with
him. When he was at home--and he was almost always at home--he
invariably lay in bed and invariably in the room where we have just
found him: a room which served him for sleeping-room, library, and
parlor. He had three other rooms, but he rarely glanced into them; in
the morning, perhaps, but even then not every day, but only when his man
came to sweep the rooms--and this, you may be sure, was not done every
day. In these rooms the furniture was protected with covers; the
curtains were always drawn.

The room in which Oblomof was lying appeared at first glance to be
handsomely furnished, There were a mahogany bureau, two sofas
upholstered in silk, handsome screens embroidered with birds and fruits
belonging to an imaginary nature. There were damask curtains, rugs, a
number of paintings, bronzes, porcelains, and a quantity of beautiful
bric-a-brac. But the experienced eye of a man of pure taste would have
discovered at a single hasty glance that everything there betrayed
merely the desire to keep up appearances in unimportant details, while
really avoiding the burden. That had indeed been Oblomof's object when
he furnished his room. Refined taste would not have been satisfied with
those heavy ungraceful mahogany chairs, with those conventional
etageres. The back of one sofa was dislocated; the veneering was broken
off in places. The same characteristics were discoverable in the
pictures and the vases, and all the ornaments.

The proprietor himself, however, looked with such coolness and
indifference on the decoration of his apartment that one might think he
asked with his eyes, "Who brought you here and set you up?" As the
result of such an indifferent manner of regarding his possessions, and
perhaps of the still more indifferent attitude of Oblomof's servant
Zakhar, the appearance of the room, if it were examined rather more
critically, was amazing because of the neglect and carelessness which
held sway there. On the walls, around the pictures, spiders' webs,
loaded with dust, hung like festoons; the mirrors, instead of reflecting
objects, would have served better as tablets for scribbling memoranda in
the dust that covered them. The rugs were rags. On the sofa lay a
forgotten towel; on the table you would generally find in the morning a
plate or two with the remains of the evening meal, the salt-cellar,
gnawed bones, and crusts of bread. Were it not for these plates, and the
pipe half smoked out and flung down o