The case for idleness Like Oblomov, we must quit our superfluous jobs

Oblomov, I imagine, looks like that stonily stoned chap in František Kupka’s The Yellow Scale. It’s a striking painting, a riot of yellows, with Kupka — for this is a self-portrait — staring defiantly at you, propped up in a cushioned wicker chair, a cigarette in one hand and the index finger of his other lodged in a lemony paperback, as if saying, “yes, I’m a lazy bastard. So what?”

That’s the vibe conveyed by Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, the hero of Ivan Goncharov’s second novel, published in 1859. He embodies that mid-19th century Russian ideal type — common enough in Turgenev and Pushkin — whom we would do well to emulate: the “superfluous man”. He is an “incorrigible, carefree idler”, his pal Penkin observes, but that’s an understatement.

Oblomov is paralysed by indolence. His achievement, in the first 50 pages, is to negotiate a relocation from his bed to his chair. He isn’t handicapped, Goncharov explains: “Lying down was not for Oblomov a necessity, as it is for a sick man; or a matter of chance, as it is for a tired man; or a pleasure, as it is for a lazy man: it was his normal condition.” Oblomov spends much of the novel in a state of near-permanent recumbency, wearing “an expression of serene unconcern, thoughts promenading freely all over his face”, his presence adding nothing to society, any more than detracting from it.

Oblomov, we learn, was once a clerk before he decided that working wasn’t worth the trouble. “In his opinion, life was divided into two halves: one consisted of work and boredom — those words were synonymous for him — and the other of rest and quiet enjoyment.” Accordingly, he decided to commit himself to a life of literary lethargy. He could afford to. With 350 serfs to his name, he has a modest rentier income that frees him from the indignities of work. His overseers swindle him, but he can’t be arsed to put in an appearance in distant Oblomovka, “on the borders of Asia”. Nor can he be bothered to stay au courant with the news. The morning papers bore him. So, too, does high society. He can’t stand the highfalutin eggheads at the Mussinskys’ salon, where they discuss da Vinci and the Venetian School: “Pedants. How boring!”

Oblomov was always a bit of a philistine. At school, “he was quite satisfied with what was written in his notebook and showed no tiresome curiosity when he failed to understand all that he heard”. So it was that, on reaching adulthood, Oblomov withdrew from society, spending his days like the Dude in The Big Lebowski, that inveterate slacker, though in the Russian’s case, his chosen uniform is a capacious oriental dressing-gown rather than a bath-robe, and he doesn’t reside alone in his bachelor pad but has a cantankerous Gogolesque manservant in tow. The two of them bicker like a married couple. Oblomov scolds Zakhar for his appetite: “Are you a cow that you have munched so much greenstuff?” The servant, in turn, faults him for his profligacy with glassware: why can’t the master imbibe directly from the decanter?

The foil to Oblomov is his dour German workaholic schoolmate, Andrey Stolz, a votary of the Protestant work ethic. Stolz laments Oblomov’s laziness: “What do you do? You just roll up and lie about like a piece of dough.” Much of the book is taken up with Stolz’s efforts to make a dull and dutiful German out of the lazy Russian. Needless to say, Stolz fails to improve Oblomov. At first, though, he succeeds in getting our slothful hero to hook up with Olga, and for a minute, Oblomov becomes a party animal, hopping from one soirée to the next. But it doesn’t last. His laziness returns, as it dawns upon him that “intimacy with a woman involves a great deal of trouble”, all the more with those high-maintenance “pale, melancholy maidens”, the kind that make you suffer “tormenting days and iniquitous nights”.

He breaks off the engagement with Olga, who proceeds to tie the knot with Stolz in Crimea. Meanwhile, two artful cadgers make Oblomov part with his fortune. The imperturbable Oblomov, however, can scarcely be bothered by such mundanities. He knows he’s coming down in the world, and he has stoically made peace with his station. Towards the end of the book, he moves in with Agafya Matveyevna, his old childminder. She takes care of him, just as she had when he was a plump putto of seven years.

