Oblamov

Oblomov is the Russian novel by Ivan Goncharov, first published in 1859, which poses the question: what if a man was so lazy that he could do nothing?

Nobody does psychological insight like nineteenth-century Russian novelists. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Chekhov and Turgenev liked to take characters and pass them under the microscope of analysis and evaluation.

Not for them the dash and flash plotting of Zola or Balzac; the Russians settle down with one or two characters and peel away thei...