How Oblomov drew on Dead Souls
A documented line of influence: Ivan Goncharov demonstrably engaged Nikolai Gogol’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Dead Souls
Nikolai Gogol · 1842
RomanticismThe influenced
Oblomov
Ivan Goncharov · 1859
The Age of the NovelRelevance
6/10
On Oblomov’s page
- Goncharov came up inside the Gogol-launched 'natural school,' the realist movement Belinsky built around Dead Souls and 'The Overcoat,' and Oblomovka — the sleepy, serf-attended manor that breeds Oblomov's paralysis — is the natural school's method applied to a single estate.
- Gogol's Manilov, the landowner who plans grand improvements and accomplishes nothing, is the direct ancestor of Oblomov's dreaming inertia. Goncharov takes the comic minor type and gives it a whole novel and a national diagnosis: Oblomovism.
On Dead Souls’s page
- Gogol's Dead Souls launched the 'natural school' of Russian realism, and the young Goncharov was one of its members — Manilov, Gogol's sugary, idle, perpetually-daydreaming landowner, is the soft clay out of which Oblomov is later sculpted.
- Goncharov takes Gogol's comic minor type — the dreaming squire who plans grand improvements and accomplishes nothing — and gives it a whole novel and a national diagnosis.