Eskapizm

Michael Wood

• BuyOblomov by Ivan Goncharov, translated by Marian Schwartz
  Seven Stories, 553 pp, £15.99, January 2009, ISBN 978 1 58322 840 1

This intimately funny and desperately sad novel opens with a parade of visitors to Ilya Ilich Oblomov’s Petersburg flat. Most of them are introduced, in this new translation, by the phrase ‘in walked’, which creates a wonderful sense of flatness, repetition and invasion. All but one of the visitors are busy in some way or other, full of talk of the world, parties, work, the latest literary news. They are going somewhere, they have a life, and one of them is eager to steal or cadge as much from Oblomov as he can. The very descriptions of these people make us tired, setting us up for a largely (although not entirely) disreputable identification with the book’s slothful hero. Other translations describe his favourite posture as lying down, but Marian Schwartz boldly goes for ‘recumbence’, with its suggestion of ornate Latin repose:

For Ilya Ilich, recumbence was neither a necessity, as it would be for an ill or sleepy man, nor an occasional occurrence, as for someone who was weary, nor a pleasure, as for a lazy man; it was his normal state.