� OblomoY, the hero ol I . A. Goncharov's noYel of t h a t name. ( Tr.) His problem was ennui in gPneral and, in particular, getting out of bed in the morning-or at all. "Oblomovism" was an upperclass Russian sucio·
political compla in t of the period. (D.!'d . )
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marking out its boundaries, dug a frontier ditch-the very one in which Nicholas is buried-are continually mixed up. And therefore we want, with a partiality like that of Cato for the cause of the vanquished, to champion the older generation.
Superfluous men '"ere in those days as essential as it is essential now that there should be none.
Nothing is more lamentable than, in the midst of the growing activity, as yet unorganised and awkward but full of enterprise and initiative, to meet those gaping, unnerved lads who lose their heads before the toughness of practical work, and expect a gratuitous solution of their difficulties and answers to problems which they have never been able to state clearly.
We will lay aside these volunteers who have appointed themselves superfluous men and, just as the French only recognise as real grenadiers les vieux de la vieille, so we will recognise as honourable and truly superfluous men only those of the reign of Nicholas. vVe ourselves belonged to that unhappy generation and, grasping many years ago that we were superfluous on the banks of the !\:eva, we very practically made off as soon as the rope was untied.
There is no need for us to defend ourselves, but we are sorry for our former comrades and want to protect them from the batch of the sick that followed them after being discharged from Nicholas's infirmary.
One cannot but share the healthy, realistic attitude of one of the best Russian reviews in attacking recently the flimsy moral point of view which in the French style seeks personal responsibility for public events. Historical strata can no more be judged by a criminal court than geological ones. And men who say that one ought not to bring down one's thunders and lightnings on bribe-takers and embezzlers of government funds, but on the environment which makes bribes a zoological characteristic of a whole tribe, of the beardless Russians, for instance, are perfectly right. All we desire is that the superfluous men of Nicholas's reign should have the rights of bribe-takers and enjoy the privileges granted to the embezzlers of public funds. They are the more deserving of this in that thPy are not only superfluous but almost all dead; and the bribe-takers and embezzlers are alive, and not only prosperous but historically justified.
·with whom are we to fight here? \Vhom have we to ridicule?
On the one hand, m!.'n who have fallen from exhaustion ; on the other, men crushed by the machine; to blame them for it is as ungen\'rous as to blamP scrofulous and lymphatic children for the poorness of their parents' blood.
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There can be only one serious question; were these morbid phenomena really due to the conditions of their environment, to their circumstances? . . .
I think it can hardly be doubted.
There is no need to repeat how cramped, how painful, was the development of Russia. We were kept in ignorance by the knout and the Tatars: we were civilised by the axe and by Germans: and in both cases our nostrils were slit and we were branded with irons. Peter I drove civilisation into us with such a wedge that Russia could not stand it and split into two layers. We are hardly beginning now, after a hundred and fifty years, to understand how this split diverged. There was nothing in common between the two parts; on the one side, there was robbery and contempt; on the other, suffering and mistrust; on the one side, the liveried lackey, proud of his social position and haughtily displaying it; on the other, the plundered peasant, hating him and concealing his hatred. Never did Turk, slaughtering men and carrying off women to his harem, oppress so systematically, nor disdain the Frank and the Greek so insolently, as did the Russia of the nobility despise the Russia of the peasant. There is no other instance in history of a caste of the same race getting the upper hand so thoroughly and becoming so completely alien as our class of upper government servants.
A renegade always goes to the extreme, to the absurd and the revolting, to the point at last of clapping a man in prison because, being a writer, he wears Russian dress, refusing to let him enter an eating-house because he is wearing a caftan and is girt with a sash. This is colossal and reminds one of Indian Asia.
On the borders of these savagely opposed worlds strange phenomena developed, whose very distortion points to latent forces, i ll at ease and seeking something different. The Raskolniki and Decembrists stand foremost among them, and they are followed by all the Westerners and Easterners, the One gins and the Lenskys, superfluous and jaundiced men. All of them, like Old Testament prophets, were at once a protest and a hope. By them Russia was exerting itself to escape from the Petrine period, or to digest it to her real body and her healthy flesh.
These pathological formations called forth by the conditions of the life of the period pass away without fail when the conditions are changed, just as now superfluous men have already passed away; but it does not follow that they deserved judgment and condemnation unless from their younger comrades in the Service. And this is on the same principle on which one of the inmates of Bedlam pointed with indignation at a patient who
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called himself the Apostle Paul, while he, who was Christ himself, knew for certain that the other was not the Apostle Paul but simply a shopkeeper from Fleet Street.
Let us recall how superfluous men were evolved.
The executions of 13th July, 1 826, at the Kronverk curtainwall5 could not at once check or change the current of ideas of that time, and as a fact the traditions of the reign of Alexander and the Decembrists persisted through the first half of Nicholas's thirty years' reign, though disappearing from sight and turning inwards. Children caught in the schools dared to hold their heads erect, for they did not yet know that they were the prisoners of education.
They were the same when they left school.
These were far different from the serene, self-confident, enthusiastic lads, open to every impression, that Pushkin and Pushchin6 appear to us to have been when they were leaving the Lycee. They have neither the proud, unbending, overwhelming daring of a Lunin,7 nor the dissolute profligacy of a Polezhayev,8 nor the melancholy serenity of Venevitinov.9 But yet they kept the fai th inherited from their fathers and elder brothers, the faith that 'It will rise-the dawn of enchanting happiness,'10 the faith in Western liberalism in which all then believed-Lafayette, Godefroy Cavaignac, Borne and Heine.
Frightened and disconsolate, they dreamed of escaping from their false and unhappy situation. This was that last hope which every one of us has felt before the death of one we love. Only doctrinaires (red or parti-coloured-it makes no difference) readily accept the most terrible conclusions because properly speaking they accept them in effigie, on paper.