"Russian literary classics frequently describe dreamers or revolutionaries who disdain practical work. Very rarely do they offer sympathetic portraits of businessmen. The eponymous hero of Ivan Goncharov's brilliant comic novel Oblomov (1859) spends all his time daydreaming—it takes him over a hundred delightful pages to get out of bed—and could not be more unlike his practical boyhood friend Stolz, who succeeds in almost everything except changing Oblomov's ways. As his name indicates, Stolz is not ethnically Russian. Doing things, it seems, is German." Gary Saul Morson