ABSTRACT
Goncharov was aiming to depict one character Oblomov, or better one attitude to life oblómovshchina. This he possessed fully: Oblomov is, like Don Quixote, a metaphysical notion that imposes itself on the known world, judging and overturning it; he is also, again like Don Quixote, held fast by actuality; Zakhar breaks into his dream, and in part shares it, as Sancho does with Don Quixote. Goncharov was in his own fashion, and no less than Belinsky, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, an extremist. Against their incessant activity he places another extreme—that of inertia. They lacerate themselves in the struggle: he patiently holds his own. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky explore many kinds of experience that were beyond Goncharov; but he stuck to his single thought and developed it till the whole novel was saturated with the idea. He makes indolence a cosmic principle that enfolds all the petty traffic and hum of nature.
