Oblomov (Everyman's Library Classics) - Hardcover

Ivan Goncharov

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1857151240 ISBN 13: 9781857151244

Publisher: Everyman, 1992

Synopsis

Goncharov's gentle satire on the failings of 19th-century Russian gentry and bureaucracy turns into something deeper and richer than satire, as he probes the character of a protagonist whose constitutional lethargy becomes a symbol for the malaise of the human spirit in an alienating world.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

The sly, subversive side of the nineteenth-century Russian literary character -- the one which represents such a contrast to the titanic exertions of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky -- was most fully realized in Ivan Goncharov's 1859 masterpiece, OBLOMOV. This magnificent farce about a gentleman who spends the better part of his life in bed is a reminder of the extent to which humor, in the hands of a comic genius, can be used to explore the absurdities and injustices of a social order.

About the Author

Richard Freeborn is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of London. He has translated and edited many novels by Turgenev, and is the author of Turgenev, the Novelist's Novelist, The Rise of the Russian Novel, and The Russian Revolutionary Novel.

Stephen Pearl (translator) was a simultaneous interpreter at the United Nations for more than thirty years and was Chief of English Interpretation there for fifteen years. He is a graduate of St. John's College, Oxford University with an M.A. in Classics.

Tolstaya was born in St. Petersburg. She has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and, in 2001, two major Russian literary awards. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and other publications. After teaching at Princeton University and for many years at Skidmore College, she now lives in Moscow.

Galya Diment (Introduction) is Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Washington, Seattle. She edited Goncharov's Oblomov: A Critical Companion (Northwestern) and is the author of The Autobiographical Novel of Co-Consciousness: Goncharov, Woolf, and Joyce (University Press of Florida). Her other books include Pniniad: Vladimir Nabokov and Marc Szeftel (University of Washington), Between Heaven and Hell: The Myth of Siberia in Russian Culture (St. Martin's), and the forthcoming Approaches to Teaching Lolita (MLA).

Edition details

• Publisher: Everyman
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1857151240
• ISBN 13: 9781857151244
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 586