Volume 35, Number 3 · March 3, 1988
Oblomov's Travels
By John Bayley
The Frigate Pallada
by Ivan Goncharov, translated by Klaus Goetze
St. Martin's, 649 pp., $35.00
I first read about the account by the nineteenth-century Russian novelist, Ivan Goncharov, of his voyage in the frigate Pallada in Prince Dmitri Mirsky's superlative History of Russian Literature, a model of its kind, and for the history of any national literature. Goncharov is known to Western readers as the author of Oblomov, the classic novel about a Russian gentleman of the old school. First published in 1859 it was translated into English in the Twenties, and its hero, together with the notion of 'Oblomovism,' has become almost as much of a byword with us as he is in Russia. The novel has even been made into a film and a play which had a run in New York.
Review, 2744 words
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