Oblomov (27 page)

Even when carried away, he was never swept off his feet, and always felt strong enough to wrench himself free if absolutely necessary. He was never blinded by beauty, and therefore never forgot or lowered his dignity as a man; he was never a slave, nor ‘lay at the feet’ of beautiful women, though he never experienced fiery joys, either. He had no idols, and that was why he preserved the powers of his soul and the strength of his body, that was why he was both chaste and proud; he exuded freshness and strength, which made even the least modest woman feel embarrassed. He knew the value of these rare and precious qualities and was so niggardly in their use that he was called an unfeeling egoist. He was blamed for his ability to control his impulses, keep within the bounds of rational behaviour, and preserve his spiritual freedom, while someone else who rushed headlong into disaster and ruined his own and another human being’s life was excused and sometimes even envied and admired.

‘Passion,’ people round him said – ‘passion justifies everything, and you in your egoism are taking care only of yourself: we shall see who you are doing it for.’

‘Well, it must be for someone,’ he said thoughtfully, as though gazing into the distance, and continued to disbelieve in the poesy of passions, refusing to admire their stormy manifestations and devastating consequences, but, as always, regarding an austere conception of life and its functions as the ideal aim of man’s existence. The more people argued with him, the more obstinate he became, and lapsed, in discussions at any rate, into puritanical fanaticism. He used to say that ‘the normal purpose of a man’s life is to live through his four “ages” without sudden jumps and carry the vessel of life to the very end without spilling a single drop, and that a slowly and evenly burning fire is better than a blazing conflagration, however poetical it might be’. In conclusion, he added that he would have been happy if
he could prove his conviction in his own case, but that he could not hope to do so because it was most difficult. As for himself, he steadily followed the path he had chosen. No one ever saw him brooding over anything painfully and morbidly; he was not apparently tormented by pricks of conscience; his heart did not ache, he never lost his presence of mind in new, difficult, or complicated situations, but tackled them as old acquaintances, as though he were living his life over again – as though he were visiting old familiar places once more. He always applied the right method in any emergency as a housekeeper chooses the right key for every door from the bunch hanging at her waist. Persistence in the pursuit of a certain aim was a quality he valued most; it was a mark of character in his eyes, and he never denied respect to people who possessed it, however insignificant their aims might be. ‘These are
men
,’ he used to say. Needless to say, he pursued his aims fearlessly, stepping over every obstacle in his way, and only relinquishing them when a brick wall rose before him or an unbridgeable abyss opened at his feet. He was incapable of the kind of courage which makes a man jump across an abyss or fling himself at a wall with his eyes shut, just on the off chance that he may succeed. He first measured the wall or the abyss, and if there were no certain way of overcoming the obstacle, he turned back, regardless of what people might say about him. Such a character could perhaps not be formed without the mixed elements of which Stolz’s character was composed. Our statesmen have always conformed to five or six stereotyped models; they look lazily and with half-closed eyes about them, put their hand to the engine of State, and drowsily move it along the beaten track, following in their predecessors’ footsteps. But soon their eyes awaken from their sleep, firm striding steps and lively voices were to be heard.… How many Stolzes have still to appear under Russian names!

How could such a man be intimate with Oblomov, whose whole existence, every feature, every step was a flagrant protest against everything Stolz stood for? It seems, however, to be an established fact that while extremes do not necessarily, as it was formerly believed, give rise to a feeling of mutual sympathy, they do not prevent it. Besides, they had spent their childhood and schooldays together – two strong ties; then there was the typically Russian, big-hearted affection lavished in Oblomov’s family on the German boy, the fact that Stolz had always played the part of the stronger, both physically and morally, and, finally and above all, there was in Oblomov’s nature something
good, pure, and irreproachable, which was deeply in sympathy with everything that was good and that responded to the call of his simple, unsophisticated, and eternally trustful nature. Anyone who once looked, whether by accident or design, into his pure and childlike soul – however gloomy and bitter he might be – could not help sympathizing with him and, if circumstances prevented them from becoming friends, retaining a good and lasting memory of him.

Andrey often tore himself away from his business affairs or from a fashionable crowd, a party or a ball, and went to sit on Oblomov’s wide sofa and unburden his weary heart and find relief for his agitated spirits in a lazy conversation, and he always experienced the soothing feeling a man experiences on coming from magnificent halls to his own humble home or returning from the beautiful South to the birch wood where he used to walk as a child.

