Oblomov
By Ivan Goncharov
Translated by Marian Schwartz
Afterword by Mikhail Shishkin
Seven Stories Press, 2008; paperback ed., Yale University Press, 2009 
A Slate Best Book of 2008

Set at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when idleness was still looked upon by Russia’s serf-owning rural gentry as a plausible and worthy goal, Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov follows the travails of an unlikely hero, a young aristocrat incapable of making a decision. Indolent, inattentive, incurious, given to daydreaming and procrastination, Oblomov clearly predates the ideal of the industrious modern man, yet he is impossible not to admire through Goncharov’s masterful prose. Translator Marian Schwartz breathes new life into this Russian masterpiece in this, the first translation from the generally recognized definitive edition of the original, as well the first to attempt to replicate in English Goncharov’s wry humor and all-embracing humanity. Replete with ingenious social satire and cutting criticism of nineteenth-century Russian society, this edition of Oblomov will introduce new readers to the novel that Leo Tolstoy praised as “a truly great work, the likes of which one has not seen for a long, long time.”

Reviews

More translations of Russian novels? We’ve done our time with War and Peace, what more do you want? Indeed. In the case of Russian literature, the vaults are still being opened, classics are still being unearthed, and new Russian literary works are still making their way to our shores. Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov and Mikhail Bulgakov’s White Guard are a new and noteworthy pairing, and their translations are brought to us by Marian Schwartz, a prize-winning translator of Russian fiction, history, biography, and criticism. -- Karen Vanuska, The Quarterly Conversation

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"Humor in the Human Condition"
The expression “great comic novel” attached to a title usually causes me to drop everything and rush off to the library to secure what I consider to be one of the prime reasons for living. The greatest of these works are, to my mind, ones that are not simply funny, but also possess a melancholy, even hopeless dimension. Examples are Charles Portis’s “Masters of Atlantis,” V.S. Naipaul’s “A House for Mr. Biswas,” Flann O’Brien’s “The Third Policeman,” Dawn Powell’s “The Wicked Pavilion,” Barbara Pym’s “Excellent Women,” Molly Keane’s “Good Behavior,” Evelyn Waugh’s “A Handful of Dust,” Anthony Burgess’s “The Long Day Wanes,” and Shchedrin’s “The Golovlyov Family” - which has also been called the gloomiest novel in all Russian literature.

Ivan Goncharov’s “Oblomov,” published in Russian in 1859, is invariably described as a “great comic novel.” Still, though I’ve taken it out of the library several times in explosions of enthusiasm, I had never actually read it until now - two versions, in fact: C. J. Hogarth’s translation of 1915, the first in English, which turns out to be an abridgement; and the most recent translation, Marian Schwartz’s of 2008, just published in paperback (Yale University Press, $16.95). continued -- Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe, March 7, 2010

“Eskapizm”

This intimately funny and desperately sad novel opens with a parade of visitors to
Ilya Ilich Oblomov’s Petersburg flat. Most of them are introduced, in this new
translation, by the phrase ‘in walked’, which creates a wonderful sense of flatness,
repetition and invasion. All but one of the visitors are busy in some way or other, full
of talk of the world, parties, work, the latest literary news. They are going
somewhere, they have a life, and one of them is eager to steal or cadge as much from
Oblomov as he can. The very descriptions of these people make us tired, setting us
up for a largely (although not entirely) disreputable identification with the book’s
slothful hero. Other translations describe his favourite posture as lying down, but
Marian Schwartz boldly goes for ‘recumbence’, with its suggestion of ornate Latin
repose: “For Ilya Ilich, recumbence was neither a necessity, as it would be for an ill or
sleepy man, nor an occasional occurrence, as for someone who was weary, nor a
pleasure, as for a lazy man; it was his normal state.” continued – Michael Wood, London Review of Books