Word: oblomov
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...memoirs, Peggy Guggenheim describes a character she calls "Oblomov," which is her name for the young Samuel Beckett of the 1930s. The name was apt. Oblomov is the hero of a 19th century Russian novel by Goncharov, and he is famed for his inability to get out of bed. The mere thought of taking any action or making any decision makes him burrow deeper under the covers in a paroxysm of inertia. Miss Guggenheim's "Oblomov'' told her that "ever since his birth he had retained a terrible memory of life in his mother's womb...
...next. The games with their supermen provide the pitiful framework for his misspent manhood. He destroys his fledgling career in publicity. He finds that his dream girl personified the materialistic, castrating American woman. His weaknesses lead him to three stays in sanatoriums. Finally, he becomes a contemporary Oblomov, spending his nights and days on couches and beds, living in the marathon shadow world of television's cultural prefabrication, and talking...
...world that give the great Russian novelists their widely remarked dramatic powers, and place them ahead of everyone else in a less remarked achievement: the creation of unforgettably grotesque characters. From Mikhail Saltykov's hypocritical Yudushka ("Little Judas") Golovlev, to Ivan Goncharov's chaise-longue lizard, Ilya Oblomov, whose lumpish name has become a Russian household word for will-less sloth, Russian writing throbs with the howls and sneers of a whole menagerie of literary monsters...