3

‘G
OOD MORNING
, llya, I’m so glad to see you! Well, how are you? All right?’ asked Stolz.

‘Oh dear, no, Andrey, old man,’ Oblomov said with a sigh. ‘I’m not at all well.’

‘Why, you’re not ill, are you?’ Stolz asked solicitously.

‘Styes have got me down: last week I got rid of one on my right eye and now I’m getting one on the left.’

Stolz laughed.

‘Is that all?’ he asked. ‘You’ve got them from sleeping too much.’

‘All? Good heavens – no! I’ve awful heartburn. You should have heard what the doctor said this morning. He told me to go abroad or it would be the worse for me: I might have a stroke.’

‘Well, are you going?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Good Lord, you should have heard all he told me! I have to live somewhere on a mountain, go to Egypt, or to America.…’

‘Well, what about it?’ Stolz said coolly. ‘You can be in Egypt in a fortnight and in America in three weeks.’

‘You, too, old man? You were the only sensible man I knew and you, too, have gone off your head. Who goes to America and
Egypt? The English – but they have been made like that by the good Lord and, besides, they have not enough room at home. But who in Russia would dream of going? Some desperate fellow, perhaps, who doesn’t value his own life.’

‘But, good heavens, it’s nothing: you get into a carriage or go on board ship, breathe pure air, look at foreign countries, cities, customs, at all the marvels.… Oh, you funny fellow! Well, tell me how you are getting on? How are things at Oblomovka?’

‘Oh!’ Oblomov said with a despairing wave of the hand.

‘What’s happened?’

‘Why, life doesn’t leave me alone.’

‘Thank goodness it doesn’t!’ said Stolz.

‘Thank goodness indeed! if it just went on patting me on the head, but it keeps pestering me just as naughty boys pester a quiet boy at school, pinching him on the sly or rushing up to him and throwing sand in his face – I can’t stand it any more!’

‘You’re much too quiet. What’s happened?’ asked Stolz.

‘Two misfortunes.’

‘Oh?’

‘I’m utterly ruined.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Let me read to you what my bailiff writes – where’s the letter? Zakhar, Zakhar!’

Zakhar found the letter. Stolz read it and laughed, probably at the bailiff’s style.

‘What a rogue that bailiff is!’ he said. ‘He has let the peasants go and now he complains! He might as well have given them passports and let them go where they like.’

‘Good Lord, if he did that, they might all want to go,’ Oblomov retorted.

‘Let them!’ Stolz said with complete unconcern. ‘Those who are happy and find it to their advantage to stay, will not go, and those who do not want to stay are of no use to you, anyway. Why keep them in that case?’

‘What an idea!’ said Oblomov. ‘The Oblomovka peasants are quiet people who like to stay at home. What do they want to roam about for?’

‘I don’t suppose you know,’ Stolz interrupted, ‘they’re going to build a landing-stage at Verkhlyovo and they also plan to make a highroad there, so that Oblomovka will be within a mile of it, and they’re going to hold an annual fair in the town, too.’

‘Dear me,’ said Oblomov, ‘that would be the last straw! Oblomovka used to be in a backwater, away from everything, and now there’s going to be a fair, a highroad! The peasants will start going regularly to the town, merchants will be coming to us – it’s the end! What a nuisance!’

Stolz laughed.

‘Of course it’s a nuisance!’ Oblomov went on. ‘The peasants were behaving nicely, you heard nothing, neither good nor bad, from them, they went about their business and asked for nothing, but now they’ll be corrupted! They’ll start drinking tea and coffee, wearing velvet trousers and blacked boots, playing accordions – no good will come of it!’

‘Well, of course, if they do that, it will certainly not be much good,’ observed Stolz. ‘But why shouldn’t you open a school in your village?’

‘Isn’t it a bit too soon?’ said Oblomov. ‘Literacy is harmful to the peasant: educate him and for all you know he may not want to plough any more.’

‘But the peasants will be able to read how to plough their fields – you funny man! But, look here, you really ought to go to your estate this year.’

‘Yes, that’s true, but, you see, my plan isn’t quite ready yet.…’ Oblomov observed timidly.

‘You don’t want any plan!’ said Stolz. ‘All you have to do is to go there – you’ll see on the spot what has to be done. You’ve been working on this plan for years: isn’t it finished yet? What do you do?’

