The Russians have a word for this inertia - Oblomovshchina - from the idle nobleman in Goncharov's Oblomov who spends the whole day dreaming and lying on the couch.* Thanks to the literary critic Nikolai Dobroliubov, who first coined the term soon after the book's publication in 1859, Oblomovsh china came to be regarded as a national disease. Its symbol was Oblomov's dressing gown (khalat).
* Though Gogol, too, had referred to such Russian 'lie-a-beds' in the second volume of Dead Souls (N. Gogol, Dead Souls, trans. D. Magarshack (Harmondsworth, 1961),
p. 265).
Dobroliubov even claimed that the 'most heartfelt striving of all our Oblomovs is their striving for repose in a dressing gown'.124 Goncharov made a careful point of emphasizing the Asian origin of his hero's dressing gown. It was 'a real oriental dressing-gown, without the slightest hint of Europe, without tassels, without velvet trimmings', and in the true 'Asiatic fashion' its sleeves 'got wider from the shoulders to the hands'.125 Living 'like a sultan', surrounded by his serfs, and never doing anything that they could be commanded to do instead for him, Oblomov became a cultural monument to Russia's 'Asiatic immobility'. Lenin used the term when he grew frustrated with the unreformability of Russian social life. 'The old Oblomov is with us', he wrote in 1920, 'and for a long while yet he will still need to be washed, cleaned, shaken and given a good thrashing if something is to come of him.'126
6
In 1874 the Ministry of Internal Affairs in St Petersburg hosted an extraordinary exhibition by the artist Vasily Vereshchagin, whose enormous battle scenes of the Turkestan campaign had recently returned with high acclaim from a European tour. Huge crowds came to see the exhibition (30,000 copies of the catalogue were sold in the first week) and the building of the Ministry became so cramped that several fights broke out as people jostled for a better view. Veresh-chagin's pictures were the public's first real view of the Imperial war which the Russians had been fighting for the past ten years against the Muslim tribes as the Tsar's troops conquered Turkestan. The Russian public took great pride in the army's capture of the khanates of Kokand, Bukhara and Khiva, followed by its conquest of Tashkent and the arid steppe of Central Asia right up to the borders with Afghanistan and British India. After its defeat in the Crimean War, the campaign showed the world that Russia was a power to be reckoned with. But Vereshchagin's almost photographic battle images revealed a savagery which had not been seen by civilians before. It was not clear who was more 'savage' in his pictures of the war: the Russian troops or their Asiatic opponents. There was 'something fascinating, something
deeply horrifying, in the wild energy of these canvases', concluded one reviewer in the press. 'We see a violence that could not be French or even from the Balkans: it is half-barbarian and semi-Asiatic - it is a Russian violence.'127
It had not originally been the painter's aim to draw this parallel. Vereshchagin started out as an official war artist, and it was not part of his remit to criticize the conduct of the Russian military. He had been invited by General Kaufman, the senior commander of the Turkestan campaign, to join the army as a surveyor, and had fought with distinction (the only Russian painter ever to be honoured with the Order of St George) before receiving the commission from the Grand Duke Vladimir (the same who had bought Repin's The Volga Barge Haulers) for the Asian battle scenes.128 But his experience of the war in Turkestan had given rise to doubts about the 'civilizing mission' of the Russian Empire in the East. On one occasion, after the Russian troops had massacred the people of a Turkmen village, Vereshchagin dug their graves himself. None of his compatriots would touch the dead.129 Vereshchagin came to see the war as a senseless massacre. 'It is essential to underline that both sides pray to the same God', he advised his friend Stasov on a piece he was preparing for the exhibition, 'since this is the tragic meaning of my art.'130 The message of Vereshchagin's epic canvases was clearly understood. He portrayed the Asian tribesmen, not as savages, but as simple human beings who were driven to defend their native land. 'What the public saw', Stasov later wrote, 'was both sides of the war - the military conquest and the human suffering. His paintings were the first to sound a loud protest against the barbarism of the Imperial war.'131
There was a huge storm of controversy. Liberals praised the artist for his stance against all war.* Conservatives denounced him as a 'traitor to Russia', and mounted a campaign to strip him of his Order of St George.132 General Kaufman became so enraged when he saw the artist's pictures that he began to shout and swear at Vereshchagin and
* Even Kaiser Wilhelm II, the most militarist of the German Emperors, told Vereshchagin at his Berlin exhibition in 1897:' Vos tableaux sont la meilleure assurance contre la guerre' (F. I. Bulgakov, V. V. Vereshchagin i ego proizvedeniia (St Petersburg, 1905), P. 11).
physically attacked him in the presence of his fellow officers. The General Staff condemned his paintings as a 'slander against the Imperial army', and called for them to be destroyed; but the Tsar, ironically, was on the liberals' side. Meanwhile, the right-wing press was outraged by the fact that Vereshchagin had been offered a professorship by the Imperial Academy of Arts (and even more outraged when the artist turned it down). Critics attacked his 'barbarous art' on the racist grounds that no real Russian worth the name could paint such tribesmen as equal human beings. 'It is an offence', argued a professor in the journal Russian World, 'to think that all these works were painted by a man who calls himself a European! One can only suppose that he ceased to be a Russian when he painted them; he must have taken on the mind of one of his Asian savages.'133
As his opponents knew, Vereshchagin was of Tatar origin. His grandmother had been born into a Turkmen tribe.134 For this reason he felt a close affinity for the landscape and the people of the Central Asian steppe. 'I insist', he once wrote to Stasov, 'that I only learned to paint when I went to Turkestan. I had more freedom for my studies there than I would have had if I had studied in the West. Instead of the Parisian attic, I lived in a Kirghiz tent; instead of the paid model, I drew real people.'135 Stasov claimed that Vereshchagin's feeling for the Central Asian steppe 'could only have been felt by an artist from Russia (not a European) who had lived among the people of the East'.136