Oblomov

Ilya Ilyich Oblomov is a Russian nobleman so committed to inaction that the novel spends the whole of its first part watching him fail to get out of bed, interrupted only by his servant Zakhar and by a letter from his estate manager warning that his finances are collapsing without him. His old friend Andrey Stoltz, energetic where Oblomov is inert, finally drags him out into society and introduces him to Olga Ilyinsky, a spirited young woman who falls for Oblomov and, for a time, seems capable of waking him into a real life; the two become engaged, but Oblomov delays the wedding again and again, unable to convert feeling into action even for the person he loves most. Olga eventually gives up on him and, years later, meets Stoltz again in Paris; the two marry, while Oblomov sinks further into the comfortable, sealed off routine of his landlady's household. Oblomov marries his landlady Agafya Matveyevna, has a son, and dies quietly of inactivity as much as anything else, and it is Stoltz who takes the boy in afterward, while Oblomov's old servant Zakhar ends the book begging in the street until Stoltz finds him too.

Goncharov is not writing a simple satire of laziness; Oblomov's inertia is presented as a genuine, almost principled refusal of a false, striving world, and the novel's comedy keeps curdling into something closer to grief as the possibility of a different life closes off page by page. It is a slow book by deliberate design, built to make a reader feel the pull of Oblomov's inertia rather than just observe it, and it asks real patience in its opening stretch before the Olga plot gives it momentum.

Goncharov worked on the novel for roughly a decade before its completion.