THE SUPERFLUOUS MAN
181
came a common term of reproach and even, in a national way, of self–
reproach. Prince Kropotkin, writing in 1901, extended the symbol to
include all the complacent absentees of his time: the political Oblo–
movs, the share-owning financial Oblomovs, the governmental
Oblomovs, and the Oblomovs of science. But by this time Oblomov
has become a series of aphorisms and the original Ilya Ilyitch has
been forgotten.
The exceptional thing is that Goncharov, while he detested
every objective manifestation of Oblomov, loved everything sub–
jective about Ilya Ilyitch. His purely personal and non-effective
qualities of charm, gentleness, generosity, and lack of malice are
perfectly convincing. Olga calls him "dove-like." Stolz ridicules the
description but gives an even more tender one himself. It is only when
one begins to abstract, as Kropotkin does and as Goncharov does
at the end of the book, that one can condemn him.
By our time, a good deal of the fierceness has gone out of the
condemnation and a present-day critic can even take the character
of Ilya Ilyitch as a foundation for a sympathetic abstraction about
Oblomovism. V. S. Pritchett in an essay in
The Living Novel
calls
Oblomov a saint, ready for canonization: "In a world of planners
he puts himself to sleep. In a world of action he discovers the poetry
of procrastination. In a world of passion he discovers the delicacies
of reluctance. And when we reject his passivity he bears our
secret desire for it like a martyr."
Later Pritchett says that though Goncharov wrote to satmze
the sluggishness of the old-fashioned landowners and to praise the
virtues of the new businessman,
his
genius makes his propaganda
ambiguous. "Mter we have read this book we do not hate idleness,
escapism, daydreaming: we love Oblomov. We have discovered a
man, a new man whose existence we had never suspected; a ludicrous
Russian nobleman who, we realize, has dwelt for a long time not in
Russia but in ourselves."
Neither Pritchett nor Kropotkin are wrong in what they say,
yet both estimates seem oddly temporary and incomplete. Oblomov
is
all they say and more. He seems so inexhaustible because he belongs
to the true sad comedy of the truly Superfluous Man. Petchorin,
Rudin, Bazarov-their quarrel with the world is political and they are
merely protestants. The real Superfluous Man is, in the deepest sense,
