Oblomov (everyman’s library)

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)

The sly, subversive side of the nineteenth-century Russian literary character — the one which represents such a contrast to the titanic exertions of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky — was most fully realized in Ivan Goncharov’s 1859 masterpiece, OBLOMOV. This magnificent farce about a gentleman who spends the better part of his life in bed is a reminder of the extent to which humor, in the hands of a comic genius, can be used to explore the absurdities and injustices of a social order.