Decidedly, Oblómoffdom is not a racial disease. It exists on both continents and in all latitudes. And besides the Oblómoffdom which Goncharóff has so well depicted, and which even Olga was powerless to break through, there is the squire’s Oblómoffdom, the red-tape Oblómoffdom of the Government offices, the scientist’s Oblómoffdom and, above all, the family-life Oblómoffdom, to which all of us readily pay so large a tribute. THE PRECIPICE The last and longest novel of Goncharóff, _The Precipice_, has not the unity of conception and workmanship which characterise _Oblómoff_. It contains wonderful pages, worthy of a writer of genius; but, all said, it is a failure. It took Goncharóff full ten years to write it, and having begun to depict in it types of one generation, he remodelled later on these types into types from the next generation--at a time when the sons differed totally from their fathers: he has told this himself in a very interesting critical sketch of his own work. As a result there is no wholeness, so to speak, in the main personages of the novel. The woman upon whom he has bestowed all his admiration, Vyéra, and whom he tries to represent as most sympathetic, is certainly interesting, but not sympathetic at all. One would say that Goncharóff’s mind was haunted by two women of two totally different types when he pictured his Vyéra--the one whom he tried--and failed--to picture in Sophie Byelovódova, and the other--the coming woman of the sixties, of whom he saw some features, and whom he admired, without fully understanding her. Vyéra’s cruelty towards her grandmother, and towards Ráisky, the hero, render her most unsympathetic, although you feel that the author quite adores her. As to the Nihilist, Vólokhoff, he is simply a caricature--taken perhaps from real life,--even seemingly from among the author’s personal acquaintances,--but obviously drawn with the desire of ventilating personal feelings of dislike. One feels a personal drama concealed behind the pages of the novel. Goncharóff’s first sketch of Vólokhoff was, as he wrote himself, some sort of Bohemian Radical of the forties who had retained in full the Don Juanesque features of the “Byronists” of the preceding generation. Gradually, however, Goncharóff, who had not yet finished his novel by the end of the fifties, transformed the figure into a Nihilist of the sixties--a revolutionist--and the result is that one has the sensation of the double origin of Vólokhoff, as one feels the double origin of Vyéra.