Dream and Fantasy in Goncharov’s Oblomov

Abstract

Discussing the processes of literary creation, Goncharov placed his own writing firmly in the category of ‘unconscious creativity’, as opposed to art that stemmed from an idea or concept.¹ By this he meant that when his creative imagination was stirred, he saw images and scenes which flowed fluently from his pen. A consequence of Goncharov’s artistic method was that he tended not to write his novels from beginning to end, but to tackle a work piecemeal as his imagination dictated (VIII, 70–71). This spontaneous method, which drew on the unconscious via the imagination, had the effect in his most famous novel, Oblomov (1859), of transforming the character of Il’ia Il’ich Oblomov from a specific social type, a landowner of a particular time and place, into an archetype, something that Goncharov himself realised fully only after the book had appeared (VIII, 71). At the same time he stressed that the roots of his unconscious creativity lay not in fancy but in life: ‘I wrote only what I had experienced, what I thought and loved, and what I saw close at hand and knew, — in a word, I described both my own life and what had become part of it’ (VIII, 113). While the insistence on life as the source of his creativity is typical of contemporary demands that literature reflect life, there is here at the same time an implied disapproval of imagination unfettered by reality.