‘My dear fellow, as though I have only the estate to worry about! What about my other misfortune?’

‘What’s that?’

‘They’re driving me out of my flat.’

‘Driving you out?’

‘Yes, they just told me to clear out, and they seem to mean it.’

‘Well, what about it?’

‘What about it? I’ve worn myself to a shadow worrying about it. I’m all alone, and there’s this and that to be seen to, check the accounts, pay the bills, and then there’s the moving! I’m spending a terrible amount of money and I’m hanged if I know what on! Before I know where I am, I shall be left penniless!’

‘What a pampered fellow you are – can’t bring yourself to move to a new flat!’ Stolz said in surprise. ‘Talking of money – how much money have you got on you? Let me have five
hundred roubles, please. I must send it off at once. I’ll get it from our office to-morrow – –’

‘Wait, let me think! I received a thousand roubles from the estate the other day, and now there’s left – wait a minute – –’

Oblomov began rummaging in the drawers.

‘Here – ten, twenty, two hundred roubles – and here’s another twenty. There were some coppers here – Zakhar! Zakhar!’

Zakhar, as usual, jumped off the stove and came in.

‘Where are the twenty copecks I put on the table yesterday?’

‘You keep on harping on the twenty copecks, sir! I’ve already told you that there were no twenty copecks on the table.’

‘Of course there were! The change from the oranges.’

‘You must have given it to somebody and forgotten all about it, sir,’ said Zakhar, turning to the door.

Stolz laughed.

‘Oh, you Oblomovs!’ he upbraided them. ‘Don’t know how much money you have in your pockets!’

‘And didn’t you give some money to Mr Tarantyev, sir?’ Zakhar reminded Oblomov.

‘Yes, yes, of course,’ Oblomov said, turning to Stolz. ‘Tarantyev took ten roubles. I forgot all about it.’

‘Why do you receive that brute?’ Stolz observed.

‘Receive him, sir?’ Zakhar intervened. ‘Why, he comes here as if it was his own house or a pub. Took the master’s shirt and waistcoat, he did, and we never saw ’em again! This morning he came for a dress-coat, if you please. Wanted to put it on at once, he did! I wish, sir, you’d speak to him about it!’

‘It’s not your business, Zakhar!’ Oblomov said sternly. ‘Go back to your room.’

‘Let’s have a sheet of note-paper,’ Stolz said. ‘I must write a note to someone.’

‘Zakhar, Mr Stolz wants paper; give him some,’ said Oblomov.

‘But there isn’t any, sir,’ Zakhar replied from the passage. ‘You looked for it yourself this morning,’ he added, without bothering to come in.

‘Just a scrap of paper!’ Stolz persisted.

Oblomov searched on the table; there wasn’t a scrap.

‘Give me your visiting card at least.’

‘I haven’t had any for ages,’ said Oblomov.

‘What is the matter with you?’ Stolz asked ironically. ‘And you’re about to do something – you’re writing a plan. Tell me, do you go out anywhere? Whom do you see?’

‘Going out? Good Lord, no! I’m always at home. My plan does worry me, you know, and then there’s the business of getting a new flat – thank goodness, Tarantyev promised to find something for me.’

‘Does anyone come to see you?’

‘Oh yes – Tarantyev, Alexeyev… the doctor looked in this morning. Penkin, too, Sudbinsky, Volkov – –’

‘I don’t see any books in your room,’ said Stolz.

‘Here’s one!’ Oblomov observed, pointing to a book that lay on the table.

‘What’s this?’ asked Stolz, glancing at the book. ‘
A Journey to Africa
. And the page you’ve stopped at has grown mouldy. Not a newspaper to be seen. Do you read the papers?’

‘No, the print’s too small – bad for the eyes, and there isn’t really any need for it: if anything new happens, it’s drummed into your ears all day long.’

‘Good heavens, Ilya!’ said Stolz, casting a surprised glance at Oblomov. ‘What
do
you do? You just roll up and lie about like a piece of dough.’

‘That’s true enough, Andrey,’ Oblomov answered sadly, ‘just like a piece of dough.’

‘But to be conscious of something does not excuse it, does it?’

‘No, but I merely answered your question; I’m not justifying myself,’ Oblomov replied with a sigh.