ABSTRACT
Part four, the most powerful piece of writing in Goncharov's oeuvre, traces Oblomov's decline into vegetative existence and death. Largely eventless, it is yet too rich in psychological insight and poetic imaginings to be identified with the sketch-like burlesque of the opening. The novel moves in a circle. But where Oblomov's earlier dreamings were a refuge from the demands of life, his recovery of Oblomovka at the elbow of the loving Agafia Matveevna is a kind of achievement. A failure in the world of action, Oblomov has yet found love and a measure of self-knowledge. The ending asserts the power of the imagination to coalesce beginnings and ends into a meaningful pattern. Oblomov's dreaming mind has returned to the past not only for escape but to discover who he is-for what it was that "had laid a heavy hand upon him in the beginning of his journey and had thrown him away from his true human purpose." Oblomov has learned to accept himself, limited as he is, and the reconciliations of the ending keeps the novel, for all its pain, in the mode of comedy.
