Notes on Oblomov and Chevengur

Thoughts on two of my favourite novels

Oblomov

Goncharov’s Oblomov precedes recent ‘elevated horror’ in the structure of its final scare: the body is shorn of elegance and hideous; the protagonist enjoys the freedom that comes with being their true, disgusting self; the audience is terrified, not just by the transformation, but that it might be enjoyable. Oblomov is a listless aristocrat representative of Russia itself. His only drive is towards torpor. He has been prematurely senescent since his early 20s, when he was briefly able to struggle against himself to work a civil service job. Us moderns follow our desire to act, and trip and falter regularly, perhaps overwhelmed by too many occurrences. Unable to move on or let things go, we incorporate those occurrences into ourselves and become weighed down until some natural process frees us to act again. We spend hours, days, months in states of distraction, while keeping up with our productive tasks. Apparently, none of us want this, and given the correct mindset we will free ourselves, time and time again, and return to life. Oblomov really does want to lie down forever. He is what we conceal in the language of exhaustion and overstimulation. With external prompting from his childhood friend, a German man of action named Stolz, Oblomov is able to shift into gear for a few months at a time. This is because the impetus derives from outside. We might imagine Oblomov as a mechanical bird who walks only as far as he is wound up. What we often consider rest is really a sort of self-absorption that we cyclically take on, a way of avoiding anything external that requires energy-consuming attention. In this state of self-absorption, we require some apparatus to reflect us back onto ourselves (art, companionship, or a truly blank mind), but with modern technology we have created an absolute ease of self-absorption that permeates all activity.

Oblomov ends with some class-based body horror. It must be remembered that 19^th century Russia was still feudal. The 19^th century Russian novel provides us with the unique combination of the feudal mindset alongside the self-conscious form of the novel. The exhausted Oblomov begins living with a peasant landlady in her suburban home. He gazes on her fat housekeeping arms from behind as he lies on the sofa. The landlady falls in love with our rotund hero. As she cooks and cleans, he naps, and between his naps he eats. Compare with the French novel of aristocratic decline, Huysmans’ À rebours. The limp and constipated Des Esseintes isolates himself in a carefully constructed countryside sensorium. He is occasionally inspired to take action. Over the course of the novel he rearranges his library of Latin literature, encrusts a tortoise with precious gems, and combines scents, tastes, and colours to create new sensory experiences, drawing on all the developments of decadence. Des Esseintes creates his private utopia with the greatest care as a bulwark against anything beyond himself. He is eventually too sick and secluded to keep living in this manner. In the end, he accedes to the demands of his bourgeois doctor, who must also be Jewish, and he prepares to return to urban life.

We cannot imagine Oblomov similarly constipated and lacking in virility. The flow of energy required to support his eternal torpor (perhaps a mishandled diapause) is gargantuan. Oblomov consumes, sleeps, and breeds on a massive scale. This, combined with the energy needed to successfully repress his feelings of shame and regret must turn Oblomov into a new form of life, a new modern species of man. Some animals, after all, sleep over 12 hours a day, and consume massive amounts of food to prepare for hibernation. Stolz comes to visit Oblomov for the last time. He is truly indolent and the spark of life in him is faded, though Stolz remains hopeful. Stolz insists that Oblomov can still escape this hovel and spring to life, that he need not waste the remaining decade or two of his life. He must leave this peasant house and the gaggle of peasant children all around. He must get a job, get his aristocratic estate up and running, he must move his body. But Stolz realises the horrific truth. As Oblomov beseeches him to leave, just like a movie monster mid-transformation, Stolz understands that the children are Oblomov’s, and Oblomov is now the husband of the peasant woman. There is no escape for him. His life will be extinguished here, he will sleep and eat until the massive stroke that kills him, his body giving into the call to degrade itself and lower itself to rest. The concluding chapters of Oblomov move at a devastating pace. We see years of Oblomov’s life pass as he does nothing at all. This particular scene is especially effective since the horror is framed through Stolz’s eyes. From the perspective of Oblomov, we might find this repose pleasurable or quaint. Stolz, a fellow man of the upper class, looks at his oldest friend descend through inactivity to the rank of peasant, which is practically akin to monstrosity.

