other, and turned
his head to right and to left in order to do so. In the same way will dogs
spend whole days at a window—their heads thrust into the sunlight, and
their gaze taking stock of every passer-by.
The mother took little Ilya’s head in her hands, drew it down into her lap,
and combed his hair with a gentle caress as, inviting her maids to admire
him, she talked concerning his future, and preordained for him the hero’s
part in some splendid epic. For their part, the maids foretold for him
mountains of gold.
At length dusk began to draw in. Once more the fire crackled in the
kitchen, and the clatter of knives became audible. Supper was being
prepared. Meanwhile the rest of the servants gathered at the entrance gates,
and thence came sounds of laughter, and of music, and of the playing of
gorielki. The sun had sunk behind the forest, yet still was sending forth rays
in a fiery, faintly warm streak which, as it passed over the surface of the
treetops, touched to gold the tips of the pines. Finally these rays
successively expired, until only a solitary beam could be seen fixed, needle-
like, in a cluster of boughs before going to join its comrades. Objects then
began to lose their outline, and the scene to become blurred in, first
greyness, then a blank almost of total obscurity. The songs of birds grew
fainter, then ceased altogether, save for one persistent singer which, as
though disagreeing with its fellows, continued to break the silence with
intermittent warbling. Presently it too took to uttering its song at rarer
intervals, and to whistling with’ more feeble insistence; until finally it
breathed a last soft-drawn note, gave a flutter or two which gently stirred
the foliage around it, and—fell asleep.

After that all was silent, save that some crickets were chirping in chorus
and against one another. A mist was rising from the earth, and spreading
over lake and river. Like everything else, the latter had sunk to rest; and
though something caused it to splash for a last time, the water instantly
resumed its absolute immobility. In the air a dampness could be detected,
and the air itself could be felt growing warmer and warmer. Amid it the
trees looked like groups of monsters; and when, suddenly, something
cracked in the weird depths of the forest, it might have been thought that
one of those monsters had been shifting its position, and with its foot had
snapped a dry bough in doing so. Overhead, the first star could be seen
glowing like a living eye, while in the windows of the house were a few
twinkling lights. The hour of nature’s most solemn, all-embracing silence
had arrived—the hour when the creative brain can work at its best, and
when poetic thought seethes most ardently, and when the heart flames with
the greatest heat of passion or with the greatest poignancy of grief—the
hour when the cruel soul ripens to a maximum of strength and composure
as it meditates evil—the hour when, at Oblomovka, every one settled down
to a night of profound, calm restfulness.
“Let us go for a walk,” said little Ilya to his mother.
“God bless the child!” she cried. “How could we go for a walk? It is now
damp, and you would get your little feet wet. Besides, we should find it
dreadful out of doors, for at this hour the wood goblin is abroad, and he
carries off little boys.”
“To what place does he carry them, and what is he like, and where does
he live?” asked the child; whereupon the mother gave full rein to her
unbridled fancy. As she did so the child listened with blinking eyes; until at
length, on sleep completely overcoming him, the nurse approached, took
him from his mother’s lap, and bore him to bed, with his head hanging over
her shoulder.
“Another day is over, praise be to God!” said the inmates of Oblomovka
as, yawning, they made the sign of the cross and then retired to rest. “Well
spent it has been, and God send that to-morrow be like it. Glory, O Lord, to
Thee this night! Glory, O Lord, to Thee!”
Oblomov dreamed a second dream. On a long winter’s evening he was
pressing close to his nurse, and she was whispering of some unknown

country where neither cold nor darkness were known, and where miracles
took place, and where rivers ran honey and milk, and where no one did
anything the year round, and where only good boys like Ilya Ilyitch himself
walked day by day in company with maidens such as neither tongue nor pen
could hope to describe. Also (the nurse said) there dwelt there a kind witch
who sometimes revealed herself to mortals in the shape of a pikefish; and
this witch singled out as her especial favourite a quiet, inoffensive boor who
formerly had been the butt of his fellows, and, for some unknown reason,
heaped him with her bounty, so that always he possessed plenty to eat, and
clothes ever ready to wear, and ended by marrying a marvellous beauty
whose name was Militrissa Kirbitievna.
The nurse related the story, and the child, with alert eyes and ears, hung
upon her words. So artfully did the nurse or tradition eliminate from the
story all resemblance to everyday life that the boy’s keen intellect and
imagination, fired by the device, remained enthralled until, in later years, he
had come even to man’s estate. As a matter of fact, the tale which the nurse
thus lovingly related was the legend of the fool Emel—that clever, biting
satire upon our forefathers and, it may be, also upon ourselves. True, in
proportion as he grew up, little Oblomov came to learn that no such things
as rivers of honey and milk, or even such persons as kind witches, really
existed; yet, though he came to smile at his nurse’s stories, that smile was
never wholly sincere, since always it would be accompanied by a sigh. For
him the legend confounded itself with life, and, unconsciously, he found
himself regretting that the legend differed from life, and that life differed
from the legend. Involuntarily he would dream of Militrissa Kirbitievna,
and feel attracted towards the country whereof nothing was known except
that folk there went for walks, and were free from sorrow and care. Never
could he rid himself of a longing to spend his days in lying upon the stove
(even as the favourite of the legend had done), and to be dressed in ready-
made, unearned clothes, and to eat at the expense of a benevolent witch. To
the same story had his father and his grandfather listened as, shaped
according to the stereotyped version current throughout antiquity, it had
issued from the mouths of male and female nurses through the long course
of ages and of generations.
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.
Time, the rare times when other cares overtook the good folk of
Oblomovka, but always they faced the situation with stoical immobility,
and the said cares, after circling over their heads, flew away like birds
which, having sought to cling to a smooth, perpendicular wall, find that
they are fluttering their wings in vain against the stubborn stone, and
therefore spread those pinions and depart. For instance, on one occasion a
portion of the gallery around the house fell upon, and buried under its ruins,
a hencoop full of poultry, as well as, in doing so, narrowly missed a

serving-woman who happened to be sitting near the spot with her husband.
At once the establishment was in an uproar. Every one came running to the
scene, under the impression that not only the hencoop, but also the barinia
and little Ilya, were lying under the debris. Every one held up his or her
hands in horror, and fell to blaming every one else for not having foreseen
the catastrophe. Every one expressed surprise that the gallery had fallen,
and also surprise that it had not fallen long ago. Upon that there ensued a
clamour and a discussion as to how things could best be put right; after
which, with sighs of regret for the poultry, the company slowly dispersed,
while strictly forbidding little Ilya to approach the rums. Three weeks later
Andrushka, Petrushka, and Vassika were ordered to chop the planks and the
remainder of the balustrade in pieces, and then to remove the fragments to
the outbuildings, lest the road should become obstructed; and in the
outbuildings those fragments tossed about until the following spring. Every
time that the elder Oblomov saw them from the window he fell to thinking,
what had best be done with them. Summoning the carpenter, he took
counsel with the man as to whether he had better build a new gallery or pull
down what was left of the old one; until finally he dismissed his subordinate
with the words, “Do you wait a little until I have considered the matter
further.” The same thing went on until, one day, either Vassika or Motika
reported to the barin that that morning, while he (Vassika or Motika) had
been climbing over the remains of the old gallery, the corners of it had
come away from the walls, and more of the structure had fallen; whereupon
the carpenter was summoned to a final consultation, and the upshot was that
some of the old fragments were used to prop the remaining portions of the
gallery. Sure enough, by the close of the month this had been done.
“Aye, that gallery looks as good as new,” the old man said to his wife.
“See how splendidly Thedot has re-erected the beams! They resemble the
pillars which the Governor has just had fitted to his house. The job has been
well done, and will last for a long time.”
Here some one reminded him that it would be as well also to have the
gates rehung and the veranda repaired, since the holes in the steps to the
latter were affording access, not only to the cats, but also to the pigs.
“Yes, yes, it ought to be done,” said the barin thoughtfully. Then he went
out to look at the veranda. “Yes, certainly the thing is breaking up,” he
continued as he see-sawed one of the planks like a cradle.

“They have been loose ever since the veranda was made,” some one
remarked.
“How so?” asked the barin. “They are loose only because the floor has
not been mended for sixteen years. It was done then by Luka. He was a
carpenter, if you like! Now he is dead, may God rest his soul! Workmen are
not as clever as they used to be—they merely spoil things.”
From that old Oblomov turned his attention to something else; and to this
day—so report has it—the veranda is rickety, though not actually fallen to
pieces. Certainly Luka must have been a good workman!
However, to do the master and the mistress justice, they were capable of
being shaken out of their apathy, even to the point of growing angry and
heated, should any failure or misfortune occur. How, they would inquire,
could such and such a matter have come to be overlooked or neglected? At
once due measures must be taken. Perhaps this would be relative to the fact
that the footbridge over the moat needed mending, or that the garden fence
called for repairs at a spot where the planking was lying flat upon the
ground and allowing the cattle to enter and spoil the shrubs. Indeed, so
solicitous was the barin for his property that once, when walking in the
garden, he, with his own hands, and with many grunts and groans, lifted up
a length of fencing, and ordered the gardener to fix a couple of props to the
same; and to this activity on the part of the proprietor was due the fact that
the said fence remained upright during the whole of the remainder of the
summer—until once more a winter snowstorm laid it low. Also, when
Antip, with his horse and water-cart, fell through the bridge into the moat
three new planks were inserted into the structure! Indeed, Antip had not
recovered from his bruising before the bridge was looking almost as good
as new! And even when the garden fence collapsed a second time the cows
and the goats did not reap very much advantage from the event. True, they
managed to devour a few currant-bushes, and also to strip a dozen lime-
trees; but before they could begin also upon the apple-trees an order was
issued that the fence should be properly dug in and reditched. But this was
only after two cows and a goat had been caught redhanded. You should
have seen the distension of their stomachs with the generous fare!...
Once more Oblomov dreamed that he was in the great, dark drawing-
room at home. The long winter’s evening was closing in, and his mother,

seated on the sofa and engaged in quietly knitting a boy’s stocking, was
yawning occasionally, and scratching her head with a knitting-needle.
Beside her were two maids—their heads bent over their work as
industriously they fashioned a holiday garment either for young Ilya or for
his father or for themselves. Meanwhile the barin, with hands clasped
behind his back, was pacing cheerfully to and fro, or seating himself on a
chair for a moment or two before resuming his walk. Ever and anon, too, he
would take a pinch of snuff, sneeze, and then take another pinch. As for
light, it came from a single tallow candle, and even the said candle was a
luxury permitted only on autumn and winter evenings; for in summer every
one contrived to rise and to go to bed by daylight, so that candles might be
saved altogether. This was a practice which had arisen partly from custom
and partly from economy. Of every commodity not produced at home, but
requiring, rather, to be bought, the good folk of Oblomovka were extremely
parsimonious; so that, although they would willingly slaughter a fine
gamefowl or a dozen young pullets for a guest’s entertainment, not a raisin
too much would be put into a pudding, and every face would whiten if the
said guest should pour himself out a second glassful of wine. Very seldom,
however, did such contretemps occur: only the most abandoned of wretches
would have done things like those—and guests of that kidney never
obtained even admittance to Oblomovka. Local manners required that, what
though twice or thrice invited to partake of a given dish or a given bottle of
wine, the guest should not do so, since he was supposed to be aware that
even the first invitation had conveyed a secret prayer that he would kindly
abstain from the dish or bottle of wine after merely tasting of the same. Nor
were two candles lit for every guest, since candles required to be bought in
the town, and therefore, like all other purchased articles, were kept under
lock and key by the lady of the house, and, with the candle-ends, were
counted before being stored away.
In short, Oblomovka disliked disbursing hard cash; so much so that,
however much a given article might be required, the money for it would be
handed out with reluctance, however insignificant the sum. As for any
considerable outlay, it was accompanied with groans, lamentations, and
high words, since the Oblomovkans would suffer any kind of misfortune
rather than part with their coin. For this reason the sofa in the drawing-room
had long been in rags, and the leather on the barin’s arm-chair leather only
by courtesy, since most of its cord and rope stuffing was now exposed, and

only a single strip of the original covering clung to the back of the chair—
the rest having, during the past five years, become split into strips, and
fallen away. For the same reason the entrance gates had sagged, and the
veranda become rickety. Nevertheless, to pay out, say, from two to five
hundred roubles for a given purpose, however necessary that purpose might
be, seemed to the inhabitants of the establishment something almost
approaching suicide. In fact, on hearing that a young landowner of the
neighbourhood had gone to Moscow and there paid three hundred roubles
for a dozen shirts, twenty-five for a pair of boots, and forty for a waistcoat
(it was on the occasion of the landowner’s marriage), old Oblomov crossed
himself, and exclaimed with an expression of horror:
“That young man ought to be clapped into prison!” In general, the
Oblomovkans paid no heed to politico-economic axioms concerning the
necessity of swift, brisk circulation of capital, or concerning the active
production and exchange of commodities. In the simplicity of their souls
they considered that the best theory, as well as the best practice, with regard
to capital was to hoard it.
On chairs in the drawing-room there would be seated snoring, in different
attitudes, the gentry and customary intimates of the house. For the most part
a profound silence would reign among them, for they saw one another every
day, and their respective stores of intellectual wealth had long been tapped
and explored, while news from without arrived but scantily. Indeed, amid
the stillness the only sound to be heard would be that of old Oblomov’s
heavy, workaday slippers, the dull beat of the clock in its case, and the
snapping of thread as one or another of the sewing party bit or broke off a
piece. Perhaps after half an hour of this one of those present would yawn—
then make the sign of the cross over the lips, and murmur: “Lord, pardon
me!” Next, some one would follow suit, and then a third, until the
infectious desire to ventilate the lungs had gone the round of the company.
Next, old Oblomov would approach the window, look through it, and say
with a touch of surprise: “Only five o’clock, yet already it is dark in the
courtyard!”
“Yes,” some one would answer, “’tis always dark by this time. The long
evenings are beginning to draw in.”

In spring, contrariwise, the company would fall to expressing surprise
and gratification at the thought that the long days were approaching. Yet,
had you inquired what the long days meant to them, they could not possibly
have told you! After this episode silence would resume its sway, until,
perhaps, in snuffing the candle, some one would chance to extinguish it.
Upon that every one would give a start, and one of the company would be
sure to ejaculate:
“An unexpected guest is making his way in our direction.” In fact, it was
not an uncommon phenomenon for the incident to give rise to a lengthy
conversation.
Time, at Oblomovka, was reckoned mostly by festivals, by the seasons of
the year, and by various family and domestic events—no reference
whatsoever being made, to months or to the days of a month. This may have
partly arisen from the fact that none but old Oblomov were capable of
distinguishing between the names of the months and the dates in a given
month.
Presently the head of the family would relapse into meditation, while
little Ilya, lolling behind his mother’s back, would also be sunk in dreams,
and at times actually dozing. Suddenly old Oblomov would (to take a
typical incident) halt in the middle of his pacing, and clap his hand
anxiously to the tip of his nose; whereupon there would ensue some such
dialogue as the following:
The master of the house: What on earth is the matter with me? See! Some
one must have passed away, for the tip of my nose is itching!
His wife: Good Lord! Why should any one have passed away because the
tip of your nose is sore? Some one has passed away only when the bridge of
one’s nose is hurting one. What a forgetful man you are, to be sure! Were
you to say a thing like that before strangers, you would make us blush for
you.
The master of the house: But every part of my nose is hurting me?
His wife: Pain at the side of it means news to come; in the eyebrows,
sorrow; in the forehead, a greeting; on the right side, a man; on the left side,
a woman; in the ears, rain; in the lips, a kiss; in the whiskers, a present of

something to eat; in the elbow, a new place to sleep in; and in the sole of the
foot, a journey.
And so forth, and so forth.
Lastly, when nine o’clock had struck there would follow supper; after
which the company would disperse to rest, and sleep would once more
reign over the care-free heads of the Oblomovkans.
In his dream Oblomov saw not only an evening spent in this manner, but
whole weeks and months and years of such evening’s. Never did anything
occur to interrupt the uniformity of that life, nor were the Oblomovkans in
any way wearied by it, since they could conceive no other existence, and
would have turned from any other with distaste. Had there been imported
into that existence any change due to circumstances, they would have
regretted the fact, and felt troubled by the thought that to-morrow was not
going to be precisely as to-day. What wanted they with the diversity, the
changes, the incidents, for which others yearned? “Let others drink of that
cup,” said they; “but for us Oblomovkans—no such thing. Let others live as
they please.” Incident—even pleasing incident—they considered to bring
disturbance and fuss and worry and commotion in its train, so that one
could not sit quietly in one’s seat and just talk and eat one’s meals.
Therefore, as decade succeeded decade, the Oblomovkans dozed and
yawned, and indulged in good-humoured laughter at rustic jests, and
assembled in corners to relate of what they had dreamed during the
previous night. Had their dreams been unpleasant, the company at once
became thoughtful and nervous, and refrained from jesting. On the other
hand, had their dreams been of a prophetic nature, at once the company
grew cheerful or despondent, according as the visions had promised sorrow
or joy. Lastly, had their dreams called for the consideration of some portent,
the company proceeded to take such active measures as might be necessary
to deal with the situation. Also, every one indulged in card-playing, games
of “fools,” and so forth; while, as for the womenfolk, they would discuss
the neighbourhood, and pry not only into its family life and social gaiety,
but also into its secret ends and desires. About these they would dispute,
and then pass censure upon various persons (more particularly upon
unfaithful husbands), and relate details of birthdays, christenings,
namedays, and dinner parties, with the lists of the invited and non-invited
guests. Likewise they would show one another various articles of their

wardrobes, and the hostess would proudly vaunt the merits of her sheets,
her knitted garments, and her lace of home manufacture. Yet at length even
these things would begin to pall; whereupon coffee, tea, and cakes would be
served, and a silence, broken only by desultory remarks, ensue.
Of course, also, there were certain rare occasions when these methods of
spending the time were interrupted by such happenings as the entire
household falling ill of a fever, or some member of it either tripping over a
stake in the dark or falling out of the hayloft or being struck on the head by
a beam which had slipped from the roof. Yet, as I say, such events were
rare, and when they occurred, every known and tried domestic remedy was
brought into play. The injured spot was rubbed with ointment, a dose of
holy water was administered, a prayer was muttered—and all was well. On
the other hand, a winter headache * was quite a common phenomenon and
in that case the household would retire to bed, groans and sighs would
resound. One person would wrap a cucumber poultice and insert cranberries
in his ears. A third walk about with nothing on but his shirt conscious, roll
about the room at regular periods of once or twice a month. This happened,
for the reason that the Oblomovkans did not like to allow any superfluous
heat to escape by the chimney, but covered the stoves when the flames were
rising high. Consequently upon no single stove-couch or stove could a hand
be laid without danger of that hand being blistered.
* Due to the fumes of the charcoal used for heating
purposes.

Only once was the monotony of Oblomovkan life broken by a wholly
unexpected circumstance. The household, exhausted by the labours of
dinner, had assembled for tea, when there entered a local peasant who had
just been making an expedition to the town. Thrusting his hand into his
bosom, he with difficulty produced a much-creased letter, addressed to the
master of the house. Every one sat thunderstruck, and even the master
himself changed countenance. Not an eye was there which did not dart
glances at the missive. Not a nose was there which was not strained in its
direction.
“How unlooked for!” at length said the mistress of the household as she
recovered herself. “From whom can the letter have come?”
Old Oblomov took it, and turned it over in his hands, as though at a loss
what to do with the epistle.

