Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Ilya Ilyich Oblomov is a mid-nineteenth century landowner outside of Saint Petersburg. An honest and decent man, he suffers from a natural tendency towards inertia. He lives less in his home than on his sofa, and less on his sofa than in his capacious dressing gown of Persian fabric, and less in his dressing gown than in his “long, soft, and wide” slippers. His body is flabby, his hands are plump, his movements are all suffused with a graceful languidness. Oblomov lives mostly lying down. Walking and standing are, for him, brief flights between a landing on his bed or his sofa. He is the very definition of the weak-willed, overworked man tortured by the mere idea of what he has to do. “As soon as he rose from bed in the morning… he would lie right back down on his sofa, prop his head on his hand and ponder, until, at last, his head was weary from hard work and his conscience told him enough had been done today for the common weal.” Something as simple as writing a letter takes him weeks, months even, and entails a complex ritual. Each decision comes at enormous psychological cost. His falsely obedient valet Zakhar shirks his duties and lets the house sink into an unspeakable state of disorder. There are days when Oblomov forgets to get up, only opening an eye around four in the afternoon, and tells himself that anyone else in his position would have already gotten through piles of work. Feeling overburdened by that mere prospect, he goes back to sleep. When his friend Stolz introduces him to a young woman, Oblomov panics. He is terrified at the very idea of sharing his life with a wife, going out into the world, reading the papers, living in society. While he falls in love with the charming Olga, who is put in charge of ensuring he that doesn’t fall asleep during the day, and takes long walks with her, he cannot resolve himself to see the relationship through. Olga teases him, wants to break him of his napping habit, rebukes him for not being more daring, for his clumsiness. Weighed down by this pressure, he breaks things off with her. Olga turns her back on him, despairing at him, calling him a “shabby, worn caftan” and a coward. Continually overwhelmed by small tasks he never has the time to finish, Oblomov is, at thirty years old, always just about “to enter life’s field.” Behind its appearance as a farcical comedy, Ivan Goncharov’s novel Oblomov, which appeared in 1859, is a poignant description of a failure to launch. The more our protagonist sleeps, the more he needs rest. Having never known great joys, he has also avoided great sorrows. Locked up inside him is a light searching for an escape, but which only “burned its own prison” and then went out. With only the will and not the way, he has never been able to move forward, for “moving forward meant suddenly throwing his roomy dressing gown from his soul and mind as well as his shoulders.” His life ends with him “finally interned in the plain, otiose tomb of his retirement which he had fashioned with his own hands.” Why remember Oblomov in 2022? Because he is the leading man of lockdowns, only without Netflix and the internet. The man lying down was us, was you, in that low-flying existence into which we were recently banished. For over two years, many people have transformed the relative powerlessness of science and medicine to curb the pandemic into rage against our elected officials. The pandemic will wane, but in the meantime quarantine has become a real option for frightened souls. Goncharov’s novel is perhaps less a depiction of the Russian soul, as Lenin lamented, than a premonition for us all: literature not as entertainment but as forewarning. The virus has, of course, been a tragedy for many millions of people, but it has also kept the world behind closed doors for years. It has breathed impressive new life into the struggle between homebodies and wanderers. The isolation of whole populations would not have gone off so well, almost overnight, had something