Childhood, freighted with associations of innocence and simplicity, was a 19th-century invention, and Oblomov, a child of that century, was unsurprisingly obsessed with recovering it. In a lyrical chapter about his pastoral upbringing, titled “Oblomov’s Dream” and published a year earlier as a short story, Oblomov describes his tranquil youth, when “troubles flew past him like birds”. It’s a state of mind he clings onto until his affliction — Oblomovitis — kills him. And so Oblomov dies, just as he lived, in blissful apathy.

In lesser hands, Oblomov would have been a morality tale, a warning against idleness written in the run-up to the abolition of serfdom in 1861; this was a period of flux when “superfluous man” acquired a whole new meaning in landowner circles. Yet it is clear from his treatment that Goncharov’s sympathies lie with the protagonist of his roman à thèse. Goncharov himself was something of an Oblomov. Not exactly a gentleman amateur — he was a bureaucrat in St Petersburg — he was nevertheless an unhurried writer. He left behind only three novels. Oblomov was workshopped in his head for some 13 years, before he rapidly wrote it up at a spa in Marienbad. Like his titular character, Goncharov never married the love of his life, shacking up instead with the widow of his manservant to whom he left his estate.

Oblomov was written in reaction to the sentiments of the age. In fiction, the desultory everyman had triumphed over the Romantic of old. Dostoevsky was all the rage. In politics, there was a growing sense that Tsarist Russia had been left behind. Some levelling up was needed, to which end the proles were expected to make some sacrifices. Hard work, patriotism and austerity were the insufferable watchwords of the day. Goncharov had had enough. Oblomov was his stab at ripping this consensus to shreds. If Russians could be infected with a heavy dose of Oblomovitis, and so made to prize poetry and disdain drudgery, then all the better.

The book was like a brick lobbed at the pensée unique. A small minority immediately panegyrised it as an instant classic. Tolstoy, for one, wrote that he was “in raptures over Oblomov”. The majority, though, felt otherwise. The same year it was published, the literary critic Nikolay Dobrolyubov turned its languorous hero into a term of abuse. His essay “What is Oblomovism?” concluded that was the ailment plaguing Russia’s ancien régime. It was this sense that Lenin inveighed against the Oblomovs of the Twenties, “always lolling on their beds”. The battle lines were drawn. The presiding conflict of rest of the century was the existential struggle between Oblomov and Stakhanov, that mirthless miner who set a world record for mining some 200 tonnes of coal in single shift, for which he became a Soviet celebrity, gracing the cover of Time magazine to boot.

These days, in Britain, our latest ruler has taken up the cudgels against Oblomovism. Indeed, Starmerism is really just Stakhanovism by another name. A rather plodding Stakhanovite himself, Sir Keir wrote a 12,000-word manifesto of sorts in 2021, a blueprint for his Labour, the gist of which was the need to “put hard-working families first”. Since then, along with his papa’s métier, it has become one of those characteristically vacuous utterances that he parrots ad nauseam. If Starmer ever gets around to putting up his own version of the EdStone, I wager that “hard work” would be right up there.

Starmer and Rachel Reeves present their war on the scrounging Oblomovism of the lumpenproletariat and lumpenpatriciate as Leftist common sense. In truth, it is anything but. It’s actually an aristocratic worldview masquerading as a proletarian one. It was always the upper classes who thought it absurd that the lower sort should have anything resembling free time, time, that is, to be up to no good. To them, the layabouts were loiterers and loafers to a man, given to boozing and wife-beating, ball games and Betfred. The great achievement of the Left, of trade unionism in particular, was to yank them away from the clutches of Dickensian miserabilism. That was the point of capping the workweek, abolishing child labour and legislating a minimum wage. Even in Stakhanov’s Soviet Union, one joined a trade union above all to enjoy its perks: spas, saunas and vacations in Black Sea dachas.

Pace Starmer, then, the Left is not in the business of ennobling work but enabling leisure. His rhetoric, in fact, mirrors that of the Right, recalling David Cameron’s obsession with “hardworking families”. Starmer would do better to take a page instead from John McDonnell, who, in the expectant days of Corbynism, received unlikely praise in The Spectator — from Oblomov’s heir and editor of The Idler, Tom Hodgkinson — for making the case for a 32-hour week, on the strength of the sensible proposition that we “work to live, not live to work”.