“Where did you get it from?” he inquired of the peasant. “And who gave
it you?”
“I got it at the inn where I put up,” replied the man. “Twice did folk come
from the post-office to inquire if any peasantry from Oblomovka were
there, since a letter was awaiting the barin. The first time they came, I kept
quiet, and the postman took the letter away; but afterwards the deacon of
Verklevo saw me, and they came and gave me the letter, and made me pay
five kopecks for it. I asked them what I was to do with the letter, and they
said that I was to hand it to your Honour.”
“Then at first you refused it?’ the mistress remarked sharply.
“Yes, I refused it. What should we want with letters? We have no need for
them, nor had I any orders to take charge of such things. So I was afraid to
touch it. ‘Don’t you go too fast with that thing,’ I said to myself. Yet how
the postman abused me! He would have complained to the authorities had I
left the letter where it was.”
“Fool!” exclaimed the lady of the house.
“And from whom can it be?” said old Oblomov meditatively as he
studied the address. “Somehow I seem to know the handwriting.”
Upon that the missive fell to being passed from one person to another;
and much guessing and discussion began. Finally the company had to own
itself nonplussed. The master of the house ordered his spectacles to be
fetched, and quite an hour and a half were consumed in searching for the
same; but at length be put them on, and then bethought him of opening the
letter.
“Wait a moment,” said his wife, hastily, arresting his hand. “Do not break
the seal. Who knows what the letter may contain? It may portend something
dreadful, some misfortune. To what have we not come nowadays? To-
morrow, or the day after, will be soon enough. The letter will not walk away
of itself.”
So the letter was placed under lock and key, and tea passed round. In fact,
the document would have lain there for a year, had it not constituted a
phenomenon so unusual as to continue to excite the Oblomovkans’
curiosity. Both after tea and on the following day the talk was of nothing
else. At length things could no longer be borne, and on the fourth day, the

company being assembled, the seal was diffidently broken, and old
Oblomov glanced at the signature.
“Radistchev!” he exclaimed. “So the message is from Philip Matveitch!”
“Oh! Ah! From him, indeed?” resounded on all sides. “To think that he is
actually alive! Glory be to God! And what does he say?”
Upon that old Oblomov started to read the letter aloud. It seemed that
Philip Matveitch desired him to forward the recipe for a certain beer which
was brewed at Oblomovka.
“Then send it, send it,” exclaimed the chorus. “Yes, and also write him an
answer.”
Two weeks elapsed.
“Really we must write that note,” old Oblomov kept repeating. “Where is
the recipe?”
“Where is it?” retorted his wife. “Why, it still has to be looked for. Wait a
little. Why need we hurry? Should God be good, we shall soon be having
another festival, and eating flesh again. Let us write then. I tell you, the
recipe won’t run away.”
“Yes, I daresay it would be better to write when we have reached the
festival.”
Sure enough, the said festival arrived, and again there was talk of the
letter. In fact, old Oblomov did in truth get himself ready to write it. He shut
himself up in his study, he put on his spectacles, and he sat down to the
table. Everything in the house was profoundly quiet, since orders had been
issued that the establishment was not to stamp upon the floor, nor, indeed,
to make a noise of any kind. “The barin is writing,” was said in much the
same tone of respectful awe that might have been used had a dead person
been lying in the house.
Hardly had old Oblomov inscribed the words “Dear Sir”—slowly and
crookedly, and with a shaking hand, and as cautiously, as though he had
been engaged in a dangerous task—when there entered to him his wife.
“I have searched and searched,” she said, “but can find no recipe.
Nevertheless the bedroom wardrobe still remains to be ransacked, so how

can you write the letter now?”
“It ought to go by the next post,” her husband remarked.
“And what will it cost to go?”
Old Oblomov produced an ancient calendar. “Forty kopecks,” he said.
“What? You are going to throw away forty kopecks on such a trifle?” she
exclaimed. “We had far better wait until we are sending other things also to
the town. Let the peasants know about it.”
“That might be better,” agreed old Oblomov, tapping his pen against the
table. With that he replaced the pen in the inkstand, and took off his
spectacles.
“Yes, it might be better,” he concluded.
And to this day no one knows how long Philip Matveitch had to wait for
that recipe.
Also, there were times when old Oblomov actually took a book in his
hands. What book it might be he did not care, for he felt no actual craving
to read; he looked upon literature as a mere luxury which could easily be
indulged in, or be done without, even as one might have a picture on one’s
wall, or one might not—one might go out for an occasional walk, or one
might not. Hence, as I say, he was indifferent to the identity of a book, since
he looked upon such articles as mere instruments of distraction from ennui
and lack of employment. Also, he always adopted towards authors that half-
contemptuous attitude which used to be maintained by gentry of the ancien
régime; for, like many of his day, he considered a writer of books to be a
roisterer, a ne’er-do-well, a drunkard, a sort of merry-andrew. Also, he
would read aloud items of intelligence from journals three years old—such
items as, “It is reported from The Hague that, on returning to the Palace
from a short drive, the King gazed at the assembled onlookers through his
spectacles,” or “At Vienna such and such an Ambassador has just presented
his Letter of Credentials.”
Again, there was a day when he read aloud the intelligence that a certain
work by a foreign writer had just been translated into Russian.
“The only reason why they go in for translating such things,” remarked a
small landowner who happened to be present, “is that they may wheedle

more money out of us dvoriané.” *
* Squires, or gentry

Meanwhile the little Ilya was engaged in journeying backwards and
forwards to Schtoltz’s school every Monday, when he awoke, he felt
overcome with depression, should he happen to hear Vassika’s rapping
voice shout aloud from the veranda: “Antipka, harness the piebald, as the
young barin has to drive over to the German’s!” Yes, then Ilya’s heart
would tremble, and he would repair sadly to his mother, who would know
why he did so, and begin to gild the pill, while secretly sighing to herself at
the thought that she was to be parted from the lad for a whole week. Indeed,
on such mornings he could scarcely be given enough to eat, and scarcely
could a sufficiency of buns and cakes and pies and sweetmeats be made to
take with him (the said sufficiency being based upon an assumption that at
the German’s the pupils fared far from richly).
“One couldn’t overeat oneself there,” said the Oblomovkans. “For dinner
one gets nothing but soup, roast, and cabbage, for tea only cold meat, and
for supper morgen fri.” *
* German black pudding.

However, there were Mondays when he did not hear Vassika’s voice
ordering the piebald to be harnessed, and when his mother met him with a
smile and the pleasant tidings, that he was not to go to school that day, since
the following Thursday would be a holiday, and it was not worth while for
him to make the journey to and fro for a stay only of three days. At other
times he would be informed that that week was the Week of Kindred, * and
that therefore cake-baking, and not book-learning, would be the order of the
day. Or on a Monday morning his mother would glance at him, and say:
“Your eyes look dull to-day. Are you sure that you are well?” Then she
would shake her head dubiously, and though the crafty youngster would be
in perfect health, he would hold his tongue on the subject. Thereafter she
would continue: “You must stay at home this week, for God knows what
might happen to you at that other place.” And in her decision she would be
confirmed by the whole of the rest of the household. True, these fond
parents were not blind to the value of education; it was that they realized
only its external value. That is to say, they could not look beyond the fact
that education enabled folk to get on in the world so far as the acquisition of

rank, crosses, and money was concerned. Certain evil rumours had arisen
regarding the necessity, of learning not only one’s letters, but also various
branches of science which until now had remained unknown to the world of
Oblomovka; but, as I say, the good folk of that place had only the dimmest,
the remotest, comprehension of any internal demand for education, and
therefore desired to secure for their little Ilya only certain showy
advantages, and no more—to wit, a fine uniform, and the getting of him
into the Civil Service (his mother even foresaw him become a provincial
governor!). Yet this, they thought, ought to be attained at as little cost as
possible, and by means of a covert evasion of the various rocks and barriers
which lay strewn about the path of enlightenment. Yes, those rocks and
barriers, they said, must be walked around, not scaled; learning must be
assimilated lightly, and not at the cost of exhaustion both of body and mind.
In their view the process need be continued only until the little Ilya had
obtained some sort of a certificate to the effect that he had been through “a
course of the arts and sciences.”
* Week of the Dead.

But to this Oblomovkan system old Schtoltz was wholly opposed; and
probably his German persistency would have carried the day, had he not
had to contend with difficulties even in his own camp. That is to say, his son
was accustomed to spoil young Oblomov by doing his exercises for him,
and prompting him in his translations. Also, young Oblomov could clearly
discern the differences between his home life and life at school. At home,
no sooner would he have awakened than he would find Zakhar standing by
his bed. Even as the nurse had done, Zakhar would draw on for the lad his
stockings, and put on his boots; and if Master Ilya—now become a boy of
fourteen—did not altogether approve of Zakhar’s performances he would
nudge the valet on the nose with his toe. Moreover, should the boy at any
time want anything, he had three or four servants to hasten to do his
bidding; and in this fashion he never learnt what it was to do a single thing
for himself. Yet in the end his parents’ fond solicitude wearied him for at no
time could he even cross the courtyard, or descend the staircase, without
hearing himself followed by shouts of “Where are you going to, Ilya?” or
“How can you do that?” or “You will fall and hurt yourself!” Thus,
pampered like an exotic plant in a greenhouse, he grew up slowly and

drowsily, and in a way which turned his energies inwards, and gradually
caused them to wither.
Yet on rare occasions he would still awake as fresh and vigorous and
cheerful as ever; he would awake feeling that an imp of mischief was
egging him on to climb the roof, or to go and roll in a field, or to rush round
the meadow where the hay was being cut, or to perch himself on the top of
a fence, or to start teasing the farm dogs—in short, to take to running hither
and thither and everywhere.
At length the thing was no longer to be borne; no longer could he resist
the imp’s prompting. One winter’s morning, capless, he leaped from the
veranda into the courtyard, and thence through the entrance gates.
Thereafter, rolling a snowball hastily in his hands, he darted towards a
crowd of boys. The fresh air cut his face, the frost nipped his ears, his
mouth and throat felt choked with cold, but in his breast there was a great
joy. He rushed forward as fast as his legs could carry him, he shouted and
he laughed. In two seconds he was in the thick of the boys. One snowball he
threw—it achieved a miss; a second snowball he threw—it achieved the
same; and just as he was seizing a third his face became converted into one
large clot of snow. He fell, and, being unused to falling, hurt himself; yet
still he laughed merrily, though the tears had sprung to his eyes. Behind the
knot of youngsters ran two dogs, pulling at their clothes; for, as every one
knows, dogs cannot with equanimity see a human being running. Thus the
whole gang sped through the village—a noisy, shouting, barking crew. At
length the lads were caught, and justice was meted out—to one on the head,
to a second on the ears, to a third on the rump. Also, the fathers of the
culprits were threatened with retribution. As for the young barin, he was
hastily thrust into a snatched-up greatcoat, then into his father’s sheepskin,
and, lastly, into a couple of quilts; after which he was borne homeward in
triumph. The entire household had expected to behold him arrive in a
moribund condition; and indescribable was his parents’ delight on seeing
him carried in both alive and unharmed..Yes, they gave thanks to God, they
dosed the boy with mint and elderberry wine and raspberry syrup, and they
kept him three days in bed—although the one thing that would have done
him any good would have been to have let him go out again and play in the
snow!

Entering quietly, Zakhar tried to arouse the sleeper, but failed. Suddenly a
loud laugh proceeded from the neighbourhood of the door. Oblomov started
up.
“Schtoltz! Schtoltz!” he cried rapturously as he threw himself upon the
newcomer.

PART II

I

O
ften Oblomov’s old school friend had endeavoured—though in vain
—to wean his comrade from the state of inertia in which he
(Oblomov) was plunged. The pair were discussing the same subject
in Oblomov’s study.
“Once upon a time,” said Schtoltz, “I remember you a slim, lively young
fellow. Have you forgotten our joint readings of Rousseau, Schiller, Goethe,
and Byron?”
“Have I forgotten them?” re-echoed Oblomov. “No. How could I forget
them? How I used to dream over those books, and to whisper to myself my
hopes for the future, and to make plans of all sorts!—though I kept them
from you for fear lest you would laugh at them. But that expired at
Verklevo; and never since has it been repeated. What is the reason, I would
ask? Never have I gone through any great mental tempest or upheaval, my
conscience is as clear as a mirror, and no adverse stroke of fortune has
occurred to destroy my self-conceit. Yet for some reason or another I have
gone to pieces.” He sighed. “You see, Andrei, at no point in my life have I
been touched with a fire which could either save me or destroy me. I have
lived a life different from that of others. With me it has not been a morning
dawn which, gradually broadening to a sultry, bustling noon, has faded,
imperceptibly, naturally, into eventide. No, I began life with a quenching of
the light of day, and, from the first moment that I realized myself, realized
also that I was on the wane. I realized that fact as I sat at my desk in the
chancellory, as I read, as I consorted with friends, as I squandered my
means upon Minia, as I lounged on the Nevski Prospect, as I attended
receptions where I was welcomed as an eligible parti, as I wasted my life
and brains in fluctuating between town and country. Even my self-conceit—
upon what was it flung away? Upon figuring in clothes made by a good
tailor, upon gaining the entrée to well-known houses, upon having my hand
shaken by Prince P———! Yet self-conceit ought to be the very salt of life.
Whither is mine gone? Either I have never understood the life of which I
speak or it was never suited to me. Oh, that I had never known or seen it,

that no one had ever pointed it out to me! For yourself, you entered and left
my orbit like a bright, swift comet; and when you were gone I forgot
everything, and began to fade.”
As Schtoltz listened to Oblomov’s words there was no trace of a
contemptuous smile on his features.
“Not long ago,” resumed Oblomov, “you said that my face had lost its
freshness and colour. Yes, that is so. I am like a ragged, cast-off garment—
though less from the fact that during the past twelve years there has lain
within me a light that has ever been seeking an outlet, but has been doomed
to illumine only its own prison. Now, therefore, unable to gain its freedom,
it is becoming altogether extinguished. Am I alone in this, however? Look
around you. The name of the tribe to which I belong is legion.”
“Nevertheless, I intend to take you travelling with me,” remarked
Schtoltz, rising. “We will start to-morrow. It must be done now or never.”
With that he went to bed.
“Now or never.” Somehow to Oblomov the words seemed a sort of
threat. He approached his dusty writing-table, and took up a pen. Of ink
there was none, nor yet a single scrap of writing-paper. Mechanically and at
random he traced some letters in the dust with his finger. There resulted the
word Oblomovstchina. * He obliterated it with a quick movement of his
sleeve. Often in his dreams had he seen the word written in letters of fire on
the ceiling, even as once Belshazzar saw characters traced on the wall of his
banqueting-room. “Now or never.” Oblomov listened to this last despairing
call of his reason and his energy, and, weighing; in the balance what little
volition still remained to him, considered to what end he could best devote
that sorry fragment. Which was he to do? To go forward or to stand still? To
go forward would mean divesting, not only his shoulders, but also his
intellect, his soul, of his dressing-gown; it would mean sweeping away, not
only from his chamber walls, but also from his eyes, the dust and the
cobwebs. Yet how was he to take the first step necessary? Where was he to
begin? He remembered Schtoltz’s words: “Go to Oblomovka, and there
learn what sowing and grinding mean, and why the peasant is poor or rich.
Walk the fields, attend the local elections, visit the mills, and linger by the
river wharves.”
* The disease of Oblomovka. See later.

Yes, that was what Schtoltz had said. But it would mean going forward,
and going forward unceasingly. In that case farewell to they poetic ideal of
life! Such a course would connote work in a smithery rather than life: it
would entail a continual round of heat and of clatter. What would be the
good of it? Would it not be better to stand still? To stand still would merely
mean occasionally putting on a shirt inside out, dinners with Tarantiev,
thinking as little as possible of anything, leaving “A Voyage to Africa”
unread to the end, and attaining a peaceful old age in the fiat of which
Tarantiev had spoken. “Now or never.”
“To be or not to be.” Oblomov rose from his chair, but, failing at once to
insert his foot into a slipper, sat down again.
Two weeks later Schtoltz departed for England, after exacting from
Oblomov a pledge to join him later in Paris. Oblomov even went to the
length of procuring a passport, ordering an expensive travelling coat, and
purchasing a cap. The furniture of the flat was to be removed to the quarters
of Tarantiev’s crony in the Veaborg Quarter, and stored in the three rooms
until its owner’s return.
A month went by—three months; yet Oblomov still did not start.
Schtoltz, who had reached Paris long ago, continued to send him letter after
letter, but they remained unanswered. Why so? Was it because the ink in the
inkstand had become dried up and no writing-paper was available? No; both
ink, pens, and paper were present in abundance. Indeed, more than once
Oblomov sat down to write, and did so fluently, and, at times, as
expressively and eloquently as he had done in the days when, with Schtoltz,
he had dreamed of the strenuous life, and of traveling. Likewise he had
taken to rising at seven o’clock in the morning, and to reading, and to
carrying books about with him. Also, his face had lost its look of
dreaminess, weariness, ennui—there was colour in his cheek, a sparkle in
his eye, and an air almost of adventurousness—at least, almost of self-
assurance—about his whole bearing. Lastly, no longer was the dressing-
gown to be seen, for Tarantiev had carried it off to his friend’s flat, along
with the rest of Oblomov’s effects. Thus Oblomov wore better clothes than
had been his wont, and even sang cheerfully as he moved about. Why so?
The reason was that there had come into his life two friends of Schtoltz’s, in
the shape of a pretty girl named Olga Sergievna Ilyinitch and her aunt. On
his first visit to them he was overcome with constraint. “How gladly I

would take off my gloves!” he thought to himself. “And how hot the room
is! And how unused to this sort of thing I have grown!”
“Besides, she will keep looking at me,” was his further reflection as
diffidently he scanned his clothes. He even wiped his face with his
handkerchief, lest a smut should have settled on his nose. Also, he touched
his tie, to make sure that its folds had not come undone, as had sometimes
happened with him. But no—all was as it should be. Yet she would persist
in regarding him attentively. Next, a footman tendered him a cup of tea,
with a plate of biscuits. He tried to subdue his nervousness, and to unbend;
but in the act of unbending he seized such a handful of cracknels, biscuits,
and sugared buns that the girl tittered and the rest of those present gazed at
the pile with unconcealed interest. “My God, she is still looking at me!” he
thought to himself. “What on earth am I to do with all these biscuits?”
Without looking, he could tell that Olga had risen from her seat and
moved to another corner. This helped to relieve his breast of a certain
amount of weight. None the less she continued to contemplate him, in order
to see what he would do with the confectionery.
“Probably I had best eat them as quickly as possible,” he thought; with
which he fell to hurriedly selecting one after another. Luckily all were of
the sort which melts in the mouth. When only two of them remained he
heaved a sigh of relief, and decided to glance towards the corner where he
knew Olga to be seated. Horrors! She was standing by a bust, with one hand
resting on its pedestal, and her eyes closely observing him! Nay, she had
even come out of her corner to get a closer view of him! Without doubt she
must have noted his awkwardness with the biscuits!
True, at supper she sat at the other end or the table, and ate and talked as
though she were in no way concerned with him; yet never once did he
throw a timid glance in her direction (in the hope that she was not looking
his way) but straightway he encountered her gaze—a gaze which, though
good-humoured, was also charged with curiosity. That was enough. He
hastened to take leave of her aunt, who invited him to come and dine
another day. He bowed, and moved away across the drawing-room without
raising his eyes. Presently he encountered a screen, with behind it, the grand
piano. He looked again—and behold, behind the screen was seated Olga!

She was still gazing at him with intent curiosity. Also, she seemed to him to
be smiling.
“Certainly Andrei has often told me that I put on pairs of odd socks, and
my shirt inside out,” he reflected as he drove home. From that moment he
could not get Olga’s glance out of his head. In bed he lay on his back and
tried to adopt the most comfortable attitudes; yet still he could not sleep....
One fine morning Tarantiev came and carried off the rest of Oblomov’s
furniture; with the result that its owner spent three such days as he had
never before experienced—days during which he was bedless and sofa-less,
and therefore driven to dine at the house of Olga’s aunt. Suddenly he
noticed that opposite the aunt’s house there stood an untenanted villa.
Consequently he hired it (furnished) at sight, and went to live there.
Thereafter he spent his whole time with Olga—he read with her, he culled
flowers with her, he walked by the lake and over the hills with her. Yes, he,
Oblomov! How came this about? It came about thus.
On the evening of the fateful dinner-party at the aunt’s house Oblomov
experienced the same torture during the meal as he had done on the
previous occasion. Every word that he spoke he uttered with an acute sense
that over him, like a searchlight, there was hovering that glance, and that it
was burning and irritating him, and that it was stimulating his nerves and
blood. Surely, on the balcony, he thought, he would be able, when
ensconced behind a cloud of tobacco smoke, to succeed in momentarily
concealing himself from that silent, that insistent gaze?
“What does it all mean?” he said to himself as he rocked himself to and
fro. “Why, it is sheer torture! Have I made myself ridiculous? At no one
else would she dare to stare as she does at me. I suppose it is because I am
quieter than the rest. However, I will make an agreement with her. I will tell
her, in so many words, that her eyes are dragging my very soul out of my
body.”
Suddenly she appeared on the threshold of the balcony. He handed her a
chair, and she took a seat beside him.
“Are you so very ennuyé?” she inquired.
“Ennuyé, yes—but not much so. I have pursuits of my own.”

“Ah? Schtoltz tells me that you are engaged in drawing up a scheme of
some sort?”
“Yes. I want to live upon my estate, and am making a few preparations
for doing so.”
“And you are going abroad?”
“Undoubtedly—as soon as ever Schtoltz is ready to accompany me.”
“Shall you be very glad to go?”
“Yes, very.”
He looked at her. A smile was hovering on her face, and illuminating her
eyes, and gradually spreading over her cheeks. Only her lips remained as
pressed together as usual. He lacked the spirit to continue his lies calmly.
“However, I—I am rather a lazy person,” he began. “But, but——”
Suddenly he felt vexed to think that she should have extracted from him a
confession of his lethargy. “What is she to me?” he thought. “Am I afraid of
her?”
“Lazy?” she exclaimed with a scarcely perceptible touch of archness.
“What? A man be lazy? That passes my comprehension.”
“Why should it?” was his inward comment. “It is all simple enough. I
have taken to sitting at home more and more, and therefore Schtoltz thinks
that I——”
“But I expect you write a great deal?” she went on. “And have you read
much?” Somehow her gaze seemed very intent.
“No, I cannot say that I have.” The words burst from him in a sudden fear
lest she should see fit: to put him through a course of literary examination.
“What do you mean?” she inquired, laughing. Then he too laughed.
“I thought that you were going to crossquestion me about some novel or
another,” he explained. “But, you see, I never read such things.”
“Then you thought wrong. I was only going to ask you about a few books
of travel.”

