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 not mentally prepared us for it. Lockdown life’s victory had lain dormant, at least since the 9/11 attacks that considerably disrupted air traffic. That was when, alongside climate disruption and the fear of terrorism and war, what one could call the Great Seclusion began. We were already locked down mentally, without knowing it. The late twentieth century was a period of openness both in terms of mobility and our way of life. That period is over; the lockdown of minds and places is well underway. Orbital tourism for millionaires has begun, but crossing a border or leaving one’s house is still “problematic.” Covid came like a sign from heaven to a West that no longer believes in the future and sees in the coming decades the confirmation of its collapse. It affixed the terrible seal of death to all those fears. As opposed to the flu of 1969, forgotten by all, this pandemic has already comprehensively changed how we live. How many experienced the return to normal as a shock? Pandemic measures restricted them, the return to freedom depresses them. Won’t they miss the fenced-in nightmare that they wholeheartedly cursed when it was first implemented, like prisoners who, upon release, sigh for the bars of their cell and for whom freedom has the bitter taste of anxiety? Any excuse is seized as an opportunity to cloister themselves again. Bedrooms, like houses, are self-sufficient microcosms, so long as they have Wi-Fi. More than enforced lockdown, we should fear voluntary self-lockdown in response to our dangerous world. This slow-motion period of life has enabled an extraordinary easing in social pressures: reduced contact with others, limited outings, curtailed nights out, remote working, absent bosses, a couch-potato (or pajama-wearing) lifestyle, authorized slouching, splendid regression. The Other as a disrupter, tempter, interrupter has disappeared, or
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