Oblomov, the Hero Who Cannot Get Out of Bed, Read Closely

“I have lain here long enough,” at last he said to himself. “Really, I must rise… But suppose I were to read the letter through carefully and then to rise?”

That is Ilya Ilyitch Oblomov, a little past ten in the morning, in the opening pages of Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov (serialized in the journal Otechestvennye zapiski from January 1859). The quotation is from C. J. Hogarth’s 1915 English translation, free on Project Gutenberg. The short answer to what the book is about: it diagnoses a man whose plans stand in for action, whose comfort meets no pressure, and whose household does the work he supposedly cannot get to. Staying in bed is the symptom the novel opens with, not the disease it names.

What actually happens on the first morning?

Oblomov is “a fellow of a little over thirty,” in a flat on Gorokliovaia Street, wearing a Persian dressing-gown so roomy “that Oblomov might have wrapped himself in it once or twice over.” Goncharov is careful about why he is in bed. It is “neither a necessity (as in the case of an invalid or of a man who stands badly in need of sleep) nor an accident (as in the case of a man who is feeling worn out) nor a gratification (as in the case of a man who is purely lazy).” It is “his normal condition.”

This morning is unusual only because he woke at eight, earlier than usual, with a letter on his mind. His steward has written from the country estate, Oblomovka, about bad harvests and falling income. Similar letters have been arriving for three years, and Oblomov has had a plan for reforming the estate for just as long. The plan, in Hogarth’s words, “remained not fully thought out.”

So he resolves to rise, wash, drink tea, think the matter through and jot down notes. Then he decides the tea can be drunk in bed, “the more so since a recumbent position could not prove a hindrance to thought.” After the tea he raises himself on an elbow, glances at his slippers, extends a foot toward them, and withdraws it. Half-past ten strikes. By the next half-hour he is horrified that it will soon be eleven and he has still not washed.

Which visitors try to get him up, and why does none of it work?

Volkov, about twenty-five and dazzling in his gloves, is going to ten places that day. After he leaves, Oblomov thinks, “What a life! What good can a man get out of it?” Sudbinski, newly head of a department, works from eight to twelve at home, twelve to five at the office, and the evening at home again; Oblomov’s reply is “Dear, dear!” Penkin writes two newspaper articles a week and wants Oblomov to read one. None of them is trying to rouse him. Each is a parade of a busy life, and Oblomov uses each to confirm that he chose better, lying on his back to preserve “both his nerves and his human dignity”.

Only the fourth caller, Tarantiev, a rough man from Oblomov’s home district, comes close. He asks why Oblomov is “lying in bed like a log” when it will soon be twelve, and Oblomov hurriedly slips his feet into his slippers, or Tarantiev “would have pulled him out of bed.” Oblomov steps out “like a man who is thoroughly worn out” and drops into an armchair.

Then Tarantiev uses the visit for himself. He takes ten roubles for Madeira, steers Oblomov toward a cheaper flat owned by a friend, and promises to be back for dinner at five. A hearty push gets Oblomov from the bed to a chair, and the push is interested.

Why does a plan feel like progress?

Alone again, Oblomov lies on his sofa with a book whose page has “turned yellow with a month’s exposure,” reads a page, yawns, and tells himself, “No, business first.” Then he starts on the estate.

What follows is the clearest passage in the book about a plan standing in for work. He designs a new house, fixes the dimensions of the dining-room and billiard-room, decides which way the study windows will face, adds a wing, sites the stables, replaces the apple trees with acacias, rejects a park on cost, and moves on to orangeries and aviaries. The vision grows until he is on a summer evening at a tea-table on the terrace of Oblomovka, with a wife behind the samovar, his friend Stolz at supper, and Zakhar, his valet, “now promoted to the dignity of a major-domo.”

None of this addresses the letter, the harvest, the arrears or the steward. It also feels good. The daydream pays the emotional reward of having done something, in advance, at no cost. The nearest finding in the research literature is the planning fallacy, and a thesis-deadline study by Buehler and colleagues shows how confident people are in schedules nothing yet backs. Oblomov’s plan is the extreme case, because it never needs a schedule at all.

What is the Oblomovka dream chapter for?