He glanced at her quickly. Her lips were still compressed, but the rest of
her face was smiling.
“I must be very careful with her,” he reflected.
“What do you read?” she asked with seeming curiosity.
“It happens that I am particularly fond of books of travel,” he replied.
“Travels in Africa, for instance?” There was quiet demureness in the
tone. He reddened at the not wholly unreasonable conjecture that she was
aware not only of what he read but of how he read.
“And are you also musical?” she continued, in order to relieve him of his
embarrassment. At this moment Schtoltz (who had now returned from
abroad) appeared on the scene.
“Ha, Ilya!” he cried. “I have told Olga Sergievna that you adore music,
and that to-night she must sing something—‘Casta Diva,’ for example.”
“Why did you speak for me at all?” protested Oblomov. “I am by no
means an adorer of music.”
“What?” Schtoltz exclaimed. “Why, the man is offended! I introduce him
as a person of taste, and here is he stumbling over himself to destroy his
good reputation!”
“I am only declining the rôle of connoisseur,” said Oblomov. “’Tis too
difficult and risky a rôle. Sometimes I can listen with pleasure to a cracked
barrel-organ, and its tunes stick in my memory; while at other times I leave
the Opera before the piece is half over. It all depends upon the mood in
which I am. In fact, there are moments when I could close my ears even to
Mozart.”
“Then it is clear that you do love music,” said Olga.
“Sing him something,” requested Schtoltz.
“But suppose that Monsieur Oblomov were, at this very moment, to be
feeling inclined to close his ears?” she said as she turned to him.
“I suppose I ought to utter some compliment or another,” he replied. “But
I cannot do so, and I would not, even if I could.”
“Why?”

“Because,” was Oblomov’s naïve rejoinder, “things would be so
awkward for me if I were to find that you sing badly.”
“Even as, the other day, you found things awkward with the biscuits?”
she retorted before she could stop herself. The next moment she reddened
as though she would have given worlds to have been able to recall her
words. “Pardon me,” she added. “I ought not to have said that.”
Oblomov had been unprepared, and was quite taken aback.
“That was a cruel advantage,” he murmured.
“No—only a small revenge (and an unpremeditated one) for your failure
to have had a compliment ready.”
“Then perhaps I will have one ready when I have heard you sing.”
“‘You wish me to sing, then?”
“No; he wishes it.” Oblomov pointed to Schtoltz.
“But what of yourself?”
Oblomov shook his head deprecatingly.
“I could not wish for what I have not yet experienced,” he said.
“You are very rude, Ilya,” put in Schtoltz. “See what comes of lolling
about at home and confining your efforts to having your socks put on for
you.”
“Pardon me,” said Oblomov quickly, and without giving him time to
finish. “I should find it no trouble to say: ‘I shall be most glad, most
delighted, to hear you sing, for of course you sing perfectly.’ So,” he went
on, “‘it will afford me the very greatest possible pleasure.’ But do you really
think it necessary?”
“At least you might express a desire that I should sing—if only out of
curiosity.”
“I dare not do so,” replied Oblomov. “You are not an actress.”
“Then it shall be for you that I will sing,” she said to Schtoltz.
“While you, Ilya,” he added, “can be getting your compliment ready.”

Evening was closing in, and the lamp had been lit. Moonlike, it cast
through the ivy-covered trellis a light so dim that the dusk still veiled the
outlines of Olga’s face and figure—it still shrouded them, as it were, in
crepe; while the soft, strong voice, vibrating with nervous tension, came
ringing through the darkness with a note of mystery. At Schtoltz’s
prompting she sang several arias and romances, of which some expressed
suffering, with a vague forecast of joy, while others expressed joy, coupled
with a lurking germ of sorrow.
As Oblomov listened he could scarcely restrain his tears or the cry of
ecstasy that was almost bursting from his soul. In fact, he would have
undertaken the tour abroad if thereby he could have remained where he was
at that moment, and then gone.
“Have I pleased you to-night?” she inquired of Schtoltz.
“Ask, rather, Oblomov,” he replied. “Confess now, Ilya: how long is it
since you felt as you are feeling at this moment?”
“Yet he might have felt like that this morning if ‘a cracked barrel-organ’
had happened to pass his window,” put in Olga—but so kindly as to rob the
words of their sarcasm.
“He never keeps his windows open,” remarked Schtoltz. “Consequently,
he could not possibly hear what is going on outside.”
That night Oblomov was powerless to sleep. He paced the room in a
mood of thoughtful despondency, and at dawn left the house to roam the
city, with his head and his heart full of God only knows what feelings and
reflections!
Three days later he called again at the aunt’s.
“I want you,” said Olga, “to feel thoroughly at home here.”
“Then pray do not look at me as you are doing now, and as you have
always done.”
Instantly her glance lost its usual expression or curiosity, and became
wholly softened to kindness.
“Why do you mind my looking at you so much?” she asked.

“I do not know. Somehow your gaze seems to draw from me everything
that I would rather people did not learn—you least of all.”
“Why so? You are a friend of Schtoltz’s, and he is a friend of mine, and
therefore——”
“And therefore there is no reason why you should know as much about
me as he does,” concluded Oblomov.
“No, there is no reason. But at least there is a possibility that I may do
so.”
“Yes—— thanks to his talkativeness! Indeed a poor service!”
“Have you, then, any secrets to conceal—or even crimes?” With a little
laugh she edged away from him.
“Perhaps,” he said with a sigh.
“Yes, to put on odd socks is a grave crime,” she remarked with demure
timidity. Oblomov seized his hat.
“I will not stand this!” he cried. “Yet you want me to feel at home here!
As for Schtoltz, I detest him! He told you about the socks, I suppose?”
“Nay, nay,” she said. “Pardon me this once, and I will try to look at you
in quite a different way. As a matter of fact, ’tis you who are looking at me
in rather an odd fashion.”
True enough, he was gazing into her kindly, grey-blue eyes—he was
doing so simply because he could not help it—and thinking to himself that
never in all the world had he seen a maiden so beautiful.
“Something seems to pass from her into myself,” he reflected. “And that
something is making my heart beat and boil. My God, what a joy to the eye
she is!”
“The important question,” she went on, “is how to preserve you from
feeling ennuyé.”
“You can do that by singing to me again.”
“Ah, I was expecting that compliment!” The words came from her in a
sudden burst as of pleasure. “Do you know, had you not uttered that gasp

after I had finished singing the other evening, I should never have slept all
night—I should have cried my very eyes out.”
“Why?” he asked.
“I do not know. I merely know that that time I sang as I had never done
before. Do not ask me to sing now, however—I could not do it.”
Nevertheless she did sing to him again; and, ah! what did that song not
voice? It seemed to be charged with her very soul.
As she finished, his face was shining with the happiness of a spirit which
has been moved to its utmost depths.
“Come!” she said. “Why do you look at me like that?”
“Yet she knew why he was doing so, and a modest touch of triumph that
she could so greatly have affected him filled her soul.
“Look at yourself in the mirror,” she went on, “and you will see that your
eyes are shining, and that—yes, really!—they have tears in them. How
deeply you must feel music!”
“No—it is not music that I am feeling,” he replied slowly; “but—but
love!”
‘Her glance met his, and instantly she saw that he had uttered the word in
spite of himself, that the word had got him in its power, and that the word
had voiced the truth.
Recovering himself, he picked up his hat, and left the room. When he had
gone she remained standing like a statue by the piano—her eyes cast down,
and her breast rising and falling tumultuously.

II

F
rom that time forth she lived in him alone, while he, for his part,
racked his brains to avoid incurring the loss of her esteem. Whenever
she detected in his soul—and she could probe that soul very deeply—
the least trace of its former characteristics, she would work for him to heap
himself with reproaches for his lethargy and fear of life. Just as he was
about to yawn, as he was actually opening his mouth for the purpose, her
astonished glance would transfix him, and cause his mouth to snap with a
click which jarred his teeth. Still more did he hasten to resume his alacrity
whenever he perceived that his lassitude was communicating itself to her,
and threatening to render her cold and contemptuous. Instantly he would
undergo a revival of strenuous activity; and then the shadow between them
would disappear, and mutual sympathy once more beat in strong, clear
accord. Yet this solicitude on his part had not, as yet, its origin in the magic
ring of love. Indeed, the effect of his charmed toils was negative rather than
positive. True, he no longer slept all day—on the contrary, he rode, read,
walked, and even thought of resuming his writing and his agricultural
schemes; yet the ultimate direction, the inmost significance, of his life still
remained confined to the sphere of good intentions. Particularly disturbing
did he find it whenever Olga plied him with some particular question or
another, and demanded of him, as of a professor, full satisfaction of her
curiosity. This occurred frequently, and arose not out of pedantry on her
part, but out of a desire to know the right and the wrong of things.
At times a given question would absorb her even to the point of
forgetting her consideration for Oblomov. For instance, on one occasion,
when she had besought his opinion concerning double stars, and he was
incautious enough to refer her to Herschel, he was dispatched to purchase
the great authority’s book, and commanded to read it through, and to
explain the same to her full satisfaction. On another occasion he was rash
enough to let slip a word or two concerning various schools of painting;
wherefore he had to undergo another week’s reading and explaining, and
also to pay sundry visits to the Hermitage Museum. In the end how he
trembled whenever she asked him a question!

“Why do you not say something?” she would say to him. “Surely it
cannot be that the subject wearies you?”
“No, but how I love you!” he would reply, as though awakening from a
trance; to which she would retort—
“Do you really? But that is not what I have just asked you.”
On another occasion he said to her—
“Cannot you see what is taking place in me? To me, speaking is a
difficulty. Give me your hand, give me your hand! There seems to be
something hindering me, something weighing me down. It is a something
that is like the great rock which oppresses a man during deep sorrow. And,
strangely enough, the effect of it is the same whether I happen to be sad or
gay. Somehow my breath seems to hurt me as I draw it, and occasionally I
come near to weeping. Yet, like a man overcome with grief, I feel that I
should be lightened and relieved if I could weep. What, think you, is amiss
with me?”
She looked at him with a smile of happiness which nothing could disturb.
Evidently no weight was pressing upon her heart.
“Shall I tell you?” she said. “Yes.”
“You are in love.”
He kissed her hand.
“And you?” he asked. “Are you in love?”
“In love?” she repeated. “I do not like the term for myself. I like you: that
is better.”
“‘I like you’?” he re-echoed. “But a mother or a father or a nurse or even
a dog may be liked: the phrase may be used as a garment, even as can, can
—”
“Even as can an old dressing-gown,” she suggested with a smile.
Presently she added—
“Whether I am actually in love with you or not I hardly know. Perhaps it
is a stage that has not yet arrived. All I know is that I have never liked
father or mother or nurse or dog as I like you. I feel lost without you. To be

parted from you for a short while makes me sorry; to be parted from you for
a long while makes me sad; and, were you to die, I should wear mourning
for the rest of my life, and never again be able to smile. To me such love is
life, and life is——”
“Yes?”
“Is a duty, an obligation. Consequently love also is a duty. God has sent
me that duty, and has bid me perform it.” As she spoke she raised her eyes
to heaven.
“Who can have inspired her with these ideas?” Oblomov thought to
himself. “Neither through experience nor through trial nor through ‘fire and
smoke’ can she have attained this clear, simple conception of life and of
love.”
“Then, since there is joy in life, is there also suffering?” he asked aloud.
“I do not know,” she replied. “That lies beyond my experience as much
as it lies beyond my understanding.”
“But how well I understand it!”
“Ah!” she said merrily. “What glances you throw at me sometimes! Even
my aunt has noticed it.”
“But how can there be joy in love if it never brings one moments of
ecstatic delight?”
“What?” she replied with a glance at the scene around her. “Is not all this
so much ecstatic delight?” She looked at him, smiled, and gave him her
hand. “Do you think,” she continued, “that presently I shall not be sorry
when you take your leave? Do you think that I shall not go to bed the earlier
in order that I may the sooner fall asleep, and cheat the wearisome night,
and be able to see you again in the morning?” The light in Oblomov’s face
had become brighter and brighter with each successive question, and his
gaze more and more suffused with radiance.

III

N
ext morning, however, he rose pale and sombre. There were traces
of sleeplessness on his features, wrinkles on his brow, and a lack of
fire and eagerness in his eyes. Once upon a time he would have
sunk back upon the pillow after drinking his tea, but now he had grown out
of the habit, and contented himself with resting his elbow where his head
had just been lying. Something in him was working strongly; but that
something was not love. True, Olga’s image was still before him, but only
at a distance, and in a mist, and shorn of its rays, like that of some stranger.
With aching eyes he gazed at it for a moment or two, and then sighed.
“To live as God wills, and not as oneself wills, is a wise rule,” he
murmured. “Nevertheless———”
“Clearly that is so,” presently he went on. “Otherwise, one would fall
into a chaos of contradictions such as no human mind, however daring and
profound, could hope to resolve. Yesterday one has wished, to-day one
attains the madly longed-for object, and tomorrow one will blush to think
that one ever desired it. Therefore one will fall to cursing life. And all
because of a proud, independent striding through existence and a wilful ‘I
will’! No; rather does one need to feel one’s way, to close one’s eyes, to
avoid becoming either intoxicated with happiness or inclined to repine
because it has escaped one. Yes, that is life. Who was it first pictured life as
happiness and gratification? The fool! ‘Life is a duty,’ says Olga. ‘Life is a
grave obligation which must be fulfilled as such.’” He heaved a profound
sigh.
“No, I cannot visit Olga to-day,” he went on. “My eyes are now open,
and I see my duty before me. Better part with her now, while it is still
possible, than later, when I shall have sworn to part with her no more.”
How had this mood of his come about? What wind had suddenly affected
him? How had it brought with it these clouds? Wherefore was he now for
assuming such a grievous yoke? Only last night he had looked into Olga’s
soul, and seen there a radiant world and a smiling destiny; only last night he
had read both her horoscope and his own. What had since happened?

Frequently, in summer, one goes to sleep while the weather is still and
cloudless, and the stars are glimmering softly. “How beautiful the
countryside will look to-morrow under the bright beams of morning!” one
thinks to oneself. “And how glad one will be to dive into the depths of the
forest and seek refuge from the heat!” Then suddenly one awakes to the
beating of rain, to the sight of grey, mournful clouds, to a sense of cold and
damp.
In Oblomov’s breast the poison was working swiftly and vigorously. In
thought he reviewed his life, and for the hundredth time felt his heart ache
with repentance and regret for what he had lost. He kept picturing to
himself what, by now, he would have been had he strode boldly ahead, and
lived a fuller and a broader life, and exerted his faculties; whence he passed
to the question of his present condition, and of the means whereby Olga had
contrived to become fond of him, and of the reason why she still was so. “Is
she not making a mistake?” was a thought which suddenly flashed through
his mind like lightning; and as it did so the lightning seemed to strike his
heart, and to shatter it. He groaned with the pain. “Yes, she is making a
mistake,” he kept saying again and again. “She merely loves me as she
works embroidery on canvas. In a quiet, leisurely manner a pattern has
evolved itself, and she has turned it over, and admired it. Soon she will lay
it aside, and forget all about it. Yes, her present affection is a mere making
ready to fall in love, a mere experiment of which I am the subject, for the
reason that I chanced to be the first subject to come to hand.” So he collated
the circumstances, and compared them. Never would she have noticed him
at all, had not Schtoltz pointed him out, and infected her young.
impressionable heart with sympathy for his (Oblomov’s) position, and
therefore implanted in her a desire to see if possibly she could shake that
dreamy soul from its lethargy before leaving it once more to its own
devices.
“Yes, that is how the case stands,” he said to himself with an access of
revulsion. He rose and lit a candle with a trembling hand. “’Tis just that and
nothing more. Her heart was ready to accept love—it was tensely awaiting
it—and I happened to fall in her way, and at the same time to fall into a
blunder. Only would some one else need to arrive for her to renounce that
blunder. As soon as ever she saw that some one else she would turn from

me with horror. In fact, I am stealing what belongs to another; I am no
better than a thief. My God, to think that I should have been so blind!”
Glancing into the mirror, he saw himself pale, dull, and sallow.
Involuntarily he pictured to his mind those handsome young fellows who
would one day come her way. Suddenly she would take fire, glance at him,
and—burst out laughing! A second time he glanced into the mirror. No, he
was not the type with which women could fall in love! He flung himself
down upon the bed, and buried his face in the pillow.
“Forgive me, Olga!” he murmured. “And may you always be happy!”
He gave orders that he was to be reported as “not at home” to any one
who might call from the Ilyinskis’ house. Then he sat down to write Olga a
letter. He wrote it swiftly. In fact, the pen flew over the pages. And when he
had finished the missive he was surprised to find that his spirits felt
cheered, and his mind easier.
“Why so?” he reflected. “Probably because I have put into what I have
just written the whole sorrow of my heart.”
Next, he dispatched the letter by the hand of Zakhar, and, leaving the
house, turned into the park, and seated himself on the grass. Among the
turf-shoots ants were scurrying hither and thither, and jostling one another,
and parting again. From above, the scene looked like the commotion in a
human market-place—it showed the same bustle, the same congestion, the
same swarm of population. Here and there, too, a bumble bee buzzed over a
flower, and then crept into its chalice, while a knot of flies had glued
themselves to a drop of sap on the trunk of a lime-tree, in the foliage a bird
was repeating an ever-insistent note (as though calling to its mate), and a
couple of butterflies were tumbling through the air in a giddy, fluttering,
intricate movement which resembled a waltz. Everywhere from the herbage
strong scents could be detected arising; everywhere there could be heard a
ceaseless chirping and twittering.
Suddenly he saw Olga approaching. Walking very quietly, she was
wiping her eyes with a handkerchief as she did so. He had not expected
those tears. Somehow they seemed to sear his heart. He rose and ran to
meet her.
“Olga, Olga!” were his first tender words.

She started, looked at him with an air of astonishment, and turned away.
He followed her.
“You are weeping?” he said.
“Yes, and’ is you have made me do so,” she replied, while her form shook
with sobs. “But it is beyond your power to comfort me.”
“That miserable letter!” he ejaculated, suddenly becoming full of
remorse.
For answer she opened a basket which she was carrying, took from it the
letter, and handed it to him.
“Take it away,” she said. “The sight of it will only make me weep more
bitterly.”
He stuffed it silently into his pocket, and, with head bent, seated himself
beside her.
“Give me credit for good intentions,” he urged. “In any case the letter
was evidence only of my care for your happiness—of the fact that I was
thinking of it in advance, and was ready to sacrifice myself on its account.
Do you think that I wrote the message callously—that inwardly I was not
shedding tears the whole time? Why should I have acted as I did?”
“Why, indeed?” she interrupted. “For the reason that you wished to
surprise me here, and to see whether I was weeping, and how bitterly. Had
you really meant the letter as you say, you would be making preparations to
go abroad instead of meeting me as you are now doing. Last night you
wanted my ‘I love you’; to-day you want to see my tears; and to-morrow, I
daresay, you will be wishing that I were dead!”
“How can you wrong me like that? Believe me, I would give half my life
to see smiles on your face instead of tears.”
“Yes—now that you have seen a woman weeping on your account. But
no; you have no heart. You say that you had no desire to make me weep.
Had that been so, you would not have acted as you have done.”
“Then what ought I to do?” he asked tenderly. “Will you let me beg your
pardon?”

“No; only children beg pardon, or persons who have jostled some one in
a crowd. Moreover, even when granted, such pardon is worth nothing.”
“But what if the letter should be true, and your affection for me all a
mistake?” he suggested.
“You are afraid, then?—you are afraid of falling into a well?—you are
afraid lest some day I should hurt you by ceasing to be fond of you?”
“Would I could sink into the ground!” he reflected. The pain was
increasing in proportion as he divined Olga’s thoughts.
“On the other hand,” she went on, “suppose you were to weary of love,
even as you have wearied of books, of work, and of the world in general?
Suppose that, fearing no rival, you were to go to sleep by my side (as you
do on your sofa at home), and that my voice were to become powerless to
wake you? Suppose that your present swelling of heart were to pass away,
and your dressing-gown come to acquire more value in your eyes than
myself? Often and often do such questions prevent my sleeping; yet I do
not, on that account, trouble you with conjectures as to the future. Always I
hope for better things, for, with me, happiness has cast out fear. Only for
one thing have I long been sitting and waiting—namely, for happiness; until
at length I had come to believe that I had found it.... Even if I have made a
mistake, at least this”—and she laid her hand upon her heart—“does not
convict me of guilt. God knows that I never desired such a fate! And I had
been so happy!” She broke off abruptly.
“Then be happy again,” urged Oblomov.
“No. Rather, go you whither you have always been wishing to go,” she
said softly.
“You are wiser than I am,” he murmured, twisting a sprig of acacia
between his fingers.
“No, I am simpler and more daring than you. What are you afraid of? Do
you really think that I should cease to love you?”
“With you by my side I fear nothing,” he replied. “With you by my side
nothing terrible can fall to my lot.”

PART III

I

O
blomov’s face beamed as he walked home. His blood was boiling,
and a light was shining in his eyes. He entered his room—and at
once, the radiance disappeared as his eyes, full of disgusted
astonishment, became glued to one particular spot. That particular spot was
the arm-chair, wherein was snugly ensconced Tarantiev.
“Why is it I never find you here?” the visitor asked sternly. “Why are you
always gadding about? That old fool Zakhar has quite got out of hand. I
asked him for a morsel of food and a glass of vodka, and he refused me
both!”
“I have been for a walk in the park,” replied Oblomov coldly. For the
moment he had forgotten the murky atmosphere wherein he had spent so
much of his life. And now, in a twinkling, Tarantiev had brought him
tumbling from the clouds! His immediate, thought was that the visitor
might insist on remaining to dinner, and so prevent him from paying his
visit to Olga and her aunt.
“Why not come and take a look at that flat?” went on Tarantiev.
“Because there is no need,” replied Oblomov, avoiding his interlocutor’s
eye. “I have decided not to move.”
“Not to move?” exclaimed Tarantiev threateningly. “Not when I have
hired the place for you, and you have signed the lease?”
This led Oblomov to remember that, on the very day of his removal from
town to the country villa, he had signed, without previously perusing it, a
document which his present visitor had submitted to him.
“Nevertheless,” he remarked, “I shall not want the flat. I am going
abroad.”
“I am sure you are not,” retorted Tarantiev coolly. “What is more, the
sooner you hand over to me a half-year’s rent, the better. Your new landlady
does not care for such tricks to be played upon her. I have paid the money
on your behalf, and I require to be repaid.”

