Tolstoy’s favourite novel is a guide to being idle

Oblomov, first published in 1859, is the charming tale of a lazy but lovable aristocrat in 19th-century Russia. The novel’s eponymous hero cannot see the point of doing anything at all, and spends his time lying in bed or wandering around his St Petersburg flat in his beloved oriental dressing gown, bickering about the dusting with his manservant. The newspaper on the desk is a year old; flies buzz from the inkwell. Oblomov broods; he worries; he thinks.

The book’s author, Ivan Goncharov, is perhaps little-known now, but in its time Oblomov was hugely popular in Russia. Tolstoy, that venerable, saintly moralist, was deeply in love with it, writing: ‘Oblomov is a truly great work, the likes of which one has not seen for a long, long time. I am in raptures over Oblomov and keep re-reading it.’

Later, that humourless man of action Lenin saw Oblomov himself as a symbol of everything that was wrong with Russia. The book and its central character had had such a success that ‘Oblomovism’ became an adjective for sluggishness, and even today an ‘Oblomov’, meaning ‘a lazy person’, is a word used by Russians who have never read the book. Lenin believed that if social progress was to be made, then Russians must cleanse their Oblomovian tendencies.

In actual fact, like many apparent idlers, Oblomov is not really lazy — or at least he is only slothful in the physical sense. Intellectually, he is a fizzing ball of energy. It’s just that he spends a lot of time in bed. But he is thinking, thinking hard, all the time. He is a philosopher. His observations on the vanity of human effort are positively Christ-like — or at least like the Christ of the Sermon on the Mount:

Isn’t everybody looking for the same thing as me? After all, surely the purpose of this hustle and bustle of yours, all these passions, wars, trade and politics is to achieve precisely this very peace and quiet, to strive for this ideal of paradise lost?

The most wonderful section of the book is probably the extended utopian fantasy, ‘Oblomov’s Dream’, an idealisation of his own childhood, where our protagonist conjures up a Virgilian bucolic idlyll:

The river burbles merrily and playfully along, widening in spots into a pool and then, narrowing into a swift thread of a current, pauses for reflection and just trickles over the rocks, branching into frisky rivulets whose babbling lulls the surrounding countryside into a sweet slumber.