Oblomovshchina, or Why I ♥ Oblomov

I met the woman who eventually became my darling wife thanks in part to a battered copy of Oblomov. No doubt this small book with the cryptic title impressed her immensely. Or, as she tells me these days, “I just couldn’t figure out what the heck it was.” Well, so much for Russian literature as a babe-catcher or aphrodisiac.

Truth is, I was then taking a college course on Dostoyevsky, where we were reading a heady and hearty survey of his works from Poor Folk through miscellaneous other short fiction, The Insulted and the Humiliated, and all of his major novels—all in one semester. And to add to the workload, for some crazy reason, I wrote my final paper on A Raw Youth.

Call me Dr. Love: Ivan Goncharov

So what was I doing touting around a copy of Oblomov as well? A fine question. Simply put, our Russian professor had mentioned the book, and I was hooked. I began reading Oblomov in my spare time, which was non-existent. Mine was sort of a strange, bizarre case of Oblomovshchina, or Oblomovitis, in reverse: Doing too much by reading Oblomov.

That Dostoyevsky seminar was so intense and exciting that the rest of my classes fell into the background. I carried all my Dostoyevsky reading, plus armfuls of notes on scads of loose sheets of paper, in a brown grocery bag. Things were a little out of control, which only seems right in retrospect, considering the course subject.

The fateful meeting with my future darling wife came one fine autumn day while I was digging through my bag o’ notes in front of our school’s union and spotted her walking across campus. Then, all of a sudden, she turned ninety degrees and came straight at me. Cool character that I was (and still am), I dropped the grocery bag, which spilled out onto the campus courtyard. As I bent over to rake up the papers, my copy of Oblomov in my back blue-jeans pocket also fell onto the ground. If she was unimpressed by this, she was also unfazed. So I asked her out to a flick (Casablanca), and the rest is history.

Somehow, the whole incident inspired my future darling wife’s interest in Oblomov too, and she began reading the book a couple weeks later. Since then, she’s read it twice and I just re-read it for the third time. It may be my favorite Russian novel of all time.

And we still have that same battered old copy from college days on the bookshelf. It’s the old Penguin Classic edition with the Mark Chagall painting on the cover, and it’s full of memories.

Note: I've always read the older David Magarshack translation, being a great lover of Penguin Classics. But I hear there are now two new recent translations of Oblomov out, one from Yale University Press, the other from Bunim & Bannigan. I’ll have to read them both.

A Prolegomena Toward Any Future Russian Literary Dialectics

in which the story is told of a certain worthy personage,

his intellectual games and the ephemerality of existence

—Andrei Bely, Petersburg, 1916

I am an obsessed man...I am a possessed man—to  paraphrase, mistranslate, or simply rip off Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man. My obsession is Russian literature.

There’s no special reason for this obsession. I’m a middle-aged, painfully normal, seemingly well-adjusted honky dude from Minneapolis, of all thrilling places. I claim no Russian ancestry, although I like ice-cold vodka and piroshkis, but not to an inordinate degree. I don’t pretend to be sophisticated, urbane, or even particularly smart: my tastes are rather boringly proletarian, from puppy dogs to rockabilly music, swashbucklers (Sabatini! Dumas!) to Westerns (The Searchers!). I’ve never misplaced my nose, run into the devil’s kitty cat in a dark alley, or plotted a good ax murder.

Perry Mason in Petersburg

Russian horse opera

No, my obsession with Russian literature is not a mid-life crisis (although that could be entertaining—and perhaps undiagnosticable). In fact, I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t know about Russian literature. That’s because I began reading all the greats when I was about seven years old, thanks to my dad’s collection of Classics Illustrated comicbooks, which included Gogol’s “The Cossack Chief” (Taras Bulba, #164) and Dostoyevksy’s Crime and Punishment (#89), not to mention Homer, Eugene Sue, and even some good solid horse operas. Call it a solid schooling at the College of Comic Book Knowledge.

But it wasn’t until much later that my obsession truly took hold due to a true college class in Dostoyevsky taught by an impassioned and inspired Russian professor. Now, even today, reading Pushkin or Pilnyak gives me a thrill I can’t quite describe. Or understand.

Thus, this blog will be an opportunity to try to get to the bottom of this obsession, blab about my favorite books and authors, and simply ramble on. And on. It will not be critical (hence, we’ll not bother mentioning Elif Batuman’s The Possessed ever again). And I will no doubt toss out numerous broad, silly, untenable, and downright wrong theories about something I don’t really know that much about.

So, let us begin.