“Where did you contrive to get the money from?”
“That has nothing to do with you. As a matter of fact, I had an old debt
repaid me.”
“A better flat you could not find in all the city.”
“Nevertheless I do not want it. It lies too far from—from——”
“From where? From the centre of the city?”
Oblomov forbore to specify what he meant, but merely remarked that he
should not be dining at home that evening.
“Then hand me over the rent, and the devil take you!” exclaimed
Tarantiev.
“I possess no money at all. As it is, I shall have to borrow some.”
“Well, repay me at least my cab fare,” insisted the visitor. “It was only
three roubles.”
“Where is the cabman? Why has he charged you so much?”
“I dismissed him long ago. I may add that the fare home is another three
roubles.”
“By the coach you could travel for half a rouble.” However, Oblomov
tendered Tarantiev four roubles, which the man at once pocketed.
“Also, I have expended some seven roubles on your account,” went on
Tarantiev. “Besides, you might as well advance me something towards the
price of a dinner. Roadside inns are dear. As a rule they fleece one of five
roubles.”
Silently Oblomov handed him another rouble, in the hope that the man
would now depart; but Tarantiev was not to be so easily shaken off.
“And also you might order Zakhar to bring me a snack now,” he said.
“But I thought you intended to dine at an inn?”
“Yes, to dine, but at the moment the time is two o’clock, and no more.”
Oblomov issued the necessary orders. On receiving them, Zakhar looked
darkly at Tarantiev.

“We have no food ready,” he said’. “Also, where are my master’s shirt
and jacket?”
“Shirt and jacket? Why, I gave them back to you long ago. I stuffed them
into your own hands, and you bundled them away into a corner. Yet you
come asking me where they are!”
“Also, what about a floorbrush and two cups which you carried off?”
persisted Zakhar.
“Floorbrush? What floorbrush?” retorted Tarantiev. “Go and get me
something to eat, you old fool!”
“We have not a single morsel in the house,” said Zakhar; “and also there
is nobody to cook it.” With which he withdrew.
‘Tarantiev looked about him, and, perceiving Oblomov to be possessed
both of a hat and a cap, attempted unsuccessfully to borrow the former for
the remainder of the summer, and then took his leave.
When he had gone Oblomov sat plunged in thought. He recognized that
his bright, cloudless holiday of love was over, and that workaday love had
now become the order of the day, and that already it was so completely
entering into his life’s ordinary tendencies that things were beginning to
lose their rainbow colours.
“Indeed,” he reflected, “this morning may have seen the extinction of the
last roseate ray of love’s festival—so that henceforth my life is to be
warmed rather than lighted. Yes, life will swallow up love, although secretly
it will remain moved by its powerful springs, and its manifestations be of an
invariably simple, everyday nature. Yes, the poem is fading, and stem prose
is to follow—to follow with a drab series of incidents which shall comprise
a marriage ceremony, a journey to Oblomovka, the building of a house, an
application to the local council, the laying out of roads, an endless
transaction of business with peasants, a number of improvements, harvests,
and so forth, the frequent spectacle of the bailiff’s anxious face, elections to
the council of nobles, and sundry sittings on the local bench.” Somewhere
he could see Olga beaming upon him, and singing Casta Diva, and then
giving him a hasty kiss before he went forth to work, or to the town, or to
interview the bailiff. Guests would call (a no very comforting prospect!),
and they would talk about the wine which each happened to be brewing in

his vats, and about the number of arshins * of cloth which each happened to
have rendered to the Treasury. What would this amount to? What was it he
was promising for himself? Was it life? Whether life or not, it would have
to be lived as though it, and it alone, constituted existence. At least it would
be an existence that would find favour with Schtoltz!
* Ells.

But the actual wedding ceremony—that, at all events, would represent
the poetry of life, its nascent, its just opening flower? He pictured himself
leading Olga to the altar. On her head there would’ be a wreath of orange-
blossoms, and to her gown a long train, and the crowd would whisper in
amazement. Shyly, and with gently heaving bosom and brow bent forward
in gracious pride, she would give him her hand in complete
unconsciousness that the eyes of all were fixed upon her. Then, a bright
smile would show itself on her face, the tears would begin to well, and for a
moment or two the furrow on her forehead would twitch with thought.
Then, when they had arrived home and the guests had all departed, she, yes,
she—clad still in her gorgeous raiment—would throw herself upon his
breast as she had done that morning!
Unable any longer to keep his fancies to himself, he went with them to
Olga. She listened to him with a smile; but when he jumped up with the
intention of informing also her aunt she frowned with such decision that he
halted in awe.
“Not a word to any one!” she said. “The right moment is not yet come.”
“What ought we to do first, then?”
“To go to the registrar, and to sign the record.”
“And then?”
“After marriage to go and live at Oblomovka, and to see what can be
done there.”
“We shall not be able to do that, for the house is in ruins, and a new one
must first be built.”
“Then where are we to live?”
“We must take a flat in town.”

“Then you had better go at once and see about it.”
“Alas!” was Oblomov’s reflection. “Olga wishes for ever to be on the
move. Apparently she cares nothing about dreaming over the poetical
phases of life, or losing herself in reveries. She is like Schtoltz. It would
seem as though the two had conspired to live life at top speed.”

II

L
ate that August rain set in, and, one day, Oblomov saw a vanload of
the Ilyinskis’ furniture come past his windows. To remain in his
country villa, now that the park was desolate and the shutters hung
closed over the Ilyinskis’ windows, seemed to him impossible. At length he
removed to the rooms which had been recommended him by Tarantiev, until
such time as he should be able to find for himself a new flat. He took hasty
meals at restaurants, and spent most of his evenings with Olga.
But the long autumn evenings in town were not like the long, bright days
amid fields and woods.
Here he could not visit Olga three times a day, nor send her notes by
Zakhar, seeing that she was five versts away. Thus the polled poem of the
late summer seemed somehow to have halted, or to be moving more slowly,
as though it contained less substance than of yore.
Sometimes they would keep silence for quite half an hour at a time, while
she busied herself with her needlework, and he busied himself in a chaos of
thoughts which ranged beyond the immediate present. Only at intervals
would he gaze at her and tremble with passion; only at intervals would she
throw him a fleeting glance, and smile as she caught the rays of tender
humility, of silent happiness, which his eyes conveyed.
Yet on the sixth day, when Olga invited him to meet her at a certain shop,
and to escort her homeward on foot, he found his position begin to grow a
trille awkward.
“Oh, if you knew how difficult things are!” he said. She returned no
answer, but sighed.
On another occasion she said to him—“Until we have arranged
everything we cannot possibly tell my aunt. Nor must we see so much of
one another. You had better come to dinner only on Sundays and
Wednesdays. Also, we might meet at the theatre occasionally, if I first give
you notice that we are going to be there. Also, as soon as a fine day should
occur I mean to go for a walk in the Summer Gardens, * and you might

come to meet me. The scene will remind us of our park in the country.” She
added this last with a quiver of emotion.
* A public park in Petrograd

He kissed her hand in silence, and parted from her until Sunday. She
followed him with her eyes—then sat down to immerse herself in a wave of
sound at the piano. But something in her was weeping, and the notes
seemed to be weeping in sympathy. She tried to sing, but no song would
come.
A few days later, Oblomov was lolling on the sofa and playing with one
of his slippers—now picking it up from the door with his toe, now dropping
it again. To him entered Zakhar.
“What now?” asked Oblomov indifferently. Zakhar said nothing, but
eyed him with a sidelong glance.
“Well?” said Oblomov again.
“Have you yet found for yourself another flat?” Zakhar countered.
“No, not yet. Why should you want to know?”
“Because I suppose the wedding will be taking place soon after
Christmas.”
“The wedding? What wedding?” Oblomov suddenly leaped up.
“You know what wedding—your own,” replied Zakhar with assurance, as
though he were speaking of an event long since arranged for. “You are
going to be married, are you not?”
“I to be married? To whom?” And Oblomov glared at the valet.
“To Mademoiselle Ilyinski——” Almost before the man could finish his
words Oblomov had darted forward.
“Who put that idea into your head?” he cried in a carefully suppressed
voice.
“The Lord bless us all and protect us!” Zakhar ejaculated, backing
towards the door. “Who told me about it? Why, the Ilyinskis’ servants, this
very summer.”

“Rubbish!” hissed Oblomov as he shook a warning finger at the old man.
“Remember—henceforth let me hear not a word about it!” He pointed to
the door, and Zakhar left the room—filling the flat with his sighs as he did
so.
Somehow Oblomov could not recover his composure, but remained
gazing at the spot which Zakhar had just vacated. Then he clasped his hands
behind his head, and reseated himself in the arm-chair.
“So the servants’ hall and the kitchen are talking!” was his insistent
reflection. “It has come to this, that Zakhar can actually dare to ask me
when the wedding is to be! Yes, and that though even Olga’s aunt has not an
inkling of the truth! What would she think of it if she knew? The wedding,
that most poetical moment in the life of a lover, that crown of all his
happiness—why, lacqueys and grooms are talking of it even though nothing
is yet decided upon! No answer has come from the estate, my registry
certificate is a blank, and a new flat still remains to be found.”
With that he fell to analysing that poetical phase from which the colour
had faded with Zakhar’s mention of the same. Oblomov was beginning to
see the other face of the medal. He tossed and turned from side to side, lay
flat on his back, leaped up and took a stride or two, and ended by sinking
back into a reclining position.
“How come folk to know about it?” he reflected. “Olga has kept silence,
and I too have breathed not a word. So much for stolen meetings at dawn
and sunset, for passionate glances, for the wizardry of song! Ah, those
poems of love! Never do they end save in disaster. One should go beneath
the wedding canopy before one attempts to swim in an atmosphere of roses.
To think that before any preparations have been made—before even an
answer has come, from the estate, or I have obtained either money or a flat
—I should have to go to her aunt, and to say: ‘This is my betrothed!’ At all
costs must I put a stop to these rumours. Marriage! What is marriage?”
He smiled as he remembered his recent poetical idealization of the
ceremony—the long train to the gown, the orange-blossoms, the whispers
of the crowd. Somehow the colours had now changed; the crowd now
comprised also the uncouth, the slovenly Zakhar and the whole staff of the
Ilyinskis’ servants’ ball. Also, he could see a long line of carriages and a sea

of strange, coldly inquisitive faces. The scene was replete with glimmering,
deadly weariness.
Summoning Zakhar to his presence, he again asked him how he had
dared to spread such rumours.
“For do you know what marriage means?” he demanded of his valet. “It
means that a lot of idle lacqueys and women and children start chattering in
kitchens and shops and the market-place. A given individual ceases to be
known as Ilya Ilyitch or Peter Petrovitch, and henceforth ranks only as the
zhenich. * Yesterday no one would have noticed him, but by to-morrow
every one will be staring at him as though he were a notorious rascal.
Neither at the theatre nor in the street will folk let him pass without
whispering, ‘Here comes the zhenich! And every day other folk will call
upon him with their faces reduced to an even greater state of imbecility than
distinguishes yours at this moment—all in order that they may, vie with one
another in saying imbecile things. That is how such an affair begins. And
early each morning the zhenich must go to see his betrothed in lemon-
coloured gloves—never at any time may he look untidy or weary; and
always he must eat and drink what is customary under the circumstances, in
order that his sustenance may appear to comprise principally bouquets and
air. That is the programme which is supposed to continue fully for three or
four months! How could I go through such an ordeal? Meanwhile you,
Zakhar, would have had to run backwards and forwards between my place
and my betrothed’s, as well as to keep making a round of the tailors’, the
bootmakers’, and the cabinetmakers’ establishments, owing to the fact that I
myself could not have been in every spot at once. And soon the whole town
would have come to hear of it. ‘Have you yet heard the news?’ ‘Oblomov is
going to be married!’ ‘Really? To whom? And what is she like? And when
is the ceremony to be?’ Talk, talk, talk! Besides, how could I have afforded
the necessary expenses? You know how much money I possess. Have I yet
found another flat? And am I not owing a thousand roubles for this one?
And would not the hire of fresh quarters have cost me three thousand
roubles more, considering the extra rooms which would have been
required? And would there not have been the cost of a carriage, and of a
cook, and so forth? How could I possibly have paid for it all?”
* Bridegroom to-be.

Oblomov checked himself abruptly. He felt horrified to think of the
threatening, the uncomfortable, vision which his imagination had conjured
up. The roses, the orange-blossoms, the glitter and show, the whispers of the
crowd—all these had faded into the background. His fond dreams, his peace
of mind alike were gone. He could not eat or sleep, and everything had
assumed an air of gloom and despondency. In seeking to overawe Zakhar,
he had ended by frightening also himself, for he had stumbled upon the
practical view of marriage, and come to perceive that, despite nuptial
poetry, marriage constitutes an official, a very real step towards a serious
assumption of new and insistent obligations. Unable, therefore, to make up
his mind as to what he should say to Olga when he next met her, he decided
to defer his visit until the following Wednesday. Having arrived at this
decision, he felt easier.
Two days later, Zakhar entered the room with a letter from Olga.
“I cannot wait until Wednesday,” she wrote. “I feel so lost through these
long absences from your side that I shall look to see you in the Summer
Gardens at three o’clock to-morrow.”
“I cannot go,” he thought to himself. The next moment he comforted
himself with the reflection that very likely, her aunt, or some other lady,
would be with her; in which case he would have a chance of concealing his
nervousness.
Scarcely had he reached the Gardens when he saw her approaching. She
was veiled, and at first he did not recognize her.
“How glad I am that you have come!” she exclaimed. “I was afraid you
would not do so.”
She pressed his hand, and looked at him with an air so frank, so full of
joy at having stolen this moment from Fate, that he felt envious of her, and
regretful that he could not share in her lighthearted mood. Her whole face
bespoke a childish confidence in the future, in her happiness, and in him.
Truly she was very charming!
“But why do you look so gloomy?” suddenly she exclaimed. “Why do
you say nothing? I had thought you would be overjoyed to see me whereas I
find you gone to sleep again! Wake up, sir!”

“I am both well and happy,” he hastened to say—fearful lest things
should attain the point of her guessing what was really in his mind. “But I
am disturbed that you should have come alone.”
“Rather, it is for me to be disturbed about that,” she retorted. “Do you
think I ought to have brought my aunt with me?”
“Yes, Olga.”
“Then, if I had known that, I would have invited her to come,”
offendedly she said as she withdrew her hand from his. “Until now I had
imagined that your greatest happiness in life was to be with me, and with
me alone. Let us go for a row in a boat.”
With that she set off towards the river, dragging his unwilling form
behind her.
“Are you coming to our house to-morrow?” she inquired when they were
safely settled in their seats.
“My God!” he reflected. “Already she has divined my thoughts, and
knows that I do not want to come!”
“Yes, yes,” he answered aloud.
“In the morning, and for the whole day?”
“Yes.”
She splashed his face playfully with water.
“How bright and cheerful everything looks!” she remarked as she gazed
about her. “Let us come again to-morrow. This time I shall come straight
from home.”
“Then you have not come straight from home to-day?”
“No, but from a shop, from a jeweller’s.”
Oblomov looked alarmed.
“Suppose your aunt were to find out?” he suggested.
“Oh, suppose the Neva were to become dried up, and that this boat were
to overturn, and that our house were suddenly to fall down, and that—that

you were suddenly to lose your love for me?” As she spoke she splashed
him again.
“Listen, Olga,” he said when they had landed on the bank. “At the risk of
vexing and offending you, I ought to tell you something.”
“What is it?” Her tone was impatient.
“That we ought not to be indulging in these secret meetings.”
“But we are betrothed to one another?”
“Yes, dearest Olga,” he replied, pressing her hands, “and therefore we are
bound to be all the more careful. I would rather be walking with you along
this avenue publicly than by stealth—I would rather see the eyes of passers-
by drop respectfully before you than run the risk of incurring a suspicion
that you have so far forgotten your modesty and your upbringing as to lose
your head and fail in your duty.”
“But I have not forgotten my modesty and my upbringing,” she
exclaimed, withdrawing her hands.
“No, I know that you have not,” he agreed. “I was merely thinking of
what people might say—of how the world in general might look upon it all.
Pray do not misunderstand me. What I desire is that to the world you should
seem to be as pure, as irreproachable, as in actual fact you are. To me your
conduct seems solely honourable and modest; but would every one believe
it to be so?”
“What you say is right,” she said after a pause. “Consequently, let us tell
my aunt to-morrow, and obtain her consent.”
Oblomov turned pale. “Why hurry so?” he asked. “I know that, two
weeks ago, I myself was urging haste; but at that time I had not thought of
the necessary preparations.”
“Then your heart is failing you? That I can see clearly.”
“No; I am merely cautious. Even now I see a carriage approaching us.
Are you sure that the people in it are not acquaintances of yours? How these
things throw one into a fever of perspiration I Let us depart as quickly as
possible.” And with that he set off, almost at a run.
“Until to-morrow, then,” she said.

“No, until the day after to-morrow. That would be better. Or even until
Friday or Saturday.”
“No, no; you must come to-morrow. Do you hear? What have we not
come to! What a mountain of sorrow are you not threatening to bring upon
my head!”
She turned to go home.

III

O
n arriving at his rooms again, Oblomov never noticed that Zakhar
gave him a cold dinner, or that, after it, he rolled into bed and slept
heavily and insensibly; like a stone. Next day he received a letter in
which Olga said that she had spent the whole night weeping.
“She has been unable to sleep!” he thought to himself. “Poor angel! Why
does she care for me so much? And why am I so fond of her? Would we had
never met! It is all Schtoltz’s fault. He shed love over us as he might have
shed a disease. What sort of a life is this? Nothing but anxiety and emotion!
How can it ever lead to peaceful happiness and rest?”
Sighing deeply, he threw himself upon the sofa—then rose again, and
went out into the street, as though seeking the normal existence which
pursues a daily, gradual course of contemplation of nature, and constitutes a
series of calm, scarcely perceptible phenomena of family life. Of existence
as a spacious, a turbulent, a billowing river, as Schtoltz always conceived it
to be, he could form no conception whatever.
He wrote to Olga that he had taken a slight chill in the Summer Gardens
—wherefore he must stay at home for a couple of days; but that he hoped
soon to be better, and to see her on the following Sunday. In reply she wrote
that he must take the greatest care of himself; that even on Sunday he must
not come should he not be well enough; and that a whole week’s separation
would be bearable to her if thereby he were enabled to avoid risking his
health. This excuse for omitting the Sunday visit Oblomov gladly seized
upon; wherefore he sent back word that, as a matter of fact, a few days’
additional convalescence would be no more than prudent.
Day succeeded day throughout the week. He read, he walked about the
streets, and, occasionally, he looked in upon his landlady for the purpose of
exchanging a couple of words and drinking some of her excellent coffee. So
comfortable did she make him that he even thought of giving her a book to
read; but when he did so she merely read the headings of a chapter or two,
and then returned him the volume, saying that later she would get her little
girl to read the work to her.

Meanwhile Olga received unexpected news. This was to the effect that a
lawsuit with regard to her property had ended in her favour, and that within
a month’s time she would be able, should she wish, to enter into actual
possession. But of this, and of her other plans for the future, she decided not
to tell Oblomov, but to spend the present hour in dreams of the happiness
that was to be hers and his when she had seen love complete its revolution
in his apathetic soul, and the slothfulness fall from his shoulders.
That very day he was to come. Yet three o’clock arrived—four o’clock—
and no Oblomov. By half-past five the beauty and the freshness of her
features had begun to fade. Insensibly her form assumed a drooping
posture, and as she sat at the table her face was pale. Yet no one noticed
this. The rest of the guests consumed the dishes which she had prepared for
him alone, and carried on a desultory, indifferent chatter of conversation.
Until ten o’clock she vacillated between hope and despair. Then, on the
arrival of that hour, she withdrew to her room. At first she showered upon
his head all the resentment that was seething within her. Not a word of
mordant sarcasm in her vocabulary would she not have devoted to his
punishing, had he been present. But after a while her mind passed from
fierceness to a thought which chilled it like ice.
“He is sick,” was that thought. “He is lonely and ill, and unable even to
write.” So much did the idea gain upon her that she passed a sleepless night,
and rose pale, quiet, and determined. The same morning—it was Monday—
the landlady informed Oblomov that a visitor desired to see him.
“To see me? Surely not?” he exclaimed. “Where is she?”
“Outside. Shall I send her away?” Oblomov was about to assent when
Olga’s maid, Katia, entered the room. Oblomov changed countenance.
“How come you to be here?” he asked.
“My mistress is outside,” she replied, “and has sent me in to bid you go
to her.” There was no help for it, so he went out, and found Olga alone.
“Are you quite well?” she exclaimed. “What has been the matter with
you?” With that they entered his study.
“I am better now—the sore throat is almost gone,” he replied; and as he
spoke he touched the part mentioned, and coughed slightly.

