Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
I would say this book is the key to a big compartment in the Russian heart or character. Oblomov’s laziness and his impotence when it comes to doing something, combined with the best intentions and the most wonderful soul, and heart, and mind: that’s typically Russian. It’s a complicated combination but it does explain the Russian national character in many ways.
Your next book?
We’ll do Oblomov. Again it’s classic, so I’m not going to comment on the story. But to understand it, let’s say it’s, from my point of view, one of the best books where you get the feeling of what’s called the ‘Russian soul’. There is the lazy landowner Oblomov versus his friend, who’s extremely decent, a nice Russian-German chap, Stolz. And it’s the whole story of Oblomov’s impotence, of the Slavic Russian character. If you want to spend a life marooned on an island somewhere, I would rather choose Oblomov than many other people: he’s wonderful, but he’s not a bore. I would say this book is the key to a big compartment in the Russian heart or character. Oblomov’s laziness and his impotence when it comes to doing something, combined with the best intentions and the most wonderful soul, and heart, and mind: that’s typically Russian. It’s a complicated combination but it does explain the Russian national character in many ways.
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Andrei Maylunas is an eminent historian on pre-Soviet Russia with unique access to the Moscow archives. He has edited and compiled several books on the Romanoffs. He says Dostoevsky’s book Demons is about Russia’s future. ‘It’s about what has happened, and what’s going to happen to Russia’s intelligentsia and nobility. It gives you a flavour of the nascent 20th-century Russia with all its ups and downs: the literature, horrors, terrors, revolutions, bloodshed, the peaks, the depths – you already feel it. You smell it and you taste it in Demons.’
