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Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov ( , ; "Goncharov". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. , ; – ) was a Russian novelist best known for his novels The Same Old Story (1847, also translated as A Common Story), Oblomov (1859), and The Precipice (1869, also translated as Malinovka Heights). He also served in many official capacities, including the position of Censorship.
Goncharov was born in Simbirsk into the family of a wealthy merchant; as a reward for his grandfather's military service, they were elevated to Russian nobility status.Oblomov, Penguin Classics, 2005. p. ix. He was educated at a boarding school, then the Moscow College of Commerce, and finally at Moscow State University. After graduating, he served for a short time in the office of the Governor of Simbirsk, before moving to Saint Petersburg where he worked as government translator and private tutor, while publishing poetry and fiction in private almanacs. Goncharov's first novel, The Same Old Story, was published in Sovremennik in 1847.
Goncharov's second and best-known novel, Oblomov, was published in 1859 in Otechestvennye zapiski. His third and final novel, The Precipice, was published in Vestnik Evropy in 1869. He also worked as a literary and theatre critic. Towards the end of his life Goncharov wrote a memoir called An Uncommon Story, in which he accused his literary rivals, first and foremost Ivan Turgenev, of having plagiarized his works and prevented him from achieving European fame. The memoir was published in 1924. Fyodor Dostoevsky, among others, considered Goncharov an author of high stature. Anton Chekhov is quoted as stating that Goncharov was "...ten heads above me in talent."
Tregubov, a man of liberal views and a secret Masonic lodge member, who knew some of the Decembrists personally, and who was one of the most popular men amongst the Simbirsk intelligentsia, was a major early influence upon Goncharov, who particularly enjoyed his seafaring stories. With Tregubov around, Goncharov's mother could focus on domestic affairs. "His servants, cabmen, the whole household merged with ours; it was a single family. All the practical issues were now mother's, and she proved to be an excellent housewife; all the official duties were his," Ivan Goncharov remembered.
At the University, with its atmosphere of intellectual freedom and lively debate, Goncharov's spirit thrived. One episode proved to be especially memorable: when his then-idol Alexander Pushkin arrived as a guest lecturer to have a public debate with professor Mikhail T. Katchenovsky on the authenticity of The Tale of Igor's Campaign. "It was as if sunlight lit up the auditorium. I was enchanted by his poetry at the time...it was his genius that formed my aesthetic ideas – although the same, I think, could be said of all the young people of the time who were interested in poetry", Goncharov wrote.Goncharov, I.A. The Works of... Moscow, 1980. Vol. 7. pg. 241). Unlike Alexander Herzen, Vissarion Belinsky or Nikolay Ogaryov, his fellow Moscow University students, Goncharov remained indifferent to the ideas of political and social change that were gaining popularity at the time. Reading and translating were his main occupations. In 1832, the Telescope magazine published two chapters of Eugène Sue's novel Atar-Gull (1831), translated by Goncharov. This was his debut publication.
In 1834, Goncharov graduated from the University and returned home to enter the chancellery of Simbirsk governor A. M. Zagryazhsky. A year later, he moved to Saint Petersburg and started working as a translator at the Finance Ministry's Foreign commerce department. Here, in the Russian capital, he became friends with the Maykov family and tutored both Apollon Maykov and Valerian Maykov in the Latin language and in Russian literature. He became a member of the elitist literary circle based in the Maykovs' house and attended by writers like Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Dmitry Grigorovich. The Maykovs' almanac Snowdrop featured many of Goncharov's poems, but he soon stopped dabbling in poetry altogether. Some of those early verses were later incorporated into the novel The Same Old Story as Aduev's writings, a sure sign that the author had stopped taking them seriously.
In 1849 Sovremennik published Oblomov's Dream, an extract from Goncharov's future second novel Oblomov (known under the working title The Artist at the time), which worked well on its own as a short story. Again it was lauded by the Sovremennik staff. Slavophiles, while giving the author credit for being a fine stylist, reviled the irony aimed at patriarchal Russian ways. Moskvityanin. 1849. No.11. Vol.1. Section 4. The novel itself, though, appeared only ten years later, preceded by some extraordinary events in Goncharov's life.
In 1852 Goncharov embarked on a long journey through England, Africa, Japan, and back to Russia, on board the frigate Pallada, as a secretary for Admiral Yevfimy Putyatin, whose mission was to inspect Alaska and other distant outposts of the Empire, and also to establish trade relations with Japan. The log-book which it was Goncharov's duty to keep served as a basis for his future book. He returned to Saint Petersburg on 25 February 1855, after traveling through Siberia and the Urals, this continental leg of the journey lasting six months. Goncharov's travelogue, Frigate "Pallada" ("Pallada" is the Russian spelling of ""), began to appear, first in Otechestvennye Zapiski (April 1855), then in The Sea Anthology and other magazines.
In 1858, Frigate "Pallada" was published as a separate book; it received favourable reviews and became very popular. For the mid-19th-century Russian readership, the book came as a revelation, providing new insights into the world, hitherto unknown. Goncharov, a well-read man and a specialist in the history and economics of the countries he visited, proved to be a competent and insightful writer. He warned against seeing his work as any kind of political or social statement, insisting it was a subjective piece of writing, but critics praised the book as a well-balanced, unbiased report, containing valuable ethnographic material, but also some social critique. Again, the anti-romantic tendency prevailed: it was seen as part of the polemic with those Russian authors who tended to romanticize the "pure and unspoiled" life of the uncivilized world. According to Nikolay Dobrolyubov, The Frigate Pallada "bore the hallmark of a gifted epic novelist."