“Then why did you not come last night?” She raked him with a glance so
keen that for the moment he found himself tongue-tied.
“And why have you taken such a step as this?” he countered. “Surely you
know what you are doing?”
“Never mind,” she retorted impatiently. “I do not believe you have been
ill at all.”
“No—I have not,” he confessed.
“You have been deceiving me? Why so?”
“I will explain later. Important reasons have kept me away from you for a
fortnight.”
“What are they?”
“I—I am afraid of scandal, of people’s tongues.”
“And not of the fact that possibly I might pass sleepless nights—that
possibly I might be so anxious as to be unable to rest?”
“You cannot think what is passing within me,” he said, pointing to his
head, and then to his heart. “I am all on edge, all on fire.”
With that he told her what Zakhar had said to him, and ended with a
statement that, like herself, he could not sleep, and that in every glance he
saw a question, or a sneer, or a veiled hint at the relations which might be
existing between her and himself.
“Let us decide to tell my aunt this week,” she replied, “and at once this
chatter will cease. Had I not known you so well, I should scarcely have
been able to understand the fact that you can be afraid of servants’ gossip,
yet not of making me anxious. Really I cannot understand you.”
“Listen,” presently she went on. “There is more in this than meets the
eye. Tell me all that is in your mind. What does it mean?”
He looked at her—then kissed her hand and sighed.
“What have you been doing during the past week or so?” she persisted as
she glanced round the room. “What a wretched place you have got! The
windows are small, and the curtains dirty. Where are your other rooms?”

He hastened to show her them, in the hope that he might divert her mind
from the question of his late doings; but she only repeated the question.
“I have been reading,” he replied, “and writing, and thinking of you.”
“Have you yet read my books?” she inquired. “Where are they? I will
take them back with me.”
One of them happened to be lying on the table. She looked at the page at
which it was open, and saw that the page was covered with dust.
“You have not read them!” she exclaimed.
“No,” he confessed.
Once more she looked at the mess and disorder in the room, and then
inquired: “Then what have you been doing? You have neither been writing
nor reading.”
“No; I have not had time to do so.. In this place, as soon as one rises, the
rooms need to be swept, and other interruptions occur afterwards. Next,
when dinner is over——”
“When dinner is over you need to go to sleep.”
So positive in its assurance was her tone that after a moment’s hesitation
he replied that her conjecture was correct.
“Why do you do that?”
“In order to pass the time. You are not here with me, Olga, and life is
wearisome and unbearable without you.”
Her gaze became so stern that he broke off abruptly.
“Listen, Ilya,” she said very gravely. “Do you remember saying in the
park that at length your life had been fired to flame, and that you believed
me to be the aim, the ideal, of your life?”
“How should I not remember it, seeing that it has revolutionized my
whole existence? Cannot you see how happy I am?”
“No, I do not see it,” she replied coldly. “Not only have you deceived me,
but also you are letting yourself relapse into your former ways.”

“Deceived you? I swear to God that, were that so, I would leap into the
pit of Hell!”
“Yes—if the pit of Hell were just beneath your feet; but, were you to put
off doing so, even for a day or two, you would straightway change your
mind, and become nervous about the deed—more especially should Zakhar
and the rest begin gossiping on the subject! That is not love.”
“Ah, you have no idea how these cares and distractions have injured my
health!” he exclaimed. “Ever since I have known you, nothing but anxiety
has been my lot. Yet deprivation of you would cause me to die or to go out
of my mind. Only through you can I breathe or feel or see. Is it, then,
wonderful that, when you are not with me, I fall ill? Without you everything
is wearisome and distasteful. I feel like a machine, I walk and act without
knowing ever what I am doing. Yes, I am like a machine whereof only you
are the fuel, the motive power....”
When she had gone he trod the floor as on air. “How clearly she sees
life!” he reflected. “How unerringly from that book of wisdom is she able to
divine her road!” Yes, his life and hers had been bound to come together
like two rivers, for she, and only she, was his true guide and instructor.
Next day there arrived a letter from the lawyer on his estate. He read it
through—then let it slip from his fingers to the ground. The gist of the
document was that his property was greatly involved, and that, if he wished
matters to be set in order, he must hasten to take up his residence on the
spot.
“Then marriage is not to be thought of for at least another year,” he
reflected with dismay. “First of all I shall need to complete my plans for the
estate, and then to consult an architect, and then, and then——”
He broke off with a sigh.

IV

A
re you certain that nothing remains to you of your properly—that
there is no hope of anything?” asked Olga a few days later.
“Yes, I am certain,” he replied—then added with a touch of
hesitation in his tone: “But perhaps within a year or so——”
“Within a year or so you may be able to order your life and your affairs?
Reflect a moment.”
He sighed, for he was fighting a battle with himself, and the battle was
reflected in his face.
“Listen,” she went on. “Remember that you and I are no longer children,
and that we are not jesting, and that the matter may affect our whole lives.
Inquire sternly of your conscience, therefore, and tell me (for I know you,
as well as trust you) whether you can stand by me your life long, and be to
me all that I need? You know me as I know you: consequently you
understand what it is that I am trying to say. Should you return me a bold, a
considered ‘Yes,’ I will cancel a certain decision of mine—I will give you
my hand, and together we will go abroad, or to your estate, or to the
Veaborg Quarter.”
“Ah, if you knew how much I love you!” he began.
“I desire no protestations of love.—only a brief answer.”
“Do not torture me, Olga,” he cried with weariness in his tone.
“Then am I right in what I suppose?” she asked.
“Yes—you are right,” was the firm, but significant, reply.
There followed a long pause.
“Shall I tell you what you would have done had we married?” at length
she said. “Day by day you would have relapsed farther and farther into your
slough. And I? You see what I am—that I am not yet grown old, and that I
shall never cease to live. But you would have taken to waiting for
Christmas, and then for Shrovetide, and to attending evening parties, and to

dancing, and to thinking of nothing at all. You would have retired to rest
each night with a sigh of thankfulness that the day had passed so quickly;
and each morning you would have awakened with a prayer that to-day
might be exactly as yesterday. That would have been our future. Is it not so?
Meanwhile I should have been fading away. Do you really think that in
such a life you would have been happy?”
He tried to rise and leave the room, but his feet refused their office. He
tried to say something, but his throat seemed dry, and no sound would
come. All he could do was to stretch out his hand.
“Forgive me!” he murmured.
She too tried to speak, but could not. She too tried to extend her hand, but
it fell back. Finally, her face contracted painfully, and, sinking forward upon
his shoulder, she burst into a storm of sobbing. It was as though all her
weapons had slipped from her grasp, and once more she was just a woman
—a woman defenceless in her fight with sorrow.
“Good-bye, good-bye!” she said amid her spasms of weeping. He sat
listening painfully to her sobs, but felt as though he could say nothing to
check them. Sinking into a chair, and burying her face in her handkerchief,
she wept bitter, burning tears, with her head bowed upon the table.
“Olga,” at length he said, “why, torture yourself in this way? You love
me, and could never survive a parting. Take me, therefore, as I am, and love
in me just so much as may be worthy of it.”
Without raising her head, she made a gesture of refusal.
“No, no,” she forced herself to gasp. “Nor need you fear for me and my
grief. I know myself. I am merely weeping my heart out, and shall then
weep no more. Do not hinder me, but go. God has punished me. Yet how it
hurts, how it hurts!”
Her sobs redoubled.
“But suppose the pain should not pass?” he said. “Suppose it should
wreck your health? Tears like these are tears of poison. Olga, darling, do not
weep. Forget the past.”
“No, no; let me weep. I am weeping not so much for the future as for the
past.” She could scarcely utter the words. “It was all so bright—but now it

is gone! It is not I that am weeping; it is my memory—my memory of the
summer, of the park—that is pouring out its grief. Do you remember those
things? Yes, I am yearning for the avenue, and for the lilac that you gave
me... They had struck their roots into my heart, and—and the plucking of
them up is painful indeed!”
In her despair she bowed her head, and sobbed again—repeating: “Oh,
how it hurts! Oh, how it hurts!”
“But suppose you were to die of this?” he said in sudden alarm. “Olga,
Olga! Think a moment!”
“No, no,” she interrupted, raising her head, and striving to look at him
through her tears. “Not long ago I realized that I was loving in you only
what I wished you to contain—that it was only the future Oblomov of my
dreams that was so dear to me. Ilya, you are good and honourable and
tender; but you are all this only as is a dove which, with its head hidden
under its wing, wishes to see nothing better. All your life you would have
sat perched beneath the eaves. But I am different—I wish for more than
that; though what it is I wish for even I myself could scarcely say. On the
other hand, do you think that you could have taught me what that something
is, that you could have supplied me with what I lack, that you could have
given me all that I——?”
Oblomov’s legs were tottering under him. Sinking into a chair, he wiped
his hands and forehead with his handkerchief. The words had been harsh—
they had stung him to the quick. Somehow, too, they had seared him
inwardly, while outwardly, they had chilled him as with a breath of frost.
No more could he do than smile the sort of pitiful, deprecating smile which
may be seen on the face of a beggar who is being rated for his sorry
clothing—the sort of smile which says: “I am poor and naked and hungry.
Beat me, therefore—beat me.”
Suddenly Olga realized the sting which her words had contained, and
threw herself impetuously upon him.
“Forgive me, my friend,” she said tenderly and with tears in her voice. “I
did not think what I was saying, for I am almost beside myself. Yes, forget
all that has happened, and let us be as formerly—let all remain unchanged.”

“No,” he replied, as abruptly he rose to his feet and checked her outburst
with a decisive gesture. “All cannot remain unchanged. Nor need you regret
that you have told me the truth. I have well deserved it.”
She burst into a renewed fit of weeping.
“Go!” she said, twisting her tear-soaked handkerchief in her hands. “I
cannot bear this any longer. To me at least the past is dear.”
She covered her face, and the sobs poured forth afresh.
“Why has everything thus come to rack and ruin?” she cried. “Who has
put a curse upon you, Ilya? Why have you done this? You are clever and
kind and good and noble; yet you can wreck our lives in this way! What
nameless evil has undone you?”
“It has a name,” he said almost inaudibly. She looked at him
questioningly with tear-filled eyes.
“That name,” he added, “is ‘The Disease of Oblomovka.’”
Turning with bowed head, he departed.
Whither he wandered, or what he did, he never afterwards knew. Late at
night he returned home. His landlady, hearing his knock, awoke Zakhar,
who undressed his master, and wrapped him in the old dressing-gown.
“How comes that to be here?” asked Oblomov, glancing at the garment.
“I was given it by the landlady to-day,” replied Zakhar. “She has just
cleaned and mended it.”
Sinking into an arm-chair, Oblomov remained there. All around was
growing dim and dreamlike. As he sat there with his head resting on his
hand he neither remarked the dimness nor heard the striking of the hours.
All his mind was plunged in a chaos of formless, indefinite thoughts which,
like the clouds in the sky, passed aimlessly, disconnectedly athwart the
surface of his brain. Of none of them could he catch the actual substance.
His heart felt crushed, and for the moment the life in it was in abeyance.
Mechanically he gazed in front of him without even noticing that day was
breaking, or that his landlady’s dry cough was once more audible, or that
the dvornik was beginning to cut firewood in the courtyard, or that the usual

clatter in the house had begun again. At length he went to bed, and fell into
a leaden, an uncomfortable sleep....
“To-day is Sunday,” whispered the kindly voice of the landlady, “and I
have baked you a pie. Will you not have some?”
He returned no answer, for he was in a high fever.

PART IV

I

F
or many a day after his illness Oblomov’s mood was one of dull and
painful despondency; but gradually this became replaced with a
phase of mute indifference, in which he would spend hours in
watching the snow fall and listening to the grinding of the landlady’s
coffee-mill, to the barking of the housedogs as they rattled at their chains, to
the creaking of Zakhar’s boots, and to the measured tick of the clock’s
pendulum. As of old, Agafia Matvievna, his landlady, would come and
propose one or another dish for his delectation; also her children would
come running to and fro through his rooms. To the landlady he returned
kindly, indifferent answers, and to the youngsters he gave lessons in reading
and waiting, while smiling wearily, involuntarily at their playfulness. Little
by little he regained his former mode of life.
One day Schtoltz walked into his room.
“Well, Ilya?” he said, with a questioning sternness which caused
Oblomov to lower his eyes and remain silent.
“Then it is to be ‘never’?” went on his friend.
“‘Never’?” queried Oblomov.
“Yes. Do you not remember my saying to you, ‘Now or never’?”
“I do,” the other returned. “But I am not the man I then was. I have now
set my affairs in order, and my plans for improving my estate are nearly
finished, and I write regularly for two journals, and I have read all the
books which you left behind you.”
“But why have you never come to join me abroad?” asked Schtoltz.
“Something prevented me.”
“Olga?”
Oblomov gathered animation at the question.
“Where is she?” he exclaimed. “I heard that she had gone abroad with
her aunt—that she went there soon after, after——”

“Soon after she had recognized her mistake,” concluded Schtoltz.
“You know the story, then?” said Oblomov, scarcely able to conceal his
confusion.
“Yes, the whole of it—even to the point of the sprig of lilac. Do you not
feel ashamed of yourself, Ilya? Does it not hurt you? Are you not consumed
with regret and remorse?”
“Yes; please do not remind me of it,” interrupted Oblomov hurriedly. “So
great was my agony when I perceived the gulf set between us that I fell ill
of a fever. Ah, Schtoltz, if you love me, do not torture me, do not mention
her name. Long ago I pointed out to her her mistake, but she would not
listen to me. Indeed I am not so much to blame.”
“I am not blaming you,” said Schtoltz gently; “for I have read your letter.
It is I that am most to blame—then she—then you least of all.”
“How is she now?”
“How is she? She is in great distress. She weeps, and will not be
comforted.”
Mingled anguish, sympathy, and alarm showed themselves on Oblomov’s
features.
“What?” he cried, rising to his feet. “Come, Schtoltz! We must go to her
at once, in order that I may beg her pardon on my knees.”
Schtoltz thought it well to change his tactics.
“Do you sit still,” he said with a laugh. “I have not been telling you the
exact truth. As a matter of fact, she is well and happy, and bids me give you
her greeting. Also, she wanted to write to you, but I dissuaded her on the
ground that it would only cause you pain.”
“Thank God for that!” cried Oblomov, almost with tears of joy. “Oh, I am
so glad, Schtoltz! Pray let me embrace you, and then let us drink to her
happiness!”
“But why are you hidden away in this corner?” asked Schtoltz after a
pause.
“Because it is quiet here—there is no one to disturb me.”

“I suppose so,” retorted Schtoltz. “In fact, you have here—well,
Oblomovka over again, only worse.” He glanced about him. “And how are
you now?”
“I am not very well. My breathing is bad, and spots persist in floating
before my eyes. Sometimes, too, when I am asleep, some one seems to
come and strike me a blow upon the back and head, so that I leap up with a
start.”
“Listen, Ilya,” said Schtoltz gravely. “I tell you, in all seriousness, that if
you do not change your mode of life you will soon be seized with dropsy or
a stroke. As for your future, I have no hopes of it at all. If Olga, that angel,
could not bear you from your swamp on her wings, neither shall I succeed
in doing so. However, to the end I shall stand by you: and when I say that, I
am voicing not only my own wish, but also that of Olga. For she desires
you not to perish utterly, not to be buried alive; she desires that at least I
shall make an attempt to dig you from the tomb.”
“Then she has not forgotten me?” cried Oblomov with emotion—adding:
“As though I were worthy of her remembrance!”
“No, she has not forgotten you, and, I think, never will. Indeed, she is not
the sort of person to forget you. Some day you must go and pay her a visit
in the country.”
“Yes, yes—but not now,” urged Oblomov.
“Even at this moment I—I——” He pointed to his heart.
“What does it contain?” asked Schtoltz. “Love?”
“No, shame and sorrow. Ah, life, life!”
“What of it?”
“It disturbs me—it allows me no rest.”
“Were it to do so, the flame of your candle would soon go out, and you
would find yourself in darkness. Ah, Ilya, Ilya! Life passes too swiftly for it
to be spent in slumber. Would, rather, it were a perpetual fire!—that one
could live for hundreds and hundreds of years! Then what an immensity of
work would one not do!”

“You and I are of different types,” said Oblomov. “You have wings; you
do not merely exist—you also fly. You have gifts and ambition; you do not
grow fat; specks do not dance before your eyes; and the back of your neck
does not need to be periodically scratched. In short, my organism and yours
are wholly dissimilar.”
“Fie, fie! Man was created to order his own being, and even to change his
own nature; yet, instead, he goes and develops a paunch, and then supposes
that nature has laid upon him that burden. Once upon a time you too had
wings. Now you have laid them aside.”
“Where are they?” asked Oblomov. “I am powerless, completely
powerless.”
“Rather, you are determined to be powerless. Even during your boyhood
at Oblomovka, and amid the circle of your aunts and nurses and valets, you
had begun to waste your intellect, and to be unable to put on your own
socks, and so forth. Hence your present inability to live.”
“All that may be so,” said Oblomov with a sigh; “but now it is too late to
turn back.”
“And what am I to say to Olga on my return?”
Oblomov hung his head in sad and silent meditation.
“Say nothing,” at length he said. “Or say that you have not seen me....”
A year and a half later Oblomov was sitting in his dull, murky rooms. He
had now grown corpulent, and from his eyes ennui peered forth like a
disease. At intervals, too, he would rise and pace the room, then lie down
again, then take a book from the table, read a few lines of it, yawn, and
begin drumming with his fingers upon the table’s surface. As for Zakhar, he
was more seedy and untidy than ever. The elbows of his coat were patched,
and he had about him a pinched and hungry air, as though his appetite were
bad, his sleep poor, and his work three times as much as it ought to have
been. Oblomov’s dressing-gown also was patched: yet, carefully though the
holes had been mended, the seams were coming apart in various places.
Likewise the coverlet of the bed was ragged, while the curtains, though
clean, were faded and hanging in strips.

Suddenly the landlady entered to announce a visitor, and also to say that
it was neither Tarantiev nor Alexiev.
“Then it must be Schtoltz again!” thought Oblomov, with a sense of
horror. “What can he want with me? However, it does not matter.”
“How are you?” inquired Schtoltz when he entered the room. “You have
grown stout, yet your face is pale.”
“Yes, I am not well,” agreed Oblomov. “Somehow my left leg has lost all
feeling.” Schtoltz threw at him a keen glance, and then eyed the dressing-
gown, the curtains, and the coverlet.
“Never mind,” said Oblomov confusedly. “You know that never at any
time do I keep my place tidy. But how is Olga?”
“She has not forgotten you. Possibly you will end by forgetting her?”
“No, never! Never could I forget the time when I was really alive and
living in Paradise. Where is she, then?”
“In the country.”
“With her aunt?”
“Yes—and also with her husband.”
“So she is married? Has she been married long? And is she happy?”
Oblomov had quite sloughed his lethargy. “I feel as though you had
removed a great burden from my mind. True, when you were last here, you
assured me that she had forgiven me; but all this time I have been unable to
rest for the gnawing at my heart.... Tell me who the fortunate man is?”
“Who he is?” repeated Schtoltz. “Why, cannot you guess, Ilya!”
Oblomov’s gaze grew more intent, and for a moment or two his features
stiffened, and every vestige of colour left his cheeks.
“Surely it is not yourself?” he asked abruptly.
“It is. I married her last year.”
The agitation faded from Oblomov’s expression, and gave place to his
usual apathetic moodiness. For a moment or two he did not raise his eyes;
but when he did so they were full of kindly tears.

“Dear Schtoltz!” he cried, embracing his friend. “And dear Olga! May
God bless you both! How pleased I am! Pray tell her so.”
“I will tell her that in all the world there exists not my friend Oblomov’s
equal.” Schtoltz was profoundly moved.
“No, tell her, rather, that I was fated to meet her, in order that I might set
her on the right road. Tell her also that I bless both that meeting and the
road which she has now taken. To think that that road might have been
different! As it is, I have nothing to blush for, and nothing of which to
repent. You have relieved my soul of a great burden, and all within it is
bright. I thank you, I thank you!”
“I will tell her what you have said,” replied Schtoltz. “She has indeed
reason for never forgetting you, for you would have been worthy of her—
yes, worthy of her, you who have a heart as deep as the sea. You must come
and visit us in the country.”
“No,” replied the other. “It is not that I am afraid of witnessing your
married happiness, or of becoming jealous of her love for you. Yet I will not
come.”
“Then of what are you afraid?”
“Of growing envious of you. In your happiness I should see, as in a
mirror, my own bitter, broken life. Yet no life but this do I wish, or have it
in my power, to live. Do not, therefore, disturb it. Memories are the height
of poetry only when they are memories of happiness. When they graze
wounds over which scars have formed they become an aching pain. Let us
speak of something else. Let me thank you for all the care and attention
which you have devoted to my affairs. Yet never can I properly requite you.
Seek, rather, requital in your own heart, and in your happiness with Olga
Sergievna. Likewise, forgive me for having failed to relieve you of your
duties with regard to Oblomovka. It is my fixed intention to go there before
long.”
“You will find great changes occurred in the place. Doubtless you have
read the statements of accounts which I have sent you?”
Oblomov remained silent.

