178
PARTISAN REVIEW
last summer will not be the poetic daydream he had imagined. "A
wedding! Do you know what that means?" he suddenly asks Zahar.
He begins to see it as a nightmare of incredible problems and activity.
"He had wanted to frighten Zahar, but he had frightened
himself
more when he went into the practical aspects of marriage and saw
that in spite of its poetical character a wedding was a concrete and
official step toward important realities and stern duties."
He has a meeting with Olga in the park. Among the cold winds
and falling leaves, it is both a parody and a reversal of their summer
trysts. He fails to call on Olga. When she comes to see
him
he weeps
and says that he still loves her. He begins to lose his identity.
Their final scene is as close to drama and tragedy as Goncharov
ever allows
himself
to come. "Why has it all been wrecked," Olga
asks.
"Who has laid a curse on you, IIya? You are kind, intelligent,
affectionate, noble ... and . . . doomed! What has, ruined you?
There is no name for that evil."
"Yes, there is," he whispers, taking her hand. "Oblomovism!"
And that is the only possible way of defining the evil that has
dehumanized
him.
The tragic sense comes not only from the fact that
he knows this, but that, like a cancer, it has become so completely
intimate with him. Olga believes in surgery. Her pathetic failure
is her inability to see that Oblomov, whom she loves, is so inextricably
mingled with Oblomovism that nothing can ever divide them again.
The rest of Oblomov's life is an effortless downward spiral. Tar–
antyev and his landlady'S brother combine to swindle him out
of his estate's revenue and gradually, without knowing how or why,
he finds himself living in poverty. He
is
like a goldfish whose bowl
of water has imperceptibly become dirty. He gazes around with per–
plexed goldfish eyes.
Stolz turns up periodically with filTIl intentions of rescuing
him,
but it does no good. He scares the swindlers and puts Oblomov's
affairs back in order but he can never persuade
him
to come away.
Oblomov calls his visits, "news from the land of the living."
Finally, he came to the conclusion that his life had not merely
happened to be
so
simple and uneventful, but had been created and
designed to be such, in order to demonstrate the ideally restful aspect
of human existence. It was other people's lot, he thought, to express its
tempestuous aspects, to set
in
motion the creative and destructive forces.
