The title of the film adaptation – A Few Days from the Life of I. I. Oblomov (Neskol’ko dnei iz zhizni I. I. Oblomova, 1980) – suggests a selective approach to the text of one of the most famous Russian novels, Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov. Choices in selection are an integral part of the process of adaptation which, in this case, I argue, were motivated by dominant socio-political trends in the late 1970s. The film was directed by a celebrated Russian director of our times, Nikita Mikhalkov, and while it gained a number of international awards, it was received with a certain caution in the ideological atmosphere of its release in 1980. The history of its release first in Berlin and then in the Soviet Union reflects tensions around the subject matter of the novel and the film – a politicised trope of Oblomov and oblomovshchina in Russia and the Soviet Union. A film adaptation of this particular novel presents a case of interpretation of the text that exemplifies diverse evaluations of the text’s messages. The history of the reception of the novel is an exemplary case of adaption, manipulation, and dialogue by the hesitant writer himself, critics belonging to various political affiliations and, as this chapter shows, the film director. These interpretations often form a dialogue with this novel’s two main characters who, in turn, were originally conceived by Goncharov as embodiments of a dialogic relationship vis-à-vis each other.

THE OBLOMOV–STOLZ DICHOTOMY AS A SOCIO-POLITICAL COMPASS OF THE AGE

Since the time of its publication in 1859, the novel has attracted controversial evaluations of its two main protagonists, the lazy and inert Oblomov and active half-Russian half-German Stolz. The word oblomovshchina is Goncharov’s own invention, and in the novel he makes Stolz coin the word to characterise the lifestyle led by Oblomov. The word became a Russian neologism and entered the vocabulary with astonishing speed. The second edition of Vladimir Dal′’s Dictionary of the Russian Language (1881) already gives a definition of the word.