The daydream ends in sleep, and Goncharov follows him: “he dreamed of a different period, of different people, of a different place from the present. Let us follow him thither.” Wikipedia places this dream as chapter 9 of Part I in the Russian text and notes it appeared separately in Sovremennik in 1849, a decade before the novel. Hogarth’s abridged version numbers its chapters differently, so I cite by content.

Oblomov is seven, in the house he has just been planning to rebuild. A nurse tries to put on his stockings, and he kicks and laughs until she gives up. His mother asks whether he slept quietly, had dreams, or ran a fever, and orders that he never be left alone and never go near the horses, the dogs, the goat, or the ravine. He bolts for each in turn, and the nurse catches him each time.

The sharpest scene is a winter morning when he runs out capless to throw snowballs with village boys, falls, and laughs through his tears. He is carried home wrapped in a greatcoat, his father’s sheepskin and two quilts, dosed with mint, elderberry wine and raspberry syrup, and, the narrator says, kept “three days in bed—although the one thing that would have done him any good would have been to have let him go out again and play in the snow!” By fourteen, Hogarth says, he has servants to hurry at his bidding and “never learnt what it was to do a single thing for himself.” The dream answers where a person learns that bed is the safe place: from people who love him.

Who does the work while Oblomov rests?

Zakhar is called again and again, to find a handkerchief that is under Oblomov, to produce the accounts, to answer for the dust. When Zakhar says the washing things have been ready “a long time” and asks why his master does not get up, Oblomov replies, “And why didn’t you tell me that the things are ready? Had you done that, I should have risen long ago.”

Goncharov puts the arrangement in one sentence. Oblomov “wished his rooms to be kept clean” but “wished this task to be carried out invisibly, and apart from himself.” A hanger-on, Alexiev, offers to clean the inkstand and fair-copy the letter Oblomov has not written.

This is the reading that made the novel a political event. In May 1859 the critic Nikolai Dobrolyubov published “What Is Oblomovism?” in Sovremennik; Alfred Kuhn, in Slavic Review in 1971, describes it as Dobrolyubov’s first major review and a key document in the clash between the liberals of the 1840s and the radicals of the 1860s. From the secondary accounts I could check, Dobrolyubov read Oblomov as a portrait of a landowning class made superfluous as serfdom neared its end. I have not read the essay itself and will not put words in it. The novel does support the outline: Oblomov’s idleness is paid for by a household of people who cannot afford his.

The transferable point is smaller than a social theory. Inertia is comfortable when someone else absorbs its cost: a partner who does the booking, a manager who covers, a friend who texts to check in. Whether that applies to you is answered by looking at who is quietly doing your Tuesday.

What do Stolz and Olga add?

Stolz arrives at the end of Part I (Hogarth spells it “Schtoltz!”), and in Part II he is the book’s argument against Oblomov’s life, because he is an old friend who does not despise him. They once read Rousseau, Schiller, Goethe and Byron together. Asked what happened, Oblomov says, “Yet for some reason or another I have gone to pieces,” and that he “began life with a quenching of the light of day.” There was no crisis. Stolz says “Now or never,” and Oblomov, alone, writes Oblomovstchina in the dust on his desk and wipes it out with his sleeve.

Then he nearly changes. He gets a passport, orders a travelling coat and buys a cap for a trip to Paris. He rises at seven, reads, and carries books about, and the dressing-gown is gone, because Tarantiev has carried it off with his furniture. The cause is Olga (in Hogarth, Olga Sergievna Ilyinitch), a friend of Stolz’s. The trip never happens.

Olga’s verdict is the book’s sharpest sentence for anyone who loves a person with a plan. She realizes she was “loving in you only what I wished you to contain,” that “it was only the future Oblomov of my dreams that was so dear to me.” He is like a dove “with its head hidden under its wing.” Asked what has undone him, Oblomov answers, “It has a name… ‘The Disease of Oblomovka.’” Later he marries his landlady, Agafia Matvievna, and has a son by her. At the end “the prolonged inertia, the unbroken stillness” bring him to his death “even as stops a watch which its owner has… forgotten to wind up.” Stolz, driving away from his last visit, reflects that Oblomovka is no longer in ruins, and he later raises the boy as his own.

