Volume 21, Number 3 · March 7, 1974
Saint of Inertia
By V.S. Pritchett
Oblomov and His Creator: The Life and Art of Ivan Goncharov
by Milton Ehre
Princeton University Press, 295 pp., $14.50
On the face of it, it is extraordinary that one of the great comic novels of the Russian nineteenth century should have come from the hand of the most pedestrian, industrious, conservative of state officials, Ivan Goncharov, a man outwardly devoid of fantasy and lacking inventive powers. From what leak in a mind so small and sealed did the unconscious drip out and produce the character of Oblomov, the sainted figure of nonproductive sloth and inertia; one of those creatures who become larger and larger as we read?
Review, 1919 words
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