GajimaruClassics.
OblomovOn the coverThe Merchant's Wife at Tea, Boris Kustodiev, 1918
Oblomov
A kindly, intelligent Russian gentleman is so paralysed by inertia that he can barely rise from his sofa, and love itself cannot rouse him for long. Goncharov’s tender, funny, devastating portrait of a man defeated by his own indolence.
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A strangely lovable masterpiece about doing nothing, gently comic and quietly profound, whose hero’s heroic sloth you will recognize with a wince. Unlike anything else in fiction.
SettingRussia, 1850s
Mid-nineteenth-century Russia of drowsy country estates and serf-run households, a fading gentry world whose comforts bred a peculiar, terminal listlessness.