“What? You have not read them?” exclaimed Schtoltz, aghast. “Then
where are they?”
“I do not know. Wait a little, and I will look for them after dinner.”
“Ah, Ilya, Ilya! Scarcely do I know whether to laugh or to weep.”
“Never mind. We will attend to the affair after dinner. First let us eat.”
During the meal Oblomov bestowed high encomiums upon his landlady’s
cooking.
“She looks after everything,” he said. “Never will you see me either with
unmended socks or with a shirt turned inside out. She supervises every
detail.”
He ate and drank with great gusto—so much so that Schtoltz
contemplated him with amazement.
“Drink, dear friend, drink,” said Oblomov. “This is splendid vodka. Even
Olga could not make vodka or patties or mushroom stews equal to these.
They are like what we used to have at Oblomovka. No man could be better
looked after by a woman than I am by my landlady, Agafia Matvievna.
Nevertheless I, I———” He hesitated.
“Well, what?” prompted Schtoltz.
“I owe her ten thousand roubles on note of hand.”
“Ten thousand roubles? To your landlady? For board and lodging?”
gasped Schtoltz, horrified.
“Yes. You see, the sum has gone on accumulating, for I live generously,
and the debt includes accounts for peaches, pineapples, and so forth.”
“Ilya,” said Schtoltz, “what is this woman to you?”
The other made no reply.
“She is robbing him,” thought his friend. “She is wheedling his all out of
him. Such things are everyday, occurrences, yet I had not guessed it.”
Desirous of taking Oblomov away with him, he nevertheless found all his
efforts in that direction ineffectual.

“I ask you once again,” he said. “In what relation do you stand to your
landlady?”
Again Oblomov reddened.
“Why are you desirous of knowing?” he countered.
“Because, on the score of our old friendship, I think it my duty to give
you a very serious warning indeed.”
“A warning against what?”
“A warning against a pit into which you may fall, Now I must be going. I
will tell Olga that we may expect to see you this summer whether at our
place or at Oblomovka.”
Then Schtoltz departed.
Not for some years did he visit the capital again, for Olga’s health
necessitated a lengthy sojourn in the Crimea. For some reason or other her
recovery after the birth of a child had been slow.
“How happy I am!” was her frequent reflection. Yet, no sooner had she
passed her life in admiring review than she would find herself relapsing into
a meditative mood. What a curious person she was!—a person who, in
proportion as her felicity became more, complete, plunged ever deeper and
deeper into a brooding over the past! Delving into the recesses of her own
mind, she began to realize that this peaceful existence, this halting at
various stages of felicity, annoyed her. However, with an effort of will she
shook her soul clear of this despondency, and quickened her steps through
life in a feverish desire to seek noise and movement and occupation. Yet the
bustle of society brought her small relief, and she would retire again into
her corner—there to rid her spirit of the unwonted sense of depression.
Then she would go out once more, and busy herself with petty household
cares which confined her to the nursery and the duties of a nurse and a
mother, or join her husband in reading and discussing serious books or
poetry. Her main fear was lest she should fall ill of the disease, the apathetic
malady, of Oblomovka. Yet, for all her efforts to slough these phases of
torpor and of spiritual coma, a dream of happiness other than the present
used to steal upon her, and wrap her in a haze of inertia, and cause her
whole being to halt, as for a rest from the exertions of life. Again, to this
mood there would succeed a phase of torture and weariness and

apprehension—a phase of dull sorrowfulness which kept asking itself dim,
indefinite questions and ceaselessly pondering upon them. And as she
listened to those questions she would examine herself, yet never discover
what it was she yearned for, nor why, at times, she seemed to tire of her
comfortable existence, to demand of it new and unfamiliar impressions, and
to be gazing ahead in search of something.
“What does it all mean?” she would say to herself with a shudder. “Is
there really anything more that I require, or that I need wish for? Whither
am I travelling? I have no farther to go—my journey is ended. Yet have I
really completed my cycle of existence? Is this really all—all?” Then she
would glance timidly around her, and wonder, in doubt and trembling, what
such whispers of the soul might portend. With anxious eyes she would scan
the earth, the heavens, and the wilds, yet find therein no answer, but merely
gloom, profundity, and remoteness. All nature seemed to be saying the same
thing; in nature she could perceive only a ceaseless, uniform current of life
to which there was neither a beginning nor an ending. Of course, she knew
whom she could consult concerning these tremors—she knew who could
return the needed answers to her questionings. But what would those
answers import? What if Schtoltz should say that her self-questionings
represented the murmurings of an unsympathetic, an unwomanly, heart—
that his quondam idol possessed but a blasé, dissatisfied soul from which
nothing good was to be looked for? Yes, how greatly she might fall in his
estimation, were he to discover these new and unwonted pangs of hers!
Consequently, whenever, in spite of her best efforts to conceal the fact, her
eyes lost their velvety softness, and acquired a dry and feverish glitter;
whenever, too, a heavy cloud overspread her face, and she could not force
herself to smile, and to talk, and to listen indifferently to the latest news in
the political world, or to descriptions of interesting phenomena in some new
walk of learning, or to remarks upon some new creation of art—well, then
she hid herself away, on the plea of illness.
Yet she felt no desire to give way to tears; she experienced none of those
sudden alarms which had been hers during the period when her girlish
nerves had been excited even to the point of self-expression. So if, while
resting on some calm, beautiful evening, there came stealing upon her, even
amid her husband’s talk and caresses, a feeling of weariness and
indifference to everything, she would merely ask herself despairingly what

it all meant. At one moment she would become, as it were, turned to stone,
and sit silent; at another she would make feverish attempts to conceal her
strange malady. Finally a headache would supervene, and she would retire
to rest. Yet all the while it was a difficult matter for her to evade the keen
eyes of her husband. This she knew well, and therefore prepared herself for
conversation with him as nervously as she would have done for confession
to a priest.

II

O
ne evening she and Schtoltz were pacing the poplar avenue in their
garden. She was suffering from her usual inexplicable lack of
energy, and finding herself able to return but the briefest of answers
to what he said.
“By the way,” he remarked, “the nurse tells me that Olinka is troubled
with a night cough. Ought we not to send for the doctor to-morrow?”
“No. I have given her some hot medicine, and am going to keep her
indoors for the present,” answered Olga dully.
In silence they walked to the end of the avenue.
“Why have you sent no reply to that letter from your friend Sonichka?”
he inquired. “This is the third letter that you have left unanswered.”
“I would rather forget her altogether,” was Olga’s brief rejoinder.
“Then you are not well?” he continued after a pause.
“Oh yes; nothing is the matter with me. Why should you think
otherwise’?”
“Then you are ennuyée?”
She clasped her hands upon his shoulder.
“No,” she said, in a tone of assumed cheerfulness—yet a tone in which
the note of ennui was only too plainly apparent.
He led her clear of the shade of the trees, and turned her face to the
moonlight.
“Look at me,” he commanded. He gazed intently into her eyes.
“One would say that you were unhappy,” he commented. “Your eyes
have a strange expression in them which I have noticed more than once
before. What is the matter with you, Olga?”
She took him by the sleeve and drew him back into the shade.

“Are you aware,” she said with forced gaiety, “that I am hungry for
supper?”
“No, no,” he protested. “Do not make a jest of this.”
“Unhappy, indeed?” she said reproachfully, halting in front of him. “Yes,
I am unhappy—but only from excess of happiness.” So tender was her tone,
and so caressing the note in her voice, that he bent down and kissed her.
With that she grew bolder. The jesting supposition that she could be
unhappy inspired her to greater frankness.
“No, I am not ennuyée,” she went on; “nor should I ever be so. You know
that well, yet you refuse to believe my words. Nor am I ill. It is merely that,
that well, that sometimes a feeling of depression comes over me. You are a
difficult man to conceal things from. Sometimes I feel depressed, though I
could not say why.”
She laid her head upon his shoulder.
“Nevertheless, what is the reason of it?” he asked her gently as he bent
over her.
“I do not know,” she repeated.
“Yet there must be a reason of some sort. If that reason lies neither in me
nor in your surroundings, it must lie in yourself. Sometimes such depression
is a symptom of ill-health. Are you sure that you are quite well?”
“At all events I feel so,” she replied gravely. “See for yourself how I eat
and walk and sleep and work! Yet every now and then there comes over me
a mood in which life seems to me incomplete.... Do not mind this, however.
It is nothing—nothing at all.”
“Tell me more,” he urged. “Certainly life is incomplete, but what would
you add to it?”
“And sometimes,” she continued, “I grow afraid lest everything should
be about to be changed, or to come to an end; while at other times I find
myself torturing my brain with a stupid wondering as to what more is to be
expected from the future, this happiness of ours, this life, with its joys and
sorrows”—she had dropped her voice to a whisper, in a sort of shame at her
own questionings—“I know to be quite natural; yet something seems still to

be drawing me onwards, and to be making me dissatisfied with my lot. How
ashamed I feel of my folly and fancifulness! But do not notice me: this
despondency of mine will soon pass away, and I shall once more become
bright and cheerful.”
She pressed herself closer with a timid caress, as though she were asking
pardon for what she termed her “folly.” He questioned her as to her
symptoms as a physician might have done, and, in return, she described to
him her dull self-interrogations, her confusion of soul. Meanwhile Schtoltz
paced the avenue with his head on his breast and his mind filled with doubt
and anxiety—anxiety at the fact that he so little understood his wife. At
length she, in her turn, drew him into the light of the moon, and gazed
inquiringly into his eyes.
“What are you thinking of?” she asked bashfully. “Are you smiling at my
foolishness? Yes, ’tis very foolish, this despondency of mine. Do you not
think so?”
He made no reply.
“Why do you not speak?” she urged impatiently.
“You have long been keeping silence,” he replied, “although always you
have known how solicitous I am on your account. Permit me, therefore, to
keep silence and reflect.”
“Yet, if you do that, I shall feel uneasy. Never ought I to have spoken out.
Pray say something.”
“What am I to say?” he asked meditatively. “It may be that a nervous
break down is hanging over you. Should that be so, the doctor, not I, will
have to decide how best you can be treated. I will send for him to-morrow.
In any case, if the mischief is not that, then——”
“Then what?” she queried, shaking his arm.
“It is over-imagination on your part. You are too full of life and hitherto
been maturing.” He was speaking rather to himself than to her.
“Pray utter your thoughts aloud, Andrei,”
“It is over—I am still maturing,” she said beseechingly. “I cannot bear it
when you go muttering to yourself like that. I have told you of my follies,

and you merely bow your head and mumble something into your beard. In
this dark spot such conduct makes me feel uncomfortable.”
“I am at a loss what to say. You tell me, ‘Depression comes over me,’ and
‘I find myself troubled with disturbing questions.’ What am I to make of
that? Let us speak on the subject again later, and in the meanwhile consider
matters. Possibly you require a course of sea-bathing, or something of the
kind.”
“But you said to yourself: ‘Hitherto you have been maturing.’ What did
you mean by that?”
“I was thinking that, that——” He spoke slowly and hesitatingly, as
though he were distrustful of his own thoughts and ashamed of his own
words. “You see, there are moments when symptoms of this kind betoken
that, if a woman has nothing radically wrong with her health, she has
reached maturity—has arrived at the stage when life’s growth becomes
arrested, and there remains for her no further problem to solve.”
“Then you mean that I am growing old?” she interrupted sharply. “How
can you say that? I am still young and strong.” And she drew herself up as
she spoke.
He smiled.
“Do not fear,” he said. “You are not of the kind that will ever grow old.
True, in old age one’s energies fail, and one ceases to battle with life; but
that is a very different thing. Provided it be what I take it to be, your sense
of depression and weariness is a sign of vigour. Frequently the growings of
a vivid, excitable intellect transcend the limits of everyday existence, and,
finding no answer to what that intellect demands of life, become converted
into despondency and a temporary dissatisfaction with life. The meaning of
it is that the soul is sorrowful at having to ask life its secret. Perhaps such is
the case with you. If so, you need not term it folly.”
She sighed, but, apparently, with relief at the thought that the danger was
over, and that she had not fallen in her husband’s estimation.
“I am quite happy,” she repeated, “nor do I spend my time in dreaming,
nor is my life monotonous. What more, then, is there for me to have? What
do these questionings portend? They harass me like a sickness.”

“They are a spur to encourage a weak, groping intellect which has lacked
full preparation. True, such depression and self-questionings have caused
many to lose their senses; but to others they seem mere formless visions, a
mere fever of the brain.”
“To think that just when one’s happiness is full to overflowing, and one is
thoroughly in love with life, there should come upon one a taint of sorrow!”
she murmured.
“Yes; such is the payment exacted for the Promethean fire. You must not
only endure, you must even love and respect, the sorrow and the doubts and
the self-questionings of which you have spoken: for they constitute the
excess, the luxury, of life, and show themselves most when happiness is at
its zenith, and has alloyed with it no gross desires. Such troubles are
powerless to spring to birth amid life which is ordinary and everyday; they
cannot touch the individual who is forced to endure hardship and want. That
is why the bulk of the crowd goes on its way without ever experiencing the
cloud of doubt, the pain of self-questioning. To him or to her, however, who
voluntarily goes to meet those difficulties they become welcome guests, not
a scourge.”
“But one can never get even with them. To almost every one they bring
sorrow and indifference.”
“Yes; but that does not last. Later they serve to shed light upon life, for
they lead one to the edge of the abyss whence there is no return—then
gently force one to turn once more and look upon life. Thus they seem to
challenge one’s tried faculties in order that the latter may be prevented from
sinking wholly into inertia.”
“And to think, also, that one should be disturbed by phantoms at all!” she
lamented. “When all is bright, one’s life suddenly becomes overshadowed
with some sinister influence. Is there no resource against it?”
“Yes, there is one. That resource lies in life itself. Without such phantoms
and such questionings life would soon become a wearisome business.”
“Then what ought I to do? To submit to them, and to wear out my heart?”
“No,” he replied. “Rather, arm yourself with resolution, and patiently, but
firmly, pursue your way.” With that he embraced her tenderly. “You and I
are not Titans; it is not for us to join the Manfreds and the Fausts of this

world in going out to do battle with rebellious problems. Rather, let us
decline the challenge of such difficulties, bow our heads, and quietly live
through the juncture until such time as life shall have come to smile again,
and happiness be once more ours.”
“But suppose they decline to pass us by? Will not our doubts and fears
continue to increase?”
“No; for we shall accept them as a new verse in life’s poem. In this case,
however, there is no fear of that. Your trouble is not peculiar to you alone; it
is an infectious malady common to all humanity, of which a touch has
visited you with the rest. Invariably does a human being feel lost when he
or she first breaks away from life and finds no support in place of it. May
God send that in the present instance this mood of yours be what I believe it
to be, and not a forerunner of some bodily illness. That would be worse, for
it would be the one thing before which I should be nerveless and destitute
of weapons. Surely that cloud, that depression, those doubts, those self-
questionings of yours, are not going to deprive us of our happiness, of our
———?” before he could do so, she had flung herself upon him in a frantic
embrace.
“Nothing shall ever do that!” she murmured in an access of renewed joy
and confidence. “No, neither doubts nor sorrow nor sickness! No, nor yet—
nor yet death itself!” Never had she seemed to love him as she did at that
moment.
“Take care that Fate does not overhear what you have whispered,” he
interposed with a superstitious caution born of tender forethought for her.
“Yes, take care that it does not rate you ungrateful, for it likes to have its
gifts appreciated at their true worth. Hitherto you have been learning only
about life: now you are going also to experience it. Soon, as life pursues its
course, there will come to you fresh sorrows and travail; and, together, they
will force you to look beyond the questions of which you have spoken, and
therefore you must husband your strength.”
Schtoltz uttered these words softly, and almost as though he were
speaking to himself. And in the words was a note of despondency which
seemed to say that already he could see approaching her “sorrows” and
“travail.”

She said nothing—she was too deeply struck with the mournful
foreboding in his tone. Yet she trusted him implicitly—his voice alone
inspired in her belief; and for that very reason his gravity affected her
deeply, and concentrated her thoughts upon herself. Leaning upon him, she
paced the avenue slowly and mechanically, with her soul awed to a silence
which she could not break. Following her husband’s eyes, she was gazing
forward at the vista of life, and trying to discern the point where, according
to his words, “sorrows and travail” were awaiting her. And as she did so she
saw arise before her a vision in which there became revealed to her a sphere
of life that was no longer to be bright and leisured and protected, that was
no longer to be passed amid plenty, that was no longer to be spent alone
with him. In that sphere she could descry only a long sequence of losses and
privations, with copious tears, strict asceticism, involuntary renunciation of
whims born of hours of ease, and new and unwonted sensations which
should call forth from her cries of pain and disappointment. Yes, in that
vision she saw before her only sickness, material ruin, the loss of her
husband, and...
Shuddering and faltering, she, with a man’s courageous curiosity,
continued to gaze at this unfamiliar presentment of life, and timidly to
review and to estimate her ability to cope with it. Only love, she saw, would
never fail her—only love would over this new existence keep ever-faithful
watch and ward. Yet it would be love of a different kind. From it there
would be absent all ardent sighs and shining days and rapturous nights; as
the years went on such things would come to seem children’s sport
compared with the non-intimate affection which life, now grown profound
and menacing, would cause her to adopt for her guide. From that life came
to her ears no sound of laughter and kisses and tremulous, soulful
intercourse amid groves and flowers, while life and nature kept high
holiday. No, such things were “withered and gone.” The love beheld in that
vision was a love which, unfading and indestructible, expressed itself on the
features of husband and wife only during seasons of mutual sorrow, and
shone forth only in slow, silent glances of mutual sympathy, and voiced
itself only in a constant, joint endurance of the trials of life as he and she
restrained the tears, and choked back the sobs, which those trials called
forth. With that there came stealing into the midst of the doubts and fears
which beset her other visions—visions remote but clear, inspiring but
definite....

Her husband’s calm, assured reasoning, added to her own implicit
confidence in him, helped Olga to succeed in shaking off both her
enigmatical, singular misgivings and her visionary, menacing dreams
concerning the future. Once more, therefore, she strode boldly forward. To
the night of doubt there succeeded a brilliant morning of maternal and
housewifely duties. On the one hand, there beckoned to her the flower
garden and the meadows; on the other hand there beckoned to her her
husband’s study. No longer did she play with life as with a means of
carefree indulgence. Rather, life had become a season of mysterious,
systematic waiting, and of getting ready.
Yet once, when Schtoltz happened to mention Oblomov’s name, she let
fall her sewing, and sank into a reverie.
“What of him?” later she asked. “Could we not find out how he is
through some of his friends?”
“Even so, we should find out no more than we know already.
Independently of his friends, I happen to be aware that he is alive and well,
and living in the same rooms as formerly. But how he is spending his days,
and whether he is morally dead or still there is flickering in him a last spark
of vitality, it is impossible for an outsider to ascertain.”
“Do not speak like that, Andrei,” said Olga. “It hurts me to hear you do
so. Were I not afraid, I would go in person to glean news of him.” The tears
had risen very near to her eyes.
“Next spring we ourselves shall be in Petrograd,” the husband remarked.
“Then we will find out.”
“But it is not sufficient merely to find out: we ought also to do all we can
for him!”
“Already I have done what is possible. When one is with him he is ready
to take any steps desired; but directly one’s back is turned he relapses into
slumber. ’Tis like trying to deal with a drunken man.”

“Then why turn your back upon him ever? He ought to be treated firmly
—he ought to, be removed from his rooms and taken away. Were I to ask
him, he would come with us into the country. I feel sure I should never get
over it if I were to see him sink to rack and ruin. Perhaps my tears——”
“Might revive him, you think?”
“No, but at least compel him to look around him, and to exchange his life
for something better. With us he would be out of the mire, and living among
his equals.”
“Surely you do not love him as you used to do?” Schtoltz asked half-
jestingly.
“No, I do not,” she replied (and as she did so her grave eyes seemed to be
gazing back into the past). “Yet in him there is something for which I have
an abiding affection, and to which I shall ever remain true.”
“Shall I tell you what that something is?” She nodded an assent.“’Tis an
honourable, trustworthy heart. That heart is the nugget given him of Nature,
and he has carried it unsullied through all his life. Under life’s stress he fell,
lost his enthusiasm, and ended by going to sleep—a broken, disenchanted
man who had lost his power to live, but not his purity and his intrinsic
worth. Never a false note has that heart sounded; never a particle of mire
has there clung to his soul; never a specious lie has he heeded; never to the
false road has he been seduced by any possible attraction. Even were a
whole ocean of evil and rascality to come seething about him, and even
were the whole world to become infected with poison and be turned upside
down, Oblomov would yet refuse to bow to the false image, and his soul
would remain as clean, as radiant, and as without spot as ever. That soul is a
soul of crystal transparency. Of men like him but few exist, so that they
shine amid the mob like pearls. No price could be high enough to purchase
his heart. Everywhere and always that heart would remain true to its trust. It
is to this element in him that you have always remained true; and it is owing
to the same element in him that my task of keeping watch will never
become a burden. In my day I have known many men with splendid
qualities. Never have I known a man cleaner, brighter, and more simple
than Oblomov. For many a man have I cherished an affection. Never for a
man have I cherished an affection more ardent and lasting than that which I

cherish for Oblomov. Once known, his personality is an entity for which
one’s love could never die.... Is that so? Have I divined aright?”
She said nothing: her eyes were fixed intently upon her work. At length
she arose, ran to her husband, gazed into his eyes for a moment as she
embraced him, and let her head sink forward upon his shoulder. During
those few moments there had arisen to her memory Oblomov’s kindly,
pensive face, his tender, deprecating gaze, and the shy, wistful smile with
which, at their last parting, he had met her reproaches. As she saw those
things her heart ached with pity.
“You will never abandon him—you will never let him leave your sight?”
she asked with her arms around her husband’s neck.
“No, never!—not though an abyss should open between us, and a
dividing wall arise!”
She kissed him.
“Nor shall I ever forget the words which you have just spoken,” she
murmured.

