«Oblomov», Ivan GoncharovThe longest chapter in the novel is a dream

How long he lies there

The promised number. The novel’s first part, eleven chapters and almost a third of the book (30%), is a single day. Oblomov wakes “unusually early, at about eight”, and the part ends with his servant Zakhar whispering at his door: “must wake him: it’s nearly half past four”. In those eight and a half hours he never once leaves his flat.

He isn’t lying down the whole time, to be fair. In the morning he lies for half an hour “tormented by this intention” of getting up, then decides that tea can be drunk in bed too. Five visitors in turn invite him to the May Day fête at Ekaterinhof. “Everybody will be there!” the first one pleads. “Everybody? No, not everybody!” Oblomov replies, and goes with none of them. Towards noon Tarantyev turns up shouting “It’s nearly twelve o’clock, and he’s still lolling about!”, and Oblomov moves from his bed to the armchair.

At about three he tears up an unfinished business letter, asks for the blinds to be drawn and to be woken at half past four. Dozing off, he asks himself: “why am I... like this?..” — and “so he never got to the reason”: instead of a word comes a sigh, then a snore. Zakhar locks his sleeping master in and goes off to the gate. That’s how long he lies there: eleven chapters in which nothing happens. Except the thing that matters most.

The longest chapter

The next chapter, the ninth, is the only one of forty-six with a title of its own: “Oblomov’s Dream”. And it is the longest in the novel: 13,573 words in the Russian original, 1.6 times as long as the next longest. This one chapter is 9% of the whole book.

The dream takes us to Oblomovka, the estate of the hero’s childhood. He is seven, he wakes “in his little bed”, and Goncharov shows an ordinary summer day there: the morning, a ponderous dinner and the main event of the day, “the hour of the general after-dinner sleep”. Father and mother fall asleep, the old aunt and the hangers-on, the gardener under a bush, the coachman in the stable, the servants in a heap in their hall. Even the nurse nods off, though her mistress strictly told her to watch the child.

To me, this is the answer to the question Oblomov didn’t finish. He falls asleep in Petersburg in the middle of the day and dreams of a place where after dinner everyone sleeps. Goncharov calls that drowsiness the epidemic of Oblomovka: the nurse, he writes, “caught it too”.

The one who stays awake

At that hour only the children are awake. The servants’ children dig in the sand, and little Ilya, in Goncharov’s words, “had been waiting impatiently for that moment, with which his independent life began”. As soon as the stocking slips from his nurse’s hands, he tiptoes away, runs up to the gallery, climbs the dovecote, catches dragonflies deep in the garden. He’d like to go further, to the birch wood beyond the gate, but he’s afraid: there are wood goblins and robbers there, people say.

Freedom in that house comes only while everyone sleeps. When Ilya is about fourteen and wants to do something himself, “father and mother and three aunts will shout in five voices”: what for, where to, what are the servants for? He has only to wink, and three or four servants rush to do it.

That, to me, is where the man who can’t get out of bed by noon comes from. He wasn’t trained to be lazy, he was trained out of doing things: whatever the boy wanted to do himself was done for him, and he was let live his own life only while the grown-ups slept. He grew up and fell asleep along with them.

Stockings

The same dream has a scene after which you read the first part differently. Ilya is fourteen now. He wakes, and by his bed already stands “Zakharka, later his famous valet Zakhar Trofimych”. Zakhar pulls on his stockings and puts on his shoes, “and Ilya, a boy of fourteen already, does nothing but hold out to him, lying down, first one leg, then the other”.

Almost twenty years later Zakhar is still with him, and in the first part they quarrel over one word. Zakhar carelessly says that “others are no worse” and move house all the same, and his master is mortally offended: he is not an “other”. His main argument: “I have never once pulled a stocking onto my feet in all my life, thank God!” He says it with pride.

Without Zakhar, Oblomov can’t “get up, or go to bed, or be combed and shod, or dine”, and Zakhar can’t imagine any other master. He is rude to him, sly with him, lies to him, and deep down worships him. The funniest pair in the book, and the saddest.

“Where is your dressing gown?”

At the end of that same day his childhood friend Stolz arrives, drags Oblomov out into society, and there is Olga. And Oblomov gets up. “He gets up at seven, reads, carries books off somewhere.” His famous Oriental dressing gown, the one he lay in through the whole first part, is gone: “No dressing gown to be seen on him”. Tarantyev has carted it off with his other things to his crony, a widow on the Vyborg Side.

Olga knows about the dressing gown, of course. In the middle of a declaration of love she laughs and asks: “A propos, where is your dressing gown?” — “What dressing gown? I never had one,” says Oblomov. For half the book he really does live without it: he walks, he reads, he’s in love. But when Zakhar asks about the wedding, his master takes fright: what wedding, first a house must be built in Oblomovka, schools set up.

When they part, Olga asks: “What has ruined you? There is no name for this evil...” “There is,” he answers, and whispers: “Oblomovshchina!” That same night he comes home late, and Zakhar, undressing his master, “threw over him — the dressing gown!” The landlady, the very widow he now lodges with, has washed and mended it. The question of why he is the way he is, left unfinished in the first part, has finally got its word. And the dressing gown is back.

Verdict

Read it. Not for the sofa, everyone remembers that anyway, but for the dream: the book’s longest chapter explains why its hero won’t get up, and explains it without a word of reproach. And for Zakhar, who is funny and sad at the same time.

At school Oblomov is taught as a novel about laziness and about the word “oblomovshchina”. To me it’s about a boy who wanted to do everything himself, and a house that wouldn’t let him. One point off for Stolz: he’s so correct that next to him even I seem alive.