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I am not sure if many people are aware but I am a big fan of Russian literature, not just books written by Russians but also books set in Russia. There is something about the backdrop and the way these books are written that I am drawn to. The culture is so different and with […]

Muireann Maguire's Red Spectres: Russian Gothic Tales from the Twentieth Century, a new collection of supernatural fiction featuring eleven short stories from both classic and lesser known Russian writers, is out later this week. Featuring nine pieces never before translated into English, the anthology combines many of the best-loved aspects of the traditional ghost story with the full Gothic

I chose to read Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov for the Classic Circuit without having any idea what the book was about. I had some vague recollection that I had read someone’s blog post about it once and it sounded good but beyond that I could not go. I could even get the book for free online and it was just shy of 200 pages. How could I go wrong? Except it turned out the online free version was abridged and when the book arrived from the library it was 445 pages! So much for short. But it turned out that it didn’t matter.

Illya Illyich Oblomov is landed gentry. He owns a large estate — Oblomovka — and three hundred peasants. When the story opens Oblomov is reclining on his divan in his apartment in St. Petersburg. For the next 150 pages or so he remains on his divan, in his dressing gown determined to deal with two problems — he is being forced to move from his apartment so the building can be renovated and he just got a letter from his estate bailiff explaining that things on the estate are rather dire. But Oblomov, so used to not doing and having others do for him, can’t sort either of the problems out. A “friend” who is really a moocher and a thief, arrives and after making sure Oblomov knows what a great imposition it all is, agrees to help Oblomov at least find a new apartment. As for his estate, the brother of his new landlady agrees to “help” him out with that.

Throughout the entire book Oblomov is either laying down or eating huge amounts of food or ineffectually worrying about things and then putting off their resolution until the next day or next week. Only in one section of the book does he ever show any kind of oomph and that is when he falls in love with the young and beautiful Olga. But even Olga can’t make him resist the grasp of oblomovshchina and the two separate. If it weren’t for Oblomov’s devoted and industrious friend, Stoltz, taking his affairs in hand and looking out for him, Oblomov would have ended his days as a beggar on the street.

There are so many different elements at work in this book I don’t know where to start and probably can’t begin to cover them all. First, you need to know this book is funny. It’s not in your face funny, it’s a subtle funny that plays with irony and the alternating affection and disgust that Oblomov inspires in his reader. Oblomov is pathetic but yet does not inspire pity. He is not stupid or lazy or incapable, his friend Stoltz makes sure we know that; the two were at university together and Oblomov studied law, read poetry and philosophy, and was an art and music connoisseur. Nor does Oblomov suffer from depression. He doesn’t suffer from anything.

Oblomov’s deep and all-pervavise inertia, his oblomovshchina, comes to represent a dying way of life. Through a dream Oblomov has early in the book we glimpse what life on the estate in Oblomovka was like and had always been like and what growing up there meant to Oblomov. The life and ways of Oblomovka are contrasted with social changes represented by Stoltz. Stoltz is not landed gentry. His father was German and his mother was Russian and he has made his way in the world through becoming educated and working hard. He is wealthy because he has earned it not because it was given to him.

Throughout the entire book we have a continual rubbing together of these two ways of life represented by Oblomov and Stoltz. Stoltz is always busy, always on the go, traveling throughout Europe for both work and pleasure. He takes pride and joy in his work and the things that he can do because of it. Oblomov reclines on his divan marveling at Stoltz’s busyness and is glad he doesn’t have to do that. He is always voicing aloud how sorry he is for people who have to be busy and work, always running here

I started a new book on my commute and lunch break today, Oblomov by Ivan Goncharev.

The Classics Circuit is going to be doing 19th century Russian literature the end of June into July. Last year or maybe longer, a blogger or bloggers (wish I could remember who! Was it you?) read Oblomov and liked it quite a lot. I had never heard of it before but it sounded good so I put it on my to-read list. I didn’t think much about it until the Russian tour sign up (sign-up closes Friday, May 21st so if you are interested in participating there is still time!). I’ll be in school this summer (my last summer in school, yay!) so looked over the list of possibilities hoping to find a short one so I could participate. I could have done short stories but Chekov didn’t sound appealing nor did any of the others.

My eyes landed on Oblomov. How long is that I wonder? And can I get it on my Kindle? I checked my favorite free book download site and there it was! Even better it was only 169 pages. So doable even with school. I signed up.

Then I realized my Bookman is in the middle of The Count of Monte Cristo on the Kindle and would probably be at it for quite some time. So I decided to get the book from the library. It came in yesterday.

