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" 'Oblomovitis!' he whispered." The curse of Oblomovitis or Oblomo-vism dogs Ilya implacably down the stairwell of personal decay, until one night he exits from life as he entered the novel, in bed.
Pre-Freudian Insights. Oblomov has been much praised as social prophecy, with Oblomovism interpreted as the stifling dead calm of inertia in the eye of the hurricane which history calls the Russian Revolution. To the 20th century reader, Oblomov is even more remarkable for its pre-Freudian insights. Analysts' couches today sag with the victims of mental illness, psychological blocks, self-hatred, death wishes, or just plain immaturity—in a word. Oblomovism.
As for Ivan Goncharov, he was not immune to the curse he described in his hero. Though he lived to be 79 and died in 1891, he wrote only one minor novel after Oblomov. Obsessed with the idea that Turgenev had robbed him of his just fame, Goncharov took to accusing him of plagiarizing his plots, and spotting the novelist once in a St. Petersburg park, yelled: "Thief! Thief!" A stroke left Author Goncharov half-blind and he died half-mad, no stranger to Oblomovism.