III

I
n the Veaborg Quarter peace and quietness reigned supreme. They
reigned in its unwashed streets, with their wooden sidewalks, and in its
lean gardens amid the nettle-encumbered ditches, where a goat with a
ragged cord around its neck was diligently engaged in cropping the herbage
and snatching dull intervals of slumber. At midday, however, the high, smart
boots of a clerk clattered along a sidewalk, the muslin curtain at a window
was pulled aside to admit the features of a Civil Service official’s lady, and
for a brief moment there showed itself over a garden fence the fresh young
face of a girl—then the face of a companion—then the face which had first
appeared, as two maidens laughed and tittered during the process cf
swinging each other on a garden swing.
Also in the abode of Oblomov’s landlady all was quiet. Had you entered
the little courtyard, you would have happened upon an idyllic scene. The
poultry would have started running hither and thither in fussy alarm, and the
dogs given tongue in furious accents, while Akulina would have paused in
her pursuit of milking the cow, and the dvornik in his task of chopping
firewood, in order that they might gaze unhampered at the visitor. “Whom
do you wish to see?” the dvornik would have inquired; and on your
mentioning Oblomov’s name, or that of the mistress of the house, he would
have pointed to the steps of the front door, and then resumed his task of
wood-chopping; whereupon the visitor would have followed the neat,
sanded path to the steps (which he would have found covered with a plain,
clean carpet of some sort), and, reaching for the brightly polished knob of
the doorbell, would have had the door opened to him by Anisia, one of the
children, the landlady herself, or Zakhar. Everything in Agafia Matvievna’s
establishment smacked of an opulence and a domestic sufficiency which
had been lacking in the days when she had shared house with her brother,
Tarantiev’s bosom friend. The kitchen, the lumber-room, and the pantry
were alike fitted with cupboards full of china, crockery, and household
wares of every sort; while in cases were set out Oblomov’s plate and
articles of silver (long ago redeemed, and never since pledged). In short, the
place abounded in such commodities as are to be found in the abode of

every frugal housewife. Also, so carefully was everything packed in
camphor and other preservatives that when Agafia Matvievna went to open
the doors of the cupboards she could scarcely stand against the
overwhelming perfume of mingled narcotics which came forth, and had to
turn her head aside for a few moments. Hams hung from the ceiling of the
storeroom (to avoid damage by mice), and, with them, cheeses, loaves-of—
sugar, dried fish, and bags of nuts and preserved mushrooms. On a table
stood tubs of butter, pots of sour cream, baskets of apples, and God knows
what else besides, for it would require the pen of a scribe Homer to describe
in full, and in detail, all that had become accumulated in the various corners
and on the various floors of this little nest of domestic life. As for the
kitchen, it was a veritable palladium of activity on the part of the mistress
and her efficient assistant, Anisia. Everything was kept indoors and in its
proper place; throughout there prevailed a system of orderliness and
cleanliness; and only into one particular nook of the house did a ray of light,
a breath of air, the good housewife’s eye, and the nimble, all-furbishing
hand of the domestic never penetrate. That nook was Zakhar’s den. Lacking
a window, it was so constantly plunged in darkness that its resemblance to a
lair rather than to a human habitation was rendered the more complete.
Whenever Zakhar surprised in his den the mistress of the house (come
thither to plan a cleaning or various improvements) he explained to her, in
forcible terms, that it was not a woman’s business to sweep out a place
where faggots, blacking, and boots ought to lie, and that it mattered not a jot
that clothes should be tossed in a heap on the floor, or that the bed in the
stove corner had become overspread with dust, seeing that it was he, and
not she, whose function it was to repose upon that bed. As for a besom, a
few planks, a couple of bricks, the remains of a barrel, and two blocks of
wood which he always kept in his room, he could not, he averred, get on in
his domestic duties without them (though why that was so he left to the
imagination). Finally, according to his own statement, neither the dust nor
the cobwebs in the least inconvenienced him—to which he begged to add a
reminder that, since he never obtruded his nose into the kitchen, he should
be the more pleased if he could be left alone by those to whom the kitchen
was at all times open. Once, when he surprised Anisia in his sanctum, he
threatened her so furiously with uplifted fist that the case was referred to the
court of superior instance—that is to say, to Oblomov himself, who walked
supinely to the door of the den, inserted his head therein, scanned the

apartment and its contents, sneezed, and returned mutely to his own
quarters.
“What have you gained by it all?” said Zakhar to the mistress and her
myrmidon, who had accompanied Oblomov, in the hope that his
participation in the affair would lead to a change of some sort. Then the old
valet laughed to himself in a way which twisted his eyebrows and whiskers
askew.
In the other rooms of the house, however, everything looked bright and
clean and fresh. The old stuff curtains had disappeared, and the doors and
windows of the drawing-room and the study were hung with blue and green
drapery and muslin curtains—the work of Agafia Matvievna’s own hands.
Indeed, for days at a time Oblomov, prone upon his sofa, had watched her
bare elbows flicker to and fro as she plied needle and thread; nor had he
once gone to sleep to the sound of thread being alternately inserted and
bitten off, as had been his custom in the old days at Oblomovka.
“Enough of work,” he had nevertheless said to her at intervals, “Pray
cease your labours for a while.”
“Nay,” she had always replied, “God loves those who toil.”
Nor was his coffee prepared for him with less care, attention, and skill
than had been the case before he had changed his old quarters for his
present ones. Giblet soup, macaroni with Parmesan cheese, soup concocted
of kvass and herbs, home-fed pullets—all these dishes succeeded one
another in regular rotation, and by so doing helped to make agreeable
breaks in the otherwise monotonous routine of the little establishment. Nor
did the sun, whenever shining, fail to brighten his room from morning till
night—thanks to the fact that the market-gardens on either side of the
building prevented that luminary’s rays from being shaded off by any
obstacle. Outside, ducks quacked cheerfully, while, within, a geranium,
added to a few hyacinths which the children had brought home, filled the
little apartment with a perfume which mingled pleasantly with the smoke of
Havana cigars and the scent of the cinnamon or the vanilla which the
mistress of the house would be preparing with bare, energetic arms.
Thus Oblomov lived in a sort of gilded cage—a cage within which, as in
a diorama, the only changes included alternations of day and night and of

the seasons. Of changes of the disturbing kind which stir up the sediment
from the bottom of life’s bowl—a sediment only too frequently both bitter
and obnoxious—there were none. Ever since the day when Schtoltz had
cleared him of debt, and Tarantiev and Tarantiev’s friend had taken
themselves off for good, every adverse element had disappeared from
Oblomov’s existence, and there surrounded him only good, kind, sensible
folk who had agreed to underpin his existence with theirs, and to help him
not to notice it, nor to feel it, as it pursued its even course. Everything was,
as it were, at peace, and of that peace, that inertia, Oblomov represented the
complete, the natural, embodiment and expression. After passing in review
and considering his mode of life, he had sunk deeper and deeper therein,
until finally he had come to the conclusion that he had no farther to go, and
nothing farther to seek, and that the ideal of his life would best be preserved
where he was—albeit without poetry, without those finer shades wherewith
his imagination had once painted for him a spacious, careless course of
manorial life on his own estate and among his own peasantry and servants.
Upon his present mode of life he looked as a continuation of the
Oblomovkan existence (only with a different colouring of locality, and, to a
certain extent, of period). Here, as at Oblomovka, he had succeeded in
escaping life, in driving a bargain with it, and ensuring to himself an
inviolable seclusion. Inwardly he congratulated himself on having left
behind him the irksome, irritating demands and menaces cf mundane
existence—on having placed a great distance between himself and the
horizon where there may be seen flashing the lightning-bolts of keen
pleasure, and whence come the thunderpeals of sudden affliction, and where
flicker the false hopes and the splendid visions of average happiness, and
where independence of thought gradually engulfs and devours a man, and
where passion slays him outright, and where the intellect fails or triumphs,
and where humanity engages in constant warfare, and leaves the field of
battle in a state of exhaustion and of ever-unsatisfied, ever-insatiable desire.
Never having experienced the consolations to be won in combat, he had
none the less renounced them, and felt at ease only in a remote corner to
which action and lighting and the actual living of life were alike strangers.
Yet moments there were when his imagination stirred within him again,
and when there recurred to his mind forgotten memories and unrealized
dreams, and when he felt in his conscience whispered reproaches for having

made of his life so little as he had done. And whenever that occurred he
slept restlessly, awoke at intervals, leaped out of bed, and shed chill tears of
hopelessness over the bright ideal that was now extinguished for ever. He
shed them as folk shed them over a dead friend whom with bitter regret
they recognize to have been neglected during his lifetime. Then he would
glance at his surroundings, hug to himself his present blessings, and grow
comforted on noting how quietly, how restfully, the sun was rising amid a
blaze of glory. Thus he had come to a decision that not only was his life
compounded in the best manner for expressing the possibilities to which the
idealistic-peaceful side of human existence may attain, but also that it had
been expressly created for and preordained to, that purpose. To others, he
reflected, let it fall to express life’s restless aspects; to others let it be given
to exercise forces of construction and destruction; to each man be allotted
his true métier.
Such the philosophy which our Plato of Oblomovka elaborated for the
purpose of lulling himself to sleep amid the problems and the stern
demands of duty and of destiny. He had been bred and nourished to play the
part, not of a gladiator in the arena but of a peaceful onlooker at the
struggle. Never could his diffident, lethargic spirit have faced either the
raptures or the blows of life. Hence he expressed only one of its aspects,
and had no mind either to succeed in it, or to change anything in it, or to
repent of his decision. As the years flowed on both emotion and repining
came to manifest themselves at rarer and rarer intervals, until, by quiet,
imperceptible degrees, he became finally interned in the plain, otiose tomb
of retirement which he had fashioned with his own hands, even as desert
anchorites who have turned from the world dig for themselves a material
sepulchre. Of reorganizing his estate, and removing thither with his
household; he had given up all thought. The steward whom Schtoltz had
placed in charge of Oblomovka regularly sent him the income therefrom,
and the peasantry proffered him flour and poultry at Christmastide, and
everything on the estate was prospering.
Meanwhile he ate heartily and much, even as he had done at Oblomovka.
Also, he walked and worked sluggishly and little—again, as he had done at
Oblomovka. Lastly, in spite of his advancing years, he drank beer and
vodka à raisin with complete insouciance, and took to sleeping ever more
and more protractedly after dinner.

But suddenly a change occurred. One day, after his usual quota of
slumber and day dreams, he tried to rise from the sofa, but failed, and his
tongue refused to obey him. Terrified, he could compass only a gesture
when he tried to call for help. Had he been living with Zakhar alone, he
might have continued to signal for assistance until next morning, or have
died, and not been found there till the following day; but, as it was, the eyes
of his landlady had been watching over him like the eyes of Providence
itself, and it cost her no skill of wit, but only an instinct of the heart, to
divine that all was not well with Oblomov. No sooner had the instinct
dawned upon her than Anisia was dispatched in a cab for a doctor, while
Agafia Matvievna herself applied ice to the patient’s head, and extracted
from her medicine chest the whole armoury of smelling-bottles and
fomentations which custom and report had designated for use at such a
juncture. Even Zakhar managed to get one of his boots on, and, thus shod,
to fuss around his master in company with the doctor, the mistress of the
house, and Anisia.
At length, blood having been let, Oblomov returned to consciousness,
and was informed that he had just sustained an apoplectic stroke, and that
he must adopt a different course of life. Henceforth, vodka, beer, wine,
coffee, and rich food were, with certain exceptions, to be prohibited, while
in their place there were prescribed for him daily exercise and a regular
amount of sleep of an exclusively nocturnal nature. Even then these
remedies would have come to nothing but for Agafia Matvievna’s
watchfulness; but she had the wit so to introduce the system that the entire
household involuntarily assisted in its working. Thus, partly by, cunning
and partly by kindness, she contrived to wean Oblomov from his attractive
indulgences in wind, postprandial slumber, and fish pasties. For instance, as
soon as ever he began to doze, either a chair would be unset in an adjoining
room, or, of its own volition, some old and worthless crockery would begin
flying into splinters, or the children would start making a noise, and be told,
fortissimo, to be gone. Lastly, should even this not prove effective, her own
kindly voice would be heard calling to him, in order to ask him some
question or another.
Also, the garden path was lengthened, and on it Oblomov accomplished,
morning and evening, a constitutional of some two hours’ duration. With
him there would walk the landlady—or, if she could not attend, one of the

children, or his old friend, the irresponsible and to every man both humble
and agreeable Alexiev. One morning Oblomov, leaning on the boy Vania’s
arm, slowly paced the path. By this time Vania had grown into almost a
youth, and found it hard to restrict his brisk, rapid step to Oblomov’s more
tardy gait. As the elder man walked he made little use of one of his legs,
which was a trace of the stroke which he had recently sustained.
“Let us go indoors now, Vaniushka,” he said; wherefore they directed
their steps towards the door. But to meet them! there issued Agafia
Matvievna.
“Why are you coming in so early?” she inquired.
“Early, indeed? Why, we have paced the path twenty times each way, and
from here to the fence is a distance of fifty sazhens; wherefore we have
covered two versts in all.”
“And how many times do you say you have paced it?” she inquired of
Vania.
He hesitated.
“Do not lie, but look me straight in the face,” she continued, fixing him
with her gaze. “I have been watching you the whole time. Remember next
Sunday. Possibly I might not let you go to the party that night.”
“Well, mother,” the boy said at length, “we have paced the path only
twelve times.”
“Ah, you rogue!” exclaimed Oblomov. “You were nipping off acacia-
leaves all the time, whereas I was keeping the most careful account.”
“Then you must go and do some more walking,” decided the landlady.
“Besides, the fish soup is not yet ready.” And she closed the door upon the
pair.
Oblomov, much against his will, completed another eight pacings of the
path, and then entered the dining-room. On the large round table the fish
soup was now steaming, and all hastened to take their usual seats—
Oblomov in solitary state on the sofa, the landlady on his right, and the rest
in due sequence.

“I will help you to this herring, as it is the fattest,” said Agafia
Matvievna.
“Very well,” he remarked. “Only, I think that a pie would go well with
it.”
“Oh dear! I have forgotten the pies! I meant to make some last night, but
my memory is all gone to pieces!” The artful Agafia Matvievna! “Besides, I
am afraid that I have forgotten the cutlets and the cabbage. In fact, you must
not expect very much of a dinner to-day.” This was addressed ostensibly to
Alexiev.
“Never mind,” he replied. “I can eat anything.”
“But why not cook him some pork and peas, or a beef-steak?” asked
Oblomov.
“I did go to the butcher’s for a beefsteak, but there was not a single
morsel of good beef left. However, I have made Monsieur Alexiev a cherry
compote instead. I know he likes that.” The truth was that cherry compote
was not bad for Oblomov; wherefore the complacent Alexiev had no choice
but both to eat it and to like it.
After dinner no power on earth could prevent Oblomov from assuming a
recumbent position; so, to obviate his going to sleep, the landlady was
accustomed to place beside him his coffee, and then to inspire, her children
to play games on the floor, so that, willy-nilly, Oblomov should be forced to
join in their sport. Presently she withdrew to the kitchen to see if the coffee
was yet ready, and, meanwhile, the children’s clatter died away. Almost at
once a gentle snore arose in the room—then a louder one—then one louder
still; and when Agafia Matvievna returned with the steaming coffee-pot she
encountered such a volume of snoring as would have done credit to a post-
house.
Angrily she shook her head at Alexiev.
“It is not my fault,” he said deprecatingly. “I tried to stir up the children,
but they would not listen to me.”
Swiftly depositing the coffee-pot upon the table, she caught up little
Andriusha from the floor, and gently seated him upon the sofa by

Oblomov’s side; whereupon the child wriggled towards him, climbed his
form until he had reached his face, and grasped him firmly by the nose.
“Hi! Hullo! Who is that?” cried Oblomov uneasily as he opened his eyes.
“You had gone to sleep, so Andriusha climbed on to the sofa and awoke
you,” replied the landlady kindly.
“I had gone to sleep, indeed?” retorted Oblomov, laying his arm around
the little one. “Do you think I did not hear him creeping along on all fours?
Why, I hear everything. To think of the little rascal catching me by the nose!
I’ll give it him! But there, there.” Tenderly embracing the child, he
deposited him on the floor again, and heaved a profound sigh. “Tell us the
news, Ivan Alexiev,” he said.
“You have heard it all. I have nothing more to tell.”
“How so? You go into society, and I do not. Is there nothing new in the
political world?”
“It is being said that the earth is growing colder every day, and that one
day it will become frozen altogether.”
“Away with you! Is that politics?”
A silence ensued. Oblomov quietly relapsed into a state of coma that was
neither sleeping nor waking. He merely let his thoughts wander at will,
without concentrating them upon anything in particular as calmly he
listened to the beating of his heart and occasionally blinked his eyes. Thus
he sank into a vague, enigmatical condition which partook largely of the
nature of hallucination. In rare instances there come to a man fleeting
moments of abstraction when he seems to be reliving past stages of his life.
Whether he has previously beheld in sleep the phenomena which are
passing before his vision, or whether he has gone through a previous
existence and has since forgotten it, we cannot say; but at all events he can
see the same persons around him as were present in the first instance, and
hear the same words as were uttered then.
So was it with Oblomov now. Gradually there spread itself about him the
hush which he had known long ago. He could hear the beating of the well-
known pendulum, the snapping of the thread as it was bitten off, and the
repetition of familiar whispered sentences like “I cannot make the thread go

through the eye of the needle. Pray do it for me, Masha—your eyesight is
keener than mine.”
Lazily, mechanically he looked into his landlady’s face; and straightway
from the recesses of his memory there arose a picture which, somewhere,
had been well known to him.
To his vision there dawned the great, dark drawing-room in the house of
his youth, lit by a single candle. At the table his mother and her guests were
sitting over their needlework, while his father was silently pacing up and
down. Somehow the present and the past had become fused and
interchanged, so that, as the little Oblomov, he was dreaming that at length
he had reached the enchanted country where the rivers run milk and honey,
and bread can be obtained without toil, and every one walks clad in gold
and silver.
Once again he could hear the old legends and the old folk-tales, mingled
with the clatter of knives and crockery in the kitchen. Once again he was
pressing close to his nurse to listen to her tremulous, old woman’s voice.
“That is Militrissa Kirbitievna,” she was saying as she pointed to the figure
of his landlady. Also, the same clouds seemed to be floating in the blue
zenith that used to float there of yore, and the same wind to be blowing in at
the window, and ruffling his hair, and the same cock of the Oblomovkan
poultry-yard to be strutting and crowing below. Suddenly a dog barked.
Some other guest must be arriving! Would it be old Schtoltz and his little
boy from Verklevo? Yes, probably, for to-day is a holiday. And in very truth
it is they—he can hear their footsteps approaching nearer and nearer! The
door opens, and “Andrei!” he exclaims excitedly, for there, sure enough,
stands his friend—but now grown to manhood, and no longer a little boy!...

IV

O
blomov recovered consciousness. Before him Schtoltz was standing
—but the Schtoltz of the present, not the Schtoltz of a daydream.
Swiftly the landlady caught up the baby Andriusha, swept the
table clear of her work, and carried off the children. Alexiev also
disappeared, and Schtoltz and Oblomov found themselves alone. For a
moment or two they gazed at one another amid a tense silence.
“Is that really you. Schtoltz?” asked Oblomov in tones scarcely audible
for emotion—such tones as a man employs only towards his dearest friend
and after a long separation.
“Yes, it is I,” replied Schtoltz quietly. “And you—are you quite well?”
Oblomov embraced him heartily. In that embrace were expressed all the
long-concealed grief and joy which, fermenting ever in his soul, had never,
since Schtoltz’s last departure, been expressed to any human being. Then
they seated themselves, and once more gazed at one another.
“Are you really well?” Schtoltz asked again.
“Yes, thank God!” replied Oblomov. “But you have been ill?”
“Yes—I was seized with a stroke.”
“Ah, Ilya, Ilya! Evidently you have let yourself go again. What have you
been doing? Actually, it is five years since last we saw one another!”
Oblomov sighed, but said nothing.
“And why did you not come to Oblomovka?” pursued Schtoltz. “And
why have you never written to me?”
“What was there to say?” was Oblomov’s sad reply. “You know me.
Consequently you need ask no more.”
“So you are still living in these rooms?” And Schtoltz surveyed the room
as he spoke. “Why have you not moved?”
“Because I am still here. I do not think the move will ever take place.”

“Why are you so sure?”
“Because I am sure.”
Again Schtoltz eyed him closely, then became thoughtful, and started to
pace the room.
“And what of Olga Sergievna?” was Oblomov’s next question. “Where is
she now, and does she still remember me?” At this point he broke off
abruptly.
“Yes, she is well, and has of you a remembrance as clear as though she
had parted from you yesterday. Presently I will tell you where she is.”
“And your children?”
“The children too are well. But are you jesting when you say that you are
going to remain where you are? My express purpose in coming here is to
carry you off to our place in the country.”
“No, no!” cried Oblomov, though lowering his voice as he glanced at the
door. Evidently the proposal had disturbed him greatly. “Do not say a word
about it,” he pleaded. “Do not begin your arguments again.”
“But why will you not come? What is the matter with you? You know me
well, and know that long ago I undertook this task, and shall never
relinquish it. Hitherto business affairs have occupied my time, but now I am
free once more. Come and live with us, or, at all events, near us. Olga and I
have decided that you must do so. Thank God that I have found you the
same as before, and not worse! My hopes of doing that had been small. Let
us be off at once. I am prepared even to abduct you by force. You must
change your mode of life, as you well know.”
To this speech Oblomov listened with impatience.
“Do not speak so loudly,” he urged. “In there——”
“Well—in there?”
“Is the landlady, and, should she hear us, she will think that I am going to
leave her.”
“And why should you not leave her? Let her think what she likes!”

