Michael Wood writes:

One of the novel’s polemical proposals is that squandering and sleeping are better, in many cases, than what we call work and achievement. In which cases? The novelist Mikhail Shishkin says in an afterword that this is ‘the Russian paradox: if you want to live a worthy life, you’d best not get off the sofa at all.’ Oblomov, Shishkin says, is a ‘vital, dear and unlucky man’ and morally much to be preferred, the implication is, to all those who preach at him, pass him by, and rip him off. Schwartz, similarly, in her translator’s note, speaks of Oblomov’s ‘shining soul’ and his ‘endearing foibles and rationalisations’. The spirit of these remarks catches something important. It is better to sleep than to work if the work is ignoble; better to be a genial pampered loafer than an ugly crook.

(LRB 6 August 2009)

Seven Stories | paperback 553 pp. |ISBN: 9781583228401