In the summer of 1857, Goncharov went to Marienbad for medical treatment. There he wrote Oblomov, almost in its entirety. "It might seem strange, even impossible that in the course of one month the whole of the novel might be written... But it'd been growing in me for several years, so what I had to do then was just sit and write everything down," he later remembered. Goncharov's second novel Oblomov was published in 1859 in Otechestvennye Zapiski. It had evolved from the earlier "Oblomov's Dream", which was later incorporated into the finished novel as Chapter 9. The novel caused much discussion in the Russian press, introduced another new term, oblomovshchina, to the literary lexicon and is regarded as a Russian classic.
In his essay What Is Oblomovshchina? Nikolay Dobrolyubov provided an ideological background for the type of Russia's 'new man' exposed by Goncharov. The critic argued that, while several famous classic Russian literary characters – Yevgeny Onegin, Pechorin, and Rudin – bore symptoms of the 'Oblomov malaise', for the first time one single feature, that of social apathy, a self-destructive kind of laziness and unwillingness to even try and lift the burden of all-pervading inertia, had been brought to the fore and subjected to a thorough analysis.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, among others, considered Goncharov a noteworthy author of high stature. Anton Chekhov is quoted as stating that Goncharov was "...ten heads above me in talent."Gayla Diment's introduction to Stephen Pearl's translation of Oblomov. New York: Bunim & Brown, 2006) Ivan Turgenev, who fell out with Goncharov after the latter accused him of plagiarism (specifically of having used some of the characters and situations from The Precipice, whose plan Goncharov had disclosed to him in 1855, in Home of the Gentry and On the Eve), nevertheless declared: "As long as there is even one Russian alive, Oblomov will be remembered!"Quoted in N. F. Budanova's "The confessions of Goncharov. The Unfinished Story. Literaturnoe Nasledstvo, 102 (2000), p. 202.
In this second term Goncharov proved to be a harsh censor: he created serious problems for Nekrasov's Sovremennik and Russkoye Slovo, where Dmitry Pisarev was now a leading figure. Openly condemning 'nihilistic' tendencies and what he called "pathetic, imported doctrines of materialism, socialism, and communism", Goncharov found himself the target of heavy criticism. In 1863 he became a member of the State Publishing Council and two years later joined the Russian government's Department of Publishing. All the while he was working on his third novel, The Precipice, which came out in extracts: Sophia Nikolayevna Belovodova (a piece he himself was later skeptical about), Grandmother and Portrait.
In 1867, Goncharov retired from his censorial position to devote himself entirely to writing The Precipice, a book he later called "my heart's child", which took him twenty years to finish. Towards the end of this tormenting process Goncharov spoke of the novel as a "burden" and an "insurmountable task" that blocked his development and made him unable to advance as a writer. In a letter to Turgenev he confessed that, after finishing Part Three, he had toyed with the idea of abandoning the whole project.
In 1869, The Precipice, a story of the romantic rivalry among three men, condemning nihilism as subverting the religious and moral values of Russia, was published in Vestnik Evropy. Later critics came to see it as the final part of a trilogy, each part introducing a character typical of Russian high society of a certain period: first Aduev, then Oblomov, and finally Raisky, a gifted man, his artistic development halted by "lack of direction". According to scholar S. Mashinsky, as a social epic, The Precipice was superior to both The Same Old Story and Oblomov.
The novel had considerable success, but the leftist press turned against its author. Saltykov-Shchedrin in Otechestvennye Zapiski ("The Street Philosophy", 1869), compared it unfavorably to Oblomov. While the latter "had been driven by ideas assimilated by its author from the best men of the 1840s", The Precipice featured "a bunch of people wandering to and fro without any sense of direction, their lines of action having neither beginning nor end," according to the critic. Yevgeny Utin in Vestnik Evropy argued that Goncharov, like all writers of his generation, had lost touch with the new Russia.Utin, Ye.I. Literature Debates of Our Times. Vestnik Evropy. 1869, No. 11. The controversial character Mark Volokhov, as leftist critics saw it, had been concocted to condemn 'nihilism' again, thus making the whole novel 'tendentious'. Yet, as Vladimir Korolenko later wrote, "Volokhov and all things related to him will be forgotten, as Gogol's Correspondence has been forgotten, while Goncharov's huge characters will remain in history, towering over all of those spiteful disputes of old."
Towards the end of his life Goncharov wrote an unusual memoir called An Uncommon Story, in which he accused his literary rivals, first and foremost Ivan Turgenev, of having plagiarized his works and prevented him from achieving European fame. Some critics claimed that the book was the product of an unstable mind, while others praised it as an eye-opening, if controversial piece of writing. It was not published until 1924.D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature (New York: Vintage, 1958)
Goncharov, who never married, spent his last days absorbed in lonely and bitter recriminations because of the negative criticism some of his work had received. He died in Saint Petersburg on 27 September 1891, of pneumonia. He was buried at the Novoye Nikolskoe Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. In 1956 his ashes were moved to the Volkovo Cemetery in Leningrad.
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