THE SUPERFLUOUS MAN
171
overtake
him
and he will yawn, sink back in defeat and
in
a few
moments
will
become nothing but a snore.
He is the supreme zero of all literature, the unheroic hero of
Ivan Alexandrovitch Goncharov's superb and neglected novel,
Oblomov.
It
is
one of the ironies of literary history that Goncharov should
have caught, pinned down and studied so well that elusive figure,
"the superfluous man," whom so many more famous and more
professional Russian writers- Lermontov, Turgenev, Chekhov, for
instance- never completely captured. The result
is
so good that
Oblomov, in a way, seems independent of
his
creator and
in
reading
Goncharov's biography one has the feeling that it was actually lIya
lIyitch who was truth and Ivan Alexandrovitch who was fiction.
Goncharov might easily be that ubiquitous clerk with the thin
ginger-colored whiskers and the nervous eyelids in one of those
gloomy tours through bureaucratic life on which the Russian authors
of the nineteenth century were so fond of taking us. It may have
been Gogol (or was it Chekhov? ) who imagined him- the cautious
minor official
in
the Ministry of Finance whose only adventure in
life was the result of a mistake: the mistake being an incautious
and insincere remark that he would like to go along on the first
Russian mission to Japan. So one day he finds
himself,
thoroughly
miserable and thoroughly detesting the sea, aboard a slow-moving
Russian frigate headed east. During the trip war breaks out with
England and he has to return to Petersburg by way of Okhotsk,
Yakutsk and Irkutsk, a dismal journey. Back home, he gets a job
as official censor and, gradually growing a little mad, fritters away
the rest of his life writing a mediocre novel,
The Precipice,
whose
plot
is
always being stolen, he imagines, by Turgenev or Flaubert
or some other unscrupulous rival. Perhaps he is a character in one
of those books Oblomov has always meant to read and has left lying
about
his
bedroom.
But, on the face of it, Oblomov seems to be an even more
unlikely candidate for life than his author. He looks like a gross
comic humour, the arch-sluggard, sleeper, malingerer, coward, baby,
recluse. At first he seems as though he could be the main figure
in one of the series of startlingly funny stereopticon views we fmd
in
Dead Souls,
but Goncharov was both less brilliant than Gogol
