Oblomovka as Anti-Ithaca: the Odyssey archetype in I.A. Goncharov''s works
The paper focuses on the understudied Homeric projections in Oblomov and early works by I.A. Goncharov. The writer begins with the "ordinary" plots of everyday Russian life to raise the problems of upbringing, education and life position. Before "Oblomov's Dream" Russian literature had no other work that would provide such a subtle and unassuming analysis of a personality "formation", which leads to a person's life collapse. According to Goncharov, the evil of improper upbringing lies in having no upringing, which was so commonplace, habitual and almost banal in Russia. In this paper, Homer's projections are analysed against the background of the Russian reception of Oddisey and its translation by V.A. Zhukovsky, as well as the tradition of the education novel. Goncharov published his "Oblomov's Dream" in 1849, when the long-awaited Zhukovsky's trasnslation of Odyssey came out to become the literary culmination of the year. Zhukovsky saw Homer's poem as a prototype of the Bildungsroman that could become a model for the corresponding Russian genre. Homer's epic offered simple, yet great examples of deeds transmitting indisputable truths and behaviour patterns, applicable to any person's personal life position. The educational ideology faced incomparably greater difficulties on its way through the colossal space of provincial Russia than in European states with their developed urban culture. "Oblomov's Dream" as well as Belinsky's articles and works of other Russian Westernizers convey the idea that in Russia the maxim "education is light, ignorance is darkness" was often a theoretical postulate rather than a guide to action. Like Ilya Ilyich, Oblomovka's residents consider school education and their obligation to teach peasants as a threat, while perceiving their own labour as punishment. As a result, Bildungsroman as a genre almost failed to become popular in Russia. Instead of the starry-eyed idealism and ideals of kalokagaty a la Winckelmann or Wieland, Russian novels are full of delusion and loss, motifs of resignation and renunciation, and plots telling about decay and destruction up to complete decline and degeneration. Goncharov emphasized the antique opposition between an active, educated, independent individual and a passive person, indifferent to knowledge and freedom. The archetype of a rational and vigorous last-ditcher epitomised by Odyssey became a guideline for the images of travelers, cosmopolitans and reformers, like Stolz in Oblomov and characters in Frigate "Pallada". Opposed to them are Oblomov and Oblomovka, stagnating, degrading and slipping into poverty. This is the world where Odyssey's motifs turn over to reveal the anti-ideality of Oblomov's way of life.