Ilya Ilyich Oblomov spends much of his life in bed, surrounded by unanswered letters, neglected business and plans whose execution would require the intolerable first step of beginning.

Oblomov is not simply lazy: he is intelligent enough to recognise the emptiness of the active world, comfortable enough to avoid confronting it, and fatally attached to a vanished childhood ideal of effortless security. First published in Russian in 1859, Oblomov became so culturally influential that “Oblomovism” entered the language as a name for passive withdrawal and the paralysis of an entire social class. Yet the novel is subtler than a satire of the idle landowning gentry.

Through Oblomov’s friendship with the energetic Stolz and his relationship with Olga, Goncharov asks whether action is necessarily meaningful, whether love can reorganise a life, and how easily sensitivity becomes an alibi for retreat. Translated by Stephen Pearl, this is for readers drawn to tragicomic character studies, Russian realism and novels about the strange moral weight of doing nothing.

Alma Classics, 2014 revised edition. Paperback, translated by Stephen Pearl. Light cover rubbing and edge wear.