Imagine my surprise to see this huge 440 page book! Wow, I thought, there must be a lot of additional materials in the book to pad it out that much. I looked. A three-page translator’s note, a two-page forward, a ten-page introduction. The rest is all novel. How could this have happened? It’s a recent translation, does the story suddenly have more words than it used to? I checked back on the book download site and discovered buried in the description of the book a note that the free digital version is abridged. Well that explains it.

Sign-up may not have closed yet for the Russian tour but I figured I had better start reading it now otherwise there is a good chance I wouldn’t be finished in time.

So I started reading it on the train this morning. Got through the introduction. I started on the actual novel during my lunch break, sitting in the warm sunshine and cool breeze and occasionally being sprinkled by the fountain in the courtyard. Here is how it begins:

One morning in his apartment in one of those big houses on Gotokhovaya Street, which could have accommodated the whole population of a country town, Ilya Ilyich Oblomov lay in bed.

The reader is given to know pretty quickly that Oblomov does not get out of bed very often. It isn’t that he is unable to get up or is ill, he just prefers to spend his days reclining in peace and quiet. It’s not Proust, but the sentences are often long with lots of clauses so it is somewhat complicated reading. Plus there are the Russian names. So far there are only two characters, Oblomov and his servant Zakhar. I can do those.

I am so far enjoying the book but somehow feel like I should be reclining in my own bed while reading it. That’s what imagination and weekends are for, right?

By Kirsty McHugh, OUP UK

Rosamund Bartlett is a writer, translator, and lecturer, specialising in Russian literature, and translated the best-selling edition of Chekhov’s About Love and Other Stories for the Oxford World’s Classics series. She was also heavily involved in a recent set of events celebrating Chekhov at the Hampstead Theatre in London. In the original post below, to coincide with Chekhov’s 150th birthday, she talks about her campaign to restore his house in Yalta.

Anton Chekhov was born 150 years ago this week, in a little whitewashed house in the southern port of Taganrog. Forty four years later, his life was already over, his body ravaged by the tuberculosis he contracted when he was in his twenties. He could have squandered his talent, like his elder brother Nikolai, and led a dissolute life, but he chose instead to value his creative gifts. He earned his literary stripes the hard way, by writing first for comic journals and newspapers, but he ended up becoming the greatest writer of his generation. He could have rested on his laurels after receiving accolades as both prose writer and dramatist, but he kept on writing, and producing masterpieces, even when he was too sick to prune his roses. He could have happily left his medical training behind after he qualified as a doctor, but he went out of his way to treat the peasants who lived near his country house, and supported efforts to provide community health care. He could have lived off the fat of the land, but provided for his parents and sister, quietly built three schools, planted trees, and undertook a grueling journey to the island of Sakhalin to make a study of its notorious penal colony. He was a consummate artist who went against the grain of Russian tradition by resolutely refusing to act as a moral guide, and a person of rare integrity who preferred to lose his closest friend rather than endure his anti-Semitism. He also never took himself seriously and indeed was cracking self-deprecating jokes until the very last. For all these reasons Chekhov’s 150th birthday is worth celebrating.

Because Chekhov was a writer with such a deep and compassionate understanding of human nature, the problems he deals with in his stories and plays are as relevant now as they were when he was writing about them, and not just to his fellow Russians. Chekhov has insights for anyone who has had a setback in life, or experienced the bewilderment of feeling one thing and saying another. Chekhov’s enduring appeal in England was certainly very clear last week at the Hampstead Theatre where Michael Pennington and I presented a week of story readings, informal performances and discussions to celebrate his anniversary – they were a complete sell-out. The proceeds are all going towards the restoration of Chekhov’s house in Yalta, which was turned into a museum soon after his death, and is unique in preserving its interior just as it was when he left it in 1904. When I visited two and a half years ago, I was shocked to find half the house shut to visitors. The museum’s director Alla Golovacheva showed me the wallpaper peeling off the walls in Chekhov’s study, due to mould, and explained there was simply no money to pay for adequate heating during the cold winter months. It was fine during Sov

Peter Mayer spoke to Jason Boog of GalleyCat this week in Overlook's SoHo office. Here's the post: "GalleyCat caught up with Overlook Press founder Peter Mayer to study the fine art of literary obfuscation. This month, Overlook Press will publish The Stranger by Max Frei--a literary fantasy novel supposedly written by the novel's main character. In reality, The Stranger was written by a reclusive female artist and has sold millions of copies in Russia. After hearing Russian readers rave about the book, Mayer scooped up the eight-book series. "A great deal of Russian literature has been disguised," he explained. "Russia was an autocratic state with great curtailments on people's personal lives... [obfuscation] is a feature that kept a lot of writers out of jail for many years."