Nikita Mikhalkov gained international recognition in the mid-seventies with Slave of Love and Unfinished Piece for Player Piano; the brother of another Soviet director, Andron Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, Nikita Mikhalkov is also a well known actor. Both Oblomov and Five Evenings are actors' films. Oblomov, based on the nineteenth century comic novel by Ivan Goncharov, features the talented actor Oleg Tabakov--whose gifts include a marvellously pliable face--as Goncharov's hero, Oblomov. For him, the word inertia was invented; a dreamer forever wrapped in his cozy nightshirt, he is the essence of sloth--and of the Russian upper classes. The first part of Oblomov is devoted to the struggle within our hero between the urge to get off his comfortable divan, and the urge to retreat from the hollowness of the present into the sweetness of the pastoral past. When Oblomov is routed from his reveries by his energetic friend Stolz, he discovers something interesting in the outside world: Woman, in the form of Stolz's girlfriend Olga (Elena Solovei). Critics have noted that Mikhalkov successfully translates Goncharov's sardonic perception of his hero, but omits the picture of Petersburg society, replete with memorable minor characters, that constitutes a large part of the novel's political satire.