We can all be Oblomovs. At first blush, of course, Oblomovism appears to be the luxury that can be afforded only by the few, not the many. Oblomov was a rentier. So, too, was Seneca, that Oblomov avant la lettre, who preached the gospel of otium, a sense of leisure grounded on a commitment to the high literary life, even as he ran the Wonga of his day. Seneca was a loan shark, whose predatory ways prompted Boudica’s anti-capitalist revolt in 60 CE. But you don’t need pots of money to be a cut-price Oblomov. A great many Zoomers and Millennials have discovered a way of sustaining a sybaritic existence on the cheap: quiet quitting. This is not the same as quitting proper, which is to say withdrawing from the workforce. Rather, it is to treat one’s job as no more than a sinecure, doing no more than the bare minimum to hold on to one’s perch.

Quiet quitting created quite the stir during the pandemic, though it’s been around for a while. Across La Manche, in 2004, the economist Corinne Maier published what was effectively a call to arms for quiet quitters. In Bonjour paresse — the translated title, Hello Laziness, loses the pun — she calls time on corporate culture, its penchant for fancy dress, for ritualised hierarchy and dissembling jargon. “It’s in your best interest to work as little as possible,” she concludes, instead of chasing that “ever-elusive little bonus”. That’s what she does at EDF, the state electricity supplier that made her book a bestseller when it subjected her to a disciplinary hearing. She exhorts her readers to “follow my example, ye small-time yuppies and wage slaves, ye wretched of the service sector, brothers and sisters led by the nose by dreary, servile little bosses and forced to dress like puppets all week long and to waste time in useless meetings and bogus seminars.”

Many have followed in her Oblomovian footsteps since the pandemic hit, aided by the recognition that work has ceased to pay as it once did. Holding back on luxury purchases, one avocado at a time, does nothing to alter the fact that in London, where I live, homes are worth 12 times the average annual wage; half a century ago, it was only three times. If “work hard, play hard” was the credo of those who entered employment at the turn of the millennium, nowadays it is dolce far niente — the sweetness of doing nothing.

Not the quiet quitting types, many young refuseniks have quit rather loudly. The upshot was the Great Resignation of the pandemic, as some four million Americans and just as many Europeans cocked a snook at proper employment. Some sought refuge in suburban self-employment, others in premature retirement. They also did a great service to those in the workforce, as wages spiralled upward thanks to reduced labour supply. For the first time since the Seventies, capital suffered a stinging defeat at the hands of labour. The conceit of Ayn Rand’s reactionary novel Atlas Shrugged, in which the billionaires go on strike to prove their indispensability, was turned on its head.

As in the West, so in the East. In China, the Tang Ping — lying flat — movement caught on, as young men and women got off the hamster wheel. Its Oblomovian logic was spelt out by Luo Huazhong, a 26-year-old blogger: “I can live like Diogenes and sleep inside a wooden bucket, enjoying sunshine. I can live like Heraclitus in a cave. Lying down is my philosophical movement. Only through lying flat can humans become the measure of all things.” In a culture where 2,200 hours of work every year is the norm — as against 1,600 in Britain and under 1,400 in Germany — the attractions of lying flat are obvious. Accordingly, many have left the heaving metropolises of the coast for the Himalayan courtyard homes of Yunnan. The movement has driven Xi Jinping mad. His avuncular counsel to “eat bitterness” for the sake of the country’s future, of course, cuts no ice with the young.

Mechanisation and Artificial Intelligence have taken the wind out of the sails of Stakhanovism, Starmerism and Xi Jinping Thought. In the Thirties, Keynes predicted that 100 years on — today — people would have to work no more than 15 hours a week. That this hasn’t come to pass, the anthropologist David Graeber argued, is because we have created “bullshit jobs”. Encompassing HR and PR, not to mention some of the more recondite acronyms, we have a Red Army-sized militia of middle-management flunkies and box-tickers. Put in place a universal basic income and liberate the lot of them from their superfluous jobs. Make them happy superfluous men à la Oblomov.

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Pratinav Anil is the author of two bleak assessments of 20th-century Indian history. He teaches at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.

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