“Listen, Andrei.” Oblomov’s tone was one of unwonted firmness. “Do
not continue your useless attempts to persuade me. Come what may, I must
remain where I am.”
Schtoltz gazed at his friend in astonishment, but Oblomov returned the
gaze with quiet resolution on his features.
“Remain here, and you are lost,” said Schtoltz. “This house, that woman,
this way of living?—I tell you the thing cannot be. Let us go.”
He caught Oblomov by the sleeve, and started to drag him towards the
door.
“Why do you want to take me away?” asked Oblomov, hanging back.
“Because I want you to leave this den, this swamp, for the world of light
and air and health and normal existence.” Schtoltz was speaking sternly,
and almost in a tone of command. “To what point have you sunk?” he went
on. “What is going to become of you? Think for a moment. Are you so
attached to this mode of life that you wish to go to sleep like a mole in its
burrow? Remember that——-”
“I desire to remember nothing. Do not disturb the past. It can never be
brought back again.” Into Oblomov’s face there had come a full
consciousness of his power to think, to reason, and to will. “What is it you
wish me to do? From the world to which you would abduct me I have
parted for ever; and to solder together two pieces which have started
asunder is impossible. I have grown to look upon this nook as my world.
Should you uproot me from it, I shall die.”
“But look at the place, at the people with whom you are living!”
“I know what you mean—I am perfectly conscious of the facts. Ah,
Andrei, believe me when I say that so well do I feel and understand things
that for many a day past I have been ashamed to show myself abroad. Yet I
cannot accompany you on your road. Even did I wish it, such a course is out
of my power. Possibly, when you were last here, I might have made the
attempt; but now”—here he dropped his eyes for a moment and paused
—“now it is too late. Go, and waste no further time upon me. Your
friendship, as God in heaven knows, I value; but your disturbance of my
peace I do not value.”

“Nothing that you can say will turn me from my purpose. I intend to
carry you off, ard the more so because I suspect certain things. Look here.
Put on a garment of some sort, and come and spend the evening at my
rooms. I have much to tell you, for I suppose you know what is afoot at our
place?”
Oblomov looked at him inquiringly.
“Ah, I had forgotten,” Schtoltz went on. “You no longer go into society.
Well, come with me, and I will tell you the whole story. Also, do you know
who is waiting for me in a carriage at the gates? I will go and call her in.”
“What? Olga?” As the words burst tremulously from Oblomov’s lips his
face underwent a sudden change. “For God’s sake do not bring her here!
Go, go for God’s sake!”
But the elder man refused to move, although his friend half started to
push him towards the door.
“I cannot return to her without you,” he said. “I have pledged my word
on that. If you will not come with me to-day, then you must come to-
morrow. You are merely putting me off for a time: you will never put me off
for ever. Even should it be the day after to-morrow, we still shall meet
again.”
Oblomov said nothing, but hung his head as though afraid to meet
Schtoltz’s eye.
“When are you coming, therefore?” went on Schtoltz. “Olga will be sure
to ask me when.”
“Ah, Andrei,” cried the other in a tone of affectionate appeal as he
embraced his friend and laid his head upon his shoulder, “Pray leave me
and—forget me.”
“What? For ever?” cried Schtoltz in astonishment as he withdrew a little
from Oblomov’s embrace in order the better to look him in the face.
“Yes,” whispered Oblomov.
Schtoltz stepped back a pace or two.
“Can this really be you, Ilya?” he exclaimed reproachfully. “Do you
really reject me in favour of that woman, of that landlady of yours?” He

started with a sudden pang. “So that child which I saw just new is your
child? Ah, Ilya, Ilya! Come hence at once. How you have fallen! What is
that woman to you?”
“She is my wife,” said Oblomov simply.
Schtoltz stood petrified.
“Yes, and the child is my son,” Oblomov continued. “He has been called
Andrei after yourself.” Somehow he seemed to breathe more freely now
that he had got rid of the burden of these disclosures. As for Schtoltz, his
face fell, and he gazed around the room with vacant eyes. A gulf had
opened before him, a high wall had suddenly shot up, and Oblomov seemed
to have ceased to exist—he seemed to have vanished from his friend’s sight,
and to have fallen headlong. The only feeling in Schtoltz’s mind was an
aching sorrow of the kind which a man experiences when, hastening to visit
a friend after a long parting, he finds that for many a day past that friend has
been dead.
“You are lost!” he kept whispering mechanically. “What am I to say to
Olga?”
At length Oblomov caught the last words, and tried to say something, but
failed. All he could do was to extend his hands in Schtoltz’s direction.
Silently, convulsively the pair embraced, even as before death or a battle. In
that embrace was left no room for words or tears or expressions of feeling.
“Never forget my little Andrei,” was Oblomov’s last choking utterance.
Slowly and silently Schtoltz left the house. Slowly and silently he crossed
the courtyard and entered the carriage. When he had gone Oblomov
reseated himself upon the sofa in his room, rested his elbows upon the table,
and buried his face in his hands....
“No, never will I forget your little Andrei,” thought Schtoltz sadly as he
drove homewards. “Ah, Ilya, you are lost beyond recall! It would be useless
now to tell you that your Oblomovka is no longer in ruins, that its turn is
come again, and that it is basking in the rays of the sun. It would be useless
now to tell you that, some four years hence, it will have a railway-station,
and that your peasantry are clearing away the rubbish there, and that before
long an iron road will be carrying your grain to the wharves, and that
already local schools have been built. Such a dawn of good fortune would

merely affright you; it would merely cause your unaccustomed eyes to
smart. Yet along the road which you could not tread I will lead your little
Andrei; and with him I will put into practice those theories whereof you and
I used to dream in the days of our youth. Farewell, Oblomovka of the past!
You have outlived your day!” For the last time Schtoltz looked back at
Oblomov’s diminutive establishment.
“What do you say?” asked Olga with a beating heart.
“Nothing,” Schtoltz answered dryly and abruptly.
“Is he alive and well?”
“Yes,” came the reluctant reply.
“Then why have you returned so soon? Why did you not call me to the
house, or else bring him out to see me? Let me go back, please.”
“No, you cannot.”
“Why so? What has happened there? Will you not tell me?”
Schtoltz continued to say nothing.
“Again I ask you: what is the matter with him?”
“The disease of Oblomovka,” was the grim response. And throughout the
rest of the journey homeward Schtoltz refused to answer a single one of
Olga’s questions.

V

F
ive years have passed, and more than one change has taken place in
the Veaborg Quarter. The street which used to lead, unenclosed, to
Oblomov’s humble abode is now lined with villas. In the midst of
them a tall stone Government office rears its head between the sunlight and
the windows of that quiet, peaceful little house which the sun’s rays once
warmed so cheerfully.
The house itself has grown old and crazy: it wears a dull, neglected look
like that of a man who is unshaven and unwashed. In places the paint has
peeled away, and in others the gutters are broken. To the latter is due the
fact that pools of dirty water stand in the courtyard, and that thrown across
them is a piece of old planking. Should a visitor approach the wicket, the
old watchdog no longer leaps nimbly to the extent of his chain, but gives
tongue hoarsely and lazily from the interior of his kennel.
And, within the house, what changes have taken place! Over it there
reigns a different housewife to the former one, and different children sport
in play. Again is seen about the premises the lean countenance of Tarantiev,
rather than the kindly, careless features of Alexiev; while of Zakhar and
Anisia also there is not a sign discernible. A new cook performs, rudely and
unwillingly, the quiet behests of Agafia Matvievna, and our old friend
Akulina—her apron girded around her middle—washes up, as formerly, the
domestic crockery and the pots and pans. Lastly, the same old sleepy
dvornik whiles away the same old idle life in the same old den by the gates,
and at a given hour each morning, as well as always at the hour of the
evening meal, there flashes past the railings of the fence the figure of
Agafia’s brother, clad, summer and winter alike, in galoshes, and always
carrying under his arm a large bundle of documents.
But what of Oblomov? Where is he—where? Under a modest urn in the
adjoining cemetery his body rests among the shrubs. All is quiet where he is
lying; only a lilac-tree, planted there by a loving hand, waves its boughs to
and fro over the grave as it mingles its scent with the sweet, calm odour of

wormwood. One would think that the Angel of Peace himself were
watching over the dead man’s slumbers....
Despite his wife’s ceaseless and devoted care for every moment of his
existence, the prolonged inertia, the unbroken stillness, the sluggish gliding
from day to day had ended by quietly arresting the machine of life. Thus
Oblomov met his end, to all appearances without pain, without distress,
even as stops a watch which its owner has—forgotten to wind up. No one
witnessed his last moments or heard his expiring gasp. A second stroke of
apoplexy occurred within a year of the first, and, like its precursor, passed
away favourably. Later, however, Oblomov became pale and weak, took to
eating little and seldom walking in the garden, and increased in moodiness
and taciturnity as the days went on. At times he would even burst into tears,
for he felt death drawing nearer, and was afraid of it. One or two relapses
occurred, from which he rallied, and then Agafia Matvievna entered his
room, one morning, to find him resting on his deathbed as quietly as he had
done in sleep—the only difference being that his head had slipped a little
from the pillow, and that one of his hands was convulsively clutching the
region of the heart in a manner which suggested that the pain had there
centred itself until the circulation of the blood had stopped for ever.
After his death Agafia Matvievna’s sister-in-law, Irina Paptelievna,
assumed control of the establishment. That is to say, she arrogated to herself
the right to rise late in the morning, to drink three cups of coffee for
breakfast, to change her dress three times a day, and to confine her
housewifely energies to seeing that her gowns were starched to the utmost
degree of stiffness. More she would not trouble to undertake, and, as before,
Agafia Matvievna remained the active pendulum of the domestic clock. Not
only did she superintend the kitchen and the dining-room, and prepare tea
and coffee for the entire household, but also she did the general mending
and supervised the linen, the children, Akulina, and the dvornik.
Why was this? Was she not Madame Oblomov and the proprietress of a
landed estate? Might she not have maintained a separate, an independent
establishment, and have wanted for nothing, and have been at no one’s beck
and call? What had led her to take upon her shoulders the burden of
another’s housekeeping, the care of another’s children, and all those petty
details which women usually assume only at the call of love, or in
obedience to sacred family ties, or for the purpose of earning a morsel of

daily bread? Where, too, were Zakhar and Anisia—now become, by every
right of law, her servants? Where, too, was the little treasure, Andrei, which
Oblomov had bequeathed her? Where, finally, were her children by her first
husband?
Those children were now all provided for. That is to say, Vania had
finished his schooling and entered Government service, his sister had
married the manager of a Government office, and little Andrei had been
committed to the care of Schtoltz and his wife, who looked upon him as a
member of their own family. Never for a moment did Agafia Matvievna
mentally compare his lot, or place it on a level with, that of her first
children—although, unconsciously it may be, she allotted them all an equal
place in her heart. In her opinion the little Andrei’s upbringing, mode of
life, and future career stood divided by an immeasurable gulf from the
fortunes of Vania and his sister.
“What are they?” she would say to herself when she called to see Andrei.
“They are children born of the people, whereas this one was born a young
barin.”
Then she would caress the boy, if not with actual timidity, at all events
with a certain touch of caution, and add to herself with something like
respect: “What a white skin he has! ’Tis almost transparent. And what tiny
hands and feet, too, and what silky hair! He is just like his dead father.”
Consequently she was the more ready to accede to Schtoltz’s request when
he asked her that he (Schtoltz) should educate the youngster; since she felt
sure that Schtoltz’s household was far more the lad’s proper place than was
her own establishment, where he would have been thrown among her grimy
young nephews.
Clad in black, she would glide like a shadow from room to room of the
house—opening and shutting cupboards, sewing, making lace, but doing
everything quietly, and without the least sign of energy. When spoken to,
she would reply as though to do so were an effort. Moreover, her eyes no
longer glanced swiftly from object to object, as they had done in the old
days: rather, they remained fixed in a sort of ever concentrated gaze.
Probably they had assumed that gaze during the hour when she had stood
looking at her dead husband’s face.

That the light of her life was fast flickering before going out, that God
had breathed His breath into her existence and taken it away again, and that
her sun had shone brilliantly and was setting for ever, she clearly
understood. Yes, that sun was setting for ever, but not before she had learnt
the reason why she had been given life, and the fact that she had not lived in
vain. Greatly she had loved, and to the full: she had loved Oblomov as a
lover, as a husband, and as a barin. But around her there was no one to
comprehend this; wherefore she kept her grief the more closely locked, in
her own bosom.
Only, next winter, when Schtoltz came to town, she ran to see him, and to
gaze hungrily at little Andrei, whom she covered with caresses. Presently
she tried to say something—to thank Schtoltz, and to pour out before him
all that had been accumulating in her heart in the absence of an outlet. Such
words he would have understood perfectly, had they been uttered. But the
task was beyond her—she could only throw herself upon Olga, glue her lips
to her hand, and burst into such a torrent of scalding tears that perforce Olga
wept with her, and Schtoltz, greatly moved, hastened from the room. All
three had now a common bond of sympathy—that bond being the memory
of Oblomov’s unsullied soul. More than once Schtoltz and Olga besought
the widow to come and live with them in the country, but always she
replied: “Where I was born and have lived my live, there must I also die.”
Likewise, when Schtoltz proposed to render her an account of his
management of the Oblomovkan property, she returned him the income
therefrom, with a request that he should lay it by for the benefit of little
Andrei.
“’Tis his, not mine,” she said. “He is the barin, and I will continue to live
as I have always done.”

VI

O
ne day, about noon, two gentlemen were walking along a pavement
in the Veaborg Quarter, while behind them a carriage quietly paced.
One of the gentlemen was Schtoltz, the other a literary friend of his
—a stout individual with an apathetic face and sleepy, meditative eyes. As
they drew level with a church, Mass had just ended, and the congregation
was pouring into the street. In front of them a knot of beggars was
collecting a rich and varied harvest.
“I wonder where these mendicants come from,” said the literary
gentleman, glancing at the reapers.
“Out of sundry nooks and corners, I suppose,” replied the other
carelessly.
“That is not what I meant. What I meant is, how have they descended to
their present position of beggars? Have they come to it suddenly or
gradually, for a good reason or for a bad one?”
“Why are you so anxious to know? Are you contemplating writing a
‘Mysteries of Petrograd’?”
“Perhaps I am,” the literary gentleman explained with an indolent yawn.
“Then here is a chance for you. Ask any one of them, and, for the sum of
a rouble, he will sell you his story, which, jotted down, you could resell to
the nobility. For instance, take this old man here. He looks a good example
of the normal type. Hi, old man! We want you!”
The old man turned his head at the summons, doffed his cap, and
approached the two gentlemen.
“Good sirs,” he whined, “pray help a poor man who has been wounded in
thirty battles and grown old in war.”
“It is Zakhar!” exclaimed Schtoltz in astonishment. “It is you, Zakhar, is
it not?”

But Zakhar said nothing. Then suddenly, he shaded his eyes from the sun,
and, staring intently at Schtoltz, muttered—
“Pardon me, your Honour—I do not recognize you. I am nearly blind.”
“What? You have forgotten your old friend, the bavin Schtoltz?” the
other asked reproachfully.
“Dear, dear! Is it really your Honour? My bad sight has got the better of
me.”
Catching Schtoltz impetuously by the hand, the old man imprinted kiss
after kiss upon the skirt of his coat.
“The Lord Himself has permitted a poor lost wretch to see a joyful day!”
he said, half-laughing, half-crying. Over his face, and particularly over his
nose, there had spread a purplish tinge, while his head was almost
completely bald, and his whiskers, though still long, looked so matted and
entangled as to resemble pieces of felt wherein snowballs have been
wrapped. As for his clothing, it consisted of an old, faded cloak, with one of
the lapels missing, and a pair of down-at-heel goloshes. In his hands was a
cap from which the fur had become worn away.
“Ah, good sir!” he repeated. “Heaven has indeed granted me joy for to-
day’s festival!”
“But why are you in this state?” Schtoltz inquired. “Are you not ashamed
of yourself?”
“Yes, your Honour; but what else could I do?” And Zakhar heaved a
profound sigh. “How else was I to live? So long as Anisia was alive I had
not to go wandering about like this, for I was given bite and sup whenever I
wanted it; but she died of cholera (Heaven rest her soul!), and her brother
straightway refused to support me, saying that I was nothing but an old
hanger-on. From Michei Andreitch Tarantiev too I received shameful abuse,
and neither of them—would you believe it, your Honour?—ever gave me a
morsel of bread! Indeed, had it not been for the barinia, God bless her”—
and Zakhar crossed himself—“I should long ago have perished of the cold;
but for a while she gave me a bit of clothing, and as much bread as I could
eat, and a place by the stove of a night. Then they took to rating her on my
account; so at last I left the house to wander whither my eyes might lead

me. This is the second year that I have been dragging out this miserable
existence.”
“But why did you not go and seek a situation?” Schtoltz inquired.
“Where was I to get one at this time of day, your Honour? True, I tried
for two, but was unsuccessful. Things are not what they used to be:
everything has changed for the worse. Nowadays masters require their
lacqueys to look respectable, and the gentry no longer keep their halls
chock-full of footmen. Indeed, ’tis seldom that you will find so many as two
footmen in a house. Yes,” he went on, “the gentry actually take off their
own boots! They have even gone so far as to invent a machine to do it
with!” Evidently the idea cut Zakhar to the heart. “Yes,” he repeated, “our
gentry are a shame and a disgrace to the country. They are fast coming to
rack and ruin.” A sigh of profound regret followed.
“At one place,” presently he resumed, “I did obtain a situation. ’Twas
with a German merchant, who engaged me to be his hall lacquey. After a
while, however, he sent me to serve in the pantry. Now, was that my proper
business? One day I was carrying some crockery across the room on a tray,
and the floor happened to be smooth and slippery, and down I fell, and the
tray and the crockery with me. So I was turned out of doors. Next, an old
countess took a fancy to my looks. ‘He is of respectable appearance,’ she
said to herself, and added me to her staff of Swiss lacqueys. The post was a
light one, and bid fair to be permanent, too. All that I had to do was to sit as
solemnly as possible on a chair, to cross one leg over the other, and, when
any rascal called, not to answer him, but just to grunt and send the fellow
away—or else give him a box on the ear. Of course, to the gentry one had to
behave differently—just to wave one’s staff like this.” Zakhar gave an
illustration of what he meant. “As I say, ’twas an easy job, and the lady,
God bless her! was not overdifficult to please. But one day she happened to
peep into my room and to see there a bug. With that she bristled up and
shrieked as though it had been I who had invented bugs! When was a
household ever without a bug? So the next time she passed me she
pretended that I smelt of liquor, and dismissed me.”
“Yes, and you smell of it now—and very strongly,” remarked Schtoltz.
“To my sorrow, I suppose so,” whined Zakhar, wrinkling his brow
bitterly. “Well, then I tried to get a coachman’s job, and took service with a

gentleman; but one day I had my feet frost-bitten (for I was overold and
weak for the job), and another day the brute of a horse fell down and nearly
broke my ribs, and another day I ran over an old woman and got taken to
the police-station.”
“Well, well! Instead of drinking and getting yourself into trouble, come
to my house, and I will give you a corner there until it is time for us to
return to the country. Do you hear?”
“Yes, your Honour—yes; but, but——”
Zakhar sighed again. “I would rather not leave these parts. You see, the
grave is here—the grave where my old patron is lying.” Zakhar sobbed.
“Only to-day I have been there to commend his soul to God. What a barin
the Lord God has taken from us! ’Twould have been good for us if he could
have lived another hundred years. Yes, only to-day I have been visiting his
grave. Whenever I am near the spot I go and sit beside it, and shed tears—
ah, such tears! And sometimes, too, when all is quiet there, I seem to hear
him calling to me once more, ‘Zakhar! Zakhar!’—and shivers go running
down my back. Never lived there such a barin as he! And how fond of
yourself he was, your Honour! May the Lord remember him when the
heavenly kingdom shall come!”
“You ought to see our little Andrei,” said Schtoltz. “If you like, you can
have charge of him.” And he handed the old man some money.
“Yes, I will come! How could I not come when it is to see little Andrei
Ilyitch? By this time he must be grown into a tall young gentleman. What
joy the Lord has reserved for me this day! Yes, I will come, your Honour,
and may God send you good health and many a long year of life!” But it
was after a departing carriage that Zakhar was dispatching his benedictions.
“Did you hear the old beggar’s story?” Schtoltz asked of his companion.
“Yes. Who was the Oblomov whom he mentioned?”
“He was—Oblomov. More than once I have spoken to you of him.”
“Ah, I think I remember the name. Yes, he was a friend and comrade of
yours, was he not? What became of him?”
“He came to rack and ruin—though for no apparent reason.” As he spoke
Schtoltz sighed heavily. Then he added: “His intellect was equal to that of

his fellow’s, his soul was as clear and as bright as glass, his disposition was
kindly, and he was a gentleman to the core. Yet he—he fell.”
“Wherefore? What was the cause?”
“The cause?” re-echoed Schtoltz. “The cause was—the disease of
Oblomovka.”
“The disease of Oblomovka?” queried the literary gentleman in some
perplexity. “What is that?”
“Some day I will tell you. For the moment leave me to my thoughts and
memories. Hereafter you shall write them down, for they might prove of
value to some one.”
In time Schtoltz related to his friend what herein is to be found recorded.

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