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C H A P T e R F o U R “A Journey around the world by I. oblomov” Goncharov’s Unlikely eternal Russian Traveler Listening to my moaning and groaning, you will of course ask, why did I depart? […] Permit me this: Did I really depart? From where? From Petersburg? In this vein can’t you also ask why I departed from London the other day, from Moscow several years ago, and why I will depart from Portsmouth in two weeks, etc.? Really, am I not an eternal traveler, like anyone who has no family and no permanent corner of their own, no ‘domestic hearth’ as they used to say in old novels? Those who possess all of these things do not depart from them. But the rest of us live out our time continuously at way stations. That’s why I’ve only gone out (vyekhal), and haven’t really departed (uekhal). —Ivan Goncharov1 The lines above come from an early passage in Ivan Goncharov’s 1858 account of his travels around the world aboard the Russian ship the Frigate Pallas.2 The book of the same name describes his nearly three-year journey from 1852–1855 as official secretary on a Russian government-sponsored mission to Japan. The purpose of this expedition was to establish trade and diplomatic relations with Japan and to visit the Russian colonies on the west coast of America. Neither aim 114 A N A T I o N A s T R A Y was accomplished: the Americans preempted the Russians in their negotiations with the Japanese, and the outbreak of the Crimean war made travel across the Pacific to the United states impossible. The fact of the journey itself, however, was to prove to be of enormous literary significance for Goncharov (1812–1891), who referred to his travel text as a “rose among the thorns,” signifying that this was the only literary achievement about which he had positive feelings. Frigate Pallas is a complex work, part travelogue, and part extension of Goncharov’s novelistic ambitions. As we will see in this chapter, it is also one that engages deeply, if unexpectedly, with the question of Russian identity and the discourse of nomadic wandering, offering in the process a new dimension to the image of the Russian wanderer. The passage quoted above is important and worthy of a close look as it sets the stage for this chapter’s discussion. As it demonstrates, the narrator of Frigate Pallas defines himself as an “eternal traveler” for whom a round-the-world voyage is but the latest manifestation of an intrinsically itinerant life. such a definition is highly surprising for the author of Oblomov, who, like his famous character, was known for his reclusive and sedentary habits. The novel Oblomov features a protagonist who rarely leaves the house. Yet travel plays a central role in the context of Oblomov, one that will be explored here through the lens of Frigate Pallas, a text which in many ways overlaps with the more famous novel. The narrator of Frigate Pallas frequently dons the guise of an oblomov-like traveler; that is to say, he writes as a homebody abroad who experiences travel in part as an agony of separation from home and in part as an extension of an essential— and existential—homelessness. For Goncharov, the form of the travelogue offers a convenient medium in which to further develop the issues of domestic or internal displacement that also appear in Oblomov. Displacement is a literal fact for the traveling narrator in the passage above— his lack of a family and domestic hearth has engendered a vagabond life of itinerant stays at way stations, with no real attachment to family or place. The language of this passage strongly recalls the attributes that Chaadaev identified as specially characteristic of Russian life in his First Philosophical Letter (1829): “Look around you […]. No one has […] even any domestic hearth […]. In our houses we are as if billeted guests; in our families we possess the look of strangers; in our cities we resemble nomads […].”3 The narrator of Frigate Pallas describes his life in similarly metaphorically nomadic terms. As I will argue, the figure of a Russian “eternal traveler” plays a central role in Frigate Pallas, just as it does, paradoxically, in Oblomov. The fact that the narrator of Frigate Pallas frequently adopts the voice of oblomov suggests that Frigate Pallas should be read as a text not only with deep...

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