Where does the Oblomov metaphor stop being useful?

It stops early. Oblomov is a character written by a novelist in the 1850s, the book is not clinical evidence about sleep, motivation or mood, and I read it in an abridged translation. Calling yourself an Oblomov is a joke or literary shorthand. It does not tell you why you cannot start.

It also turns unkind in one case. Goncharov says outright that Oblomov is not lying down because he is ill, which makes him a poor model for a person who is. Trouble getting out of bed that persists for weeks, especially with low mood, lost interest in things that used to matter, or changes in sleep or appetite, can be depression, and it deserves a doctor or therapist rather than a stricter alarm. A separate article on getting out of bed when depression is involved covers how that differs from ordinary reluctance.

And the book is silent on what most snoozers deal with, a sleepy brain at 6:30 a.m. Oblomov’s trouble begins at ten in the morning, two hours after he woke, with tea in his hand. A body that cannot yet wake and a mind that will not begin are different problems.

What can someone who keeps hitting snooze take from it?

Three things, none of them medical. First, read what the morning resolution actually contains. Oblomov never says “I will stay in bed.” He says he will rise after tea, after reading the letter, after the thought is clearer, and each postponement sounds like preparation. Researchers who study how intentions turn into action, and where they fail place the gap in the same spot: between the plan and the first physical act.

Second, the audience. The only person who gets Oblomov out of bed is the one who stands over it and threatens to pull him out, and he only gets as far as the armchair. A deadline with someone watching is a point Goncharov never states and the plot illustrates anyway. DontSnooze is built on a narrow version of it: when the alarm fires you have 30 seconds to record a video showing you are up, and if you do not, a random photo from your camera roll goes to friends you chose. My inference, not Goncharov’s and not tested in any study, is that a deadline measured in seconds leaves no room for a thirty-minute “I will rise after tea” resolution.

Third, the stage you are at. If you have a plan, a notebook and a tidy house in your head but no first step, the stages-of-change model separates people contemplating a change from those preparing or acting, and the advice differs for each.

A small test comes from the book. Write down the one thing your own letter from the steward is asking of you, set a time in the next hour for the first ten minutes of it, and notice whether you reach for a bigger plan instead. Oblomov’s letter is the first thing in the novel, and the book spends hundreds of pages showing what a man does instead of answering it.

Questions readers bring to Oblomov

How long does Oblomov stay in bed at the start of the novel?

In C. J. Hogarth’s 1915 translation he wakes at eight and is not out of bed until Tarantiev arrives close to noon, about four hours. Hogarth’s version is abridged, and Wikipedia’s account of the novel says that across the first 50 pages Oblomov only gets from his bed to a chair. Page counts vary by edition, so the clock times are the firmer anchor.

What is Oblomovism, and who coined it?

Oblomovism (Russian oblomovshchina) was named by the critic Nikolai Dobrolyubov in “What Is Oblomovism?”, published in the May 1859 issue of the journal Sovremennik. Alfred Kuhn, in Slavic Review in 1971, calls it Dobrolyubov’s first major review and possibly his best. Hogarth spells the word Oblomovstchina and footnotes it as “the disease of Oblomovka,” the phrase Oblomov uses when Olga breaks with him.

Is Oblomov depressed, and could his behavior describe me?

A fictional character in a translation from 1850s Russian cannot be diagnosed, and the novel never calls him ill; Goncharov says his lying in bed is not the need of an invalid. Apathy and trouble starting do overlap with what people report in depression, though. If getting up has been hard for weeks, or comes with low mood, lost interest, or changes in sleep or appetite, talk to a doctor or therapist instead of trying a stricter alarm.

Which English translation of Oblomov should I read?

The free Project Gutenberg text is Hogarth’s 1915 version, which is abridged and spells Stolz as Schtoltz. Wikipedia lists later translations by Natalie Duddington (1929), David Magarshack (1954), Ann Dunnigan (1963), Stephen Pearl (2006) and Marian Schwartz (2008); Duddington and Schwartz follow the 1862 text, the other three the 1859 text. Every quotation in this article comes from Hogarth.