THE SUPERFLUOUS MAN
179
... With
years,
agitation and remorse visited
him
less often, and he
settled down gradually into the plain and wide coffin he had made of
his existence.
In the meantime, as was inevitable, Stolz and Olga fall in love
and marry. Their courtship is much simpler and less interesting than
Oblomov's. Their vigorous and active minds suit each other and
likewise, Goncharov suggests, might have proceeded to exacerbate
each other. But the memory of Oblomov seems to make a gentle
ghostly third with them; it seems to temper their nervous vitality
with a reminder of something else.
It
adds another dimension to
Stolz's maxim that "the end of life is in living most fully." This is
Oblomov's only success.
In one of Leskov's stories there is an elderly princess who
considers this novel obscene. The narrator is amazed. How could
Goncharov, he asks himself, with all his mild attitude toward
humanity, offend anybody's sensibilities? In a strident whisper, the
old lady answers one word:
((Elbows!"
She refers to the scene in which Oblomov, coming on his land–
lady at work, stares fascinated at her plump white elbows which are
working vigorously up and down as she pounds some cinnamon.
The ancient princess was not referring to a sexual kind of obscenity;
what she indicated is the same shock that Stolz receives when he
comes to call on Oblomov for the last time. Olga is waiting in a
carriage outside and Stolz makes an eloquent appeal to Oblomov to
leave this place and come away with him. There is a child climbing
on Oblomov's lap. Suddenly Stolz's attention fixes on it. "Ilya,
llya," he cries. "Escape from here, make haste, come away! How
low you have fallen.
This
woman..." Oblomov answers: "She is
my wife."
Oblomov seems to have disappeared, sunk through the ground.
Stolz is conscious of "the anguish a man feels when he hastens in
excitement to see a friend from whom he has been parted and learns
that the friend has long been dead." And when Oblomov does die
a little later on, it is the slightest subtraction possible from the world
of the living.
The story needs an epilogue to bring another one of Goncharov's
meanings into focus. Most of the story has tended to develop the
personal failure inherent in Oblomovism, but Goncharov saw
it
as a