Chevengur

The feudal attitude of the 19^th century Russian novel is best seen in the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, whose ideas are essentially mediaeval. The missing link between the 19^th century world of peasants, serfs, counts, and Tsars, and the 20^th century world of acronymic agencies and historical movement can be seen in Platonov’s Chevengur. Tolstoy, along with many Russian authors, idolizes the peasantry’s pure-hearted religiosity, so much so that he adopted the trappings of a peasant-monk in his own life, to the detriment of his wife. Dostoevsky, the ultimate sick pervert, believed there was no greater form of life than stupid Christianity, so any form of rebellious negativity or forward-thinkingness must be destroyed. No wonder he is the favourite of the current Russian state, and of the scores of modern people who crave a stupid, meaningful life. Chevengur follows the early 20^th century in Russia, beginning with a real peasant wild man, something far away from the pastoral idyll of other authors. As was common at the time, Zakhar Pavlovich heads to the woods to forage during a famine, as other villagers make the long pilgrimage to far-off cities, where they might mine or beg. There is no sense of the progression of time, which requires genuinely modern people.¹ For this reason, the novel takes a while to get started while its protagonist, Sasha, comes of age. You might say this long, guttural start reflects Russia’s long hesitance to enter modernity, its millennia long lazy morning. The haziness of the first few chapters of Chevengur successfully reflects the haze of childhood memory, the haze of historical primordiality, and the haze of psychological underdevelopment, which is justified by the bloomings of consciousness after the fact.

Zakhar is a natural technician, since he lacks highly developed human feeling. He is skilled at repairing bits and bobs and figuring out how things work. Zakhar begins to live and feel in his last years. He begins working at a train depot under the supervision of a foreman who reminds me of Father Mapple.² The foreman is a dedicant of trains, which are more ideal than humanity. We might see mechanical modernity, which can go forward, as a religion that Zakhar is briefly inducted into. But just as Zakhar is inducted into mechanisms, he becomes an atheist upon meeting a prematurely ensouled child. In this case, I call atheistic his abandonment of mechanisms, and his newfound interest in the human soul. This might seem like an unjustified reversal, but Zakhar loses his sense of mysticism towards higher powers above humanity, and begins to see mankind as truly valuable. He becomes disillusioned by the mechanical stuff that makes humanity move forward. It is a brilliant move of Platonov’s that Zakhar’s initial faith is in the act of crafting, as opposed to anything more abstract. All attempts to transform matter can be conflated. The Aristotelean idea of artifice as something opposed to nature, which bestows on inert matter a human purpose, the Communist idea of bringing an end to history, and the Christian concept of immanentizing the eschaton all have faith in the human capacity to craft and transform in common. We can’t imagine Christianity, however, having any reality for Zakhar. Rather, his natural consciousness is devoid of life and emotion, and reaches its peak in the mastery of modern machinery. His atheistic return is the discovery of a reverence towards the human soul, so that he might care for the orphaned Sasha. That Zakhar only discovers the significance of the human towards the end of his life is, I think, perfectly true, since the parts of humanity that we consider essential often only come late, as the human reaches its complete form.

My favourite passage in the novel shows Sasha going off to beg in the city with a handwoven bag and a walking stick. He leaves behind his first adoptive family. His adoptive father stands watching as dawn comes in, staying until he sees Sasha go off into the horizon. Sasha must first descent down the hill out of sight, then ascend up the next hill before he can vanish. The father stays for some time, anxious that Sasha is taking a while. Eventually, Sasha ascends the next hill, and his adoptive father is relieved. Down the hill, Sasha had found his father’s grave. He lay there for a while, and left his walking stick there. The scene contains a pleasing chthonic element, and an aspect of maturation conjoined with the physicality of a journey into the unknown. And, quite correctly, we do not have the details of Sasha’s quest to go begging – it is enough to know he walked into the distance. Combined with this is the beautiful unspoken emotion of Sasha’s adoptive father, a man who never developed a strong sense of himself, weighed down by labour and children. He spends some time in quiet contemplation, and his weathered affection shines through. The image of Sasha rounding the hill before finally heading off into the sunset, the man who cared for him for some years watching on, is one I can picture vividly. Consider this an allegory for Russia in the 20^th century.

What separates Oblomov and Chevengur is the existence of machinery. In the 70 or so years between the novels, industry has arrived in Russia. Oblomov captures a pre-industrial sense of exhaustion, which ends up being relevant to our post-industrial lives. Oblomov might well be an inert machine, steadily using up the stuff of human life. Chevengur represents a burst from out this inertia. We might compare the events of Chevengur to the awareness described by Benjamin in his Concept of History. The workers, during their moment of triumph, become aware of their power to explode the continuum of history. Faith is treated quite cynically in Chevengur, though it accedes to the vitality of generational change.

Reverse migrants, Sergey Ivanov

1. Compare with the Oresteia, in which mythic dislocation and repetition is contrasted with a new political order, that ceases prior time and creates a new order of time that can move forward. See also the French Revolutionary Calendar.

2. Moby Dick’s priest conveniently uses the story of Jonah and the Whale in his sermon. Since he preaches at a whaleman’s chapel, I have always wondered whether he exclusively delivers whale-related sermons. The single sermon he delivers must surely exhaust the stock of Biblical whales.