How Oblomov drew on Don Quixote
A documented line of influence: Ivan Goncharov demonstrably engaged Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra · 1605
RenaissanceThe influenced
Oblomov
Ivan Goncharov · 1859
The Age of the NovelRelevance
6/10
On Oblomov’s page
- The master-servant comedy of Oblomov and Zakhar is built on the model of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza: the same affectionate friction, the same gap between a grand interior life and a shabby reality, the same way the reader laughs and aches at once.
- The debt is traced directly in the scholarship — J. D. Hainsworth's 'Don Quixote, Hamlet, and Negative Capability: Aspects of Goncharov's Oblomov' (1980) reads the Oblomov-Zakhar pair against Cervantes' knight and squire.
On Don Quixote’s page
- Cervantes gave Goncharov his comic engine: the deluded dreamer and his exasperated servant. Oblomov and his serf Zakhar are a Russian Quixote and Sancho, their endless squabbles continually setting decayed grandeur and exalted daydreams against bleak reality.
- The master-servant comedy of inseparable opposites — the grand interior life shadowed by a shabby, grumbling realist — is Cervantes' invention, and Goncharov bends it from chivalric quest to terminal indolence.