"In this first translation taken from the definitive L. S. Geiro edition, translator Marian Schwartz captures the wry humor and all-embracing humanity of Ivan Goncharov's classic nineteenth-century satire of quiet resistance to bourgeois life. Ilya Ilich Oblomov is a young, serf-owning nobleman largely incapable of overcoming his apathy. "Forced to choose between an unworthy life and sleeping," writes Mikhail Shishkin in the afterword "Oblomov chooses sleep. Suicide by sofa."" "In 1987, L. S. Geiro brought the Russian literary world's attention to the lesser-known 1862 edition of Oblomov, which Goncharov began compiling a year and a half after the book's first publication in 1859. Goncharov had removed various emphatic phrases, made significant editorial cuts, eliminated overwritten dialogue, and rendered his character descriptions, in Geiro's words, more 'laconic."" "This English edition of Oblomov offers a gastronomical glossary, a publisher's note, and a new afterword by Smirnoff-Booker Prize winner Mikhail Shishkin."--BOOK JACKET.

The Russian novelist IVAN GONCHAROV (1812–1891) was born in Simbirsk, Russia. He served for thirty years as a minor government official and traveled widely. His short stories, critiques, essays, and memoirs were published posthumously in 1919. Oblomov was his most popular and critically acclaimed novel during his lifetime.
MARIAN SCHWARTZ has translated Russian literature for over thirty years. She has published over two dozen book-length translations, along with twenty issues of Russian Studies in Literature. She is the principal English translator of the works of Nina Berberova and is a past president of the American Literary Translators Association.