A landowner spends the first hundred and fifty pages trying to get out of bed, and the rest of the book proving he was right not to bother. Goncharov gave Russian the word oblomovism for the national disease of the will, and the novel is far funnier and sadder than the diagnosis suggests. This edition carries C. J. Hogarth's translation and fifty-five plates of painting bound with the text, among them Fedotov, Shishkin and Repin.
