His inflated speech is mocked at every turn, especially by his uncle Peter, a successful but dry entrepreneur.

The novel ends with an ironic twist. Alexander, upon turning himself into a calculating businessman like his uncle, is surprised by the news that Peter in his young years also went through a heady romantic phase. Alexander has repeated his uncle’s career even to the backache that comes with success. Neither youthful enthusiasm nor middle-age scepticism are adequate responses to the problem of living. Instead of a didactic defence of the bourgeois virtues, Goncharov’s first novel is a wry comment on the way of the world, the ‘common story’ of growing up.

Though Oblomov turns on a similar opposition of practical action and sentimental drift, it is much richer, more deeply felt. It does not tell the story of a career to be made but of a life to be saved. The writing of A Common Story went smoothly – conceived in 1844, written in 1845 and wrapped up the following year, according to the author’s later testimony. It is an amusing book, but cerebral. Goncharov lived with Oblomov eleven to thirteen years before it finally appeared in 1859. It ‘ripened’ in his mind, he recalled. The bulk of it burst out of him in the summer of 1857 at the spa in Marienbad. It was the happiest moment of his life.

The extended period of writing is reflected in shifting styles. Part One, in its portraiture of a typical day in the life of Oblomov, is in the manner of what Russians call ‘the natural school’ – a first flower of realism. The comic zaniness in the relation of master and servant owes much to Gogol, the towering figure of the time. Isolated in his cramped room, the outside world blocked out by dusty windows, endlessly squabbling with his manservant Zakhar – the two seem married to each other – Oblomov fears his life may have ended before it started. ‘Why am I like this?’ is the question that sets the novel in motion. In the famous chapter entitled ‘Oblomov’s Dream’ his dreaming mind returns in nostalgia to the lost paradise of childhood, a time when the habits of ordinary life could be fully satisfying. Kitchen, barnyard and meadow are apprehended with poetic warmth; domesticity is granted mythic significance. In his ‘Dream’ Oblomov also sets out to discover the roots of his illness. At a dead end, his recourse is to self-knowledge. As in psychoanalytic theory, childhood gives us the objects of our desire and the source of our disease.

Upon awakening he makes a desperate attempt to join the world. By 1857, when the story of Oblomov’s love for Olga was written, the grotesqueries of the natural school were long out of fashion. The manner of the summer romance is delicate, poetical in the manner of Turgenev, the leading novelist of the late fifties. Oblomov has escaped his shabby seclusion and entered a world of aristocratic refinement. The figure of Olga often melts into lyrical images: a sprig of lilac, radiant light, the aria Casta diva. She promises grace.

Readers have found Stolz unconvincing but his friendship with Oblomov is important. They have been close since childhood. Each represents, we are told, half of life. The half-German Stolz (the name means ‘pride’) is all work, discipline, ambition (the Peter Aduyev of this novel). Oblomov, for all his sorrows, is blessed with the passive virtues: delicacy, imagination, tenderness.