Author · 1 works
Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov was born in 1812 in Simbirsk, on the Volga, into a well-off merchant family. He lost his father at the age of seven. His upbringing was shaped by his mother, Avdotya, and by his godfather Nikolai Tregubov, a retired naval officer, from whom he inherited both a fascination with the sea and a large library. After eight loathed years at the Moscow School of Commerce, he entered the philology faculty of Moscow University in 1831.
On graduating he entered the civil service, working in St Petersburg as a translator at the Ministry of Finance. In those same years he joined the literary circle that met at the Maykov house; his first poems and stories appeared in its journals. A Common Story, published in 1847, made his name; Belinsky counted it among the best books of the year.
In 1852 he sailed aboard the frigate Pallada as secretary to Admiral Putyatin, saw England, Africa and Japan, and returned overland through Siberia. The voyage produced the book The Frigate Pallada. Back home he served on the censorship committee. In the summer of 1857, at Marienbad, he set down in a single month the Oblomov he had carried in him for years; the novel appeared in 1859 and gave Russian the word oblomovshchina. The Precipice, twenty years in the making, followed in 1869.
He was a slow narrator, patient with detail, drawn less to events than to the way a man decays from within and habit eats away at the will. His last years were solitary and embittered: he accused Turgenev of stealing his subjects and burned most of his late manuscripts. He never married. He died of pneumonia in St Petersburg in 1891.
Goncharov wrote as Russian literature was turning towards realism. The natural school formed around Belinsky put the lives of ordinary people where the romantic hero had stood. The debate that led to the abolition of serfdom in 1861, the quarrel between Westernizers and Slavophiles, and the rift between the radical young of the 1860s and the old gentry gave his novels their ground. The thick journals shaped both readers and arguments, and criticism such as Dobrolyubov's "What Is Oblomovshchina?" turned a novel into a political statement.
