| Ivan Goncharov | |
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Portrait of Ivan Goncharov by Ivan Kramskoi |
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| Born | Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov 18 June 1812 Simbirsk, Russia |
| Died | 27 September 1891 (aged 79) Saint Petersburg, Russia |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Nationality | Russian |
| Period | 1847–1871 |
| Notable work(s) | Oblomov (1859) |
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Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov (Russian: Ива́н Алекса́ндрович Гончаро́в, Ivan Aleksandrovič Gončarov; 18 June [O.S. 6 June] 1812 – 27 September [O.S. 15 September] 1891) was a Russian novelist best known as the author of Oblomov (1859).
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Ivan Goncharov was born in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk); his father was a wealthy grain merchant and respected official who was elected mayor of Simbirsk several times.[1] The Goncharovs' big stone manor in the town center occupied a vast territory and had all the characteristics of a rural manor, with huge barns (packed with wheat and flour) and numerous stables.[2] His father, Aleksander Ivanovich Goncharov, died when the boy was seven years old. First his mother Avdotya Matveevna, then his godfather Nikolay Nikolayevich Tregubov, a nobleman and a former Navy officer, took it upon themselves to give a boy a good education.[1] Tregubov, described as man of liberal views and member of the secret masonic lodge,[2] who knew personally some of the Decemberists, and who was one of the most popular men amongst Simbirsk intelligentsia, was later cited as the major early influence on Goncharov, especially with his sea travel stories.[3] With Tregubov around, Goncharova could engage herself in domestic affairs. "His servants, cabmen, the whole household merged in with ours, and we formed a common family. All the practical issues now were mother's, and she proved to be an excellent housewife. All the intellectual duties were his," Ivan Goncharov remembered.[2]
Goncharov spent the years 1820 to 1822 at a private boarding-school owned by Rev. Fyodor S. Troitsky. It was here that he learned French and German languages and started reading European writers' original texts that he borrowed from the Troitsky's vast library.[1] Yet Goncharova wanted her both sons to follow their late father's steps, and in August 1822 he was sent to Moscow to join a college of commerce. There he spent eight unhappy years, detesting the dismal quality of education and nonsensically severe discipline, taking solace in self-education. "My first humanitarian and moral tutor was Karamzin," he remembered. Then Pushkin came as a revelation, with Evgeny Onegin being published as a series, capturing young man's imagination.[2] In 1830, Goncharov decided to quit the college and in 1831 (missing one year because of a cholera outbreak in Moscow) he enrolled in the Moscow University's philological faculty, where he took a special interest in literature, arts, and architecture.[3]
In 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 Aleksander Pushkin arrived as a guest lecturer to have a public discussion with professor M. T. Katchenovsky on the issue of Slovo o polku Igoreve’s authenticity. "It was as if sunlight lit up the auditorium. I was enchanted by his poetry at the time, for me it was like mother's milk, his verses were making me tremble with delight. It was his genius that formed my aesthetic background - although the same, I think, could be said of all the young people of the time who were interested in poetry", Goncharov wrote.[4] Yet, unlike Hertzen, Belinsky, or Ogaryov, his fellow Moscow University students of the time, 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 Moscow University and returned home to enter Simbirsk governor A. M. Zagryazhsky's chancellery. A year later, he moved to Saint Petersburg where he became a translator at the Finance Ministry's Foreign commerce department. Here in the Russian capital, he became friends with the Maykov family (he was young Apollon and Valerian's tutor for a while, teaching the boys Latin and Russian literature)[2] and joined the elitist literary circle based in their house and attended by people like Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Dmitry Grigorovich. Maykovs' home-made Snowdrop almanac featured many of young Goncharov's poems.[3] Soon he stopped dabbling in poetry altogether; some of those early verses were later incorporated into A Common Story novel as Aduev's writings, a sure sign their author stopped treating them seriously.[2]
It was in one of Maykovs' Snowdrop compilations that Goncharov's first piece of prose appeared, a satirical novelet called Evil Illness (1838), ridiculing romantic sentimentalism and 'void fantasizing'. Another mini-novel, A Fortunate Blunder, a "high-society drama" in the tradition set by Marlinsky, Vladimir Odoevsky and Vladimir Sollogub,[2] although tinged with comedy, was published by Moonlit Nights almanac in 1839.[3] In 1842 Goncharov wrote and essay called Ivan Savvich Podzhabrin, a naturalist psychological sketch. Published in Sovremennik only six years later, it failed to make an impact, being very much a period piece, but later scholars reviewed it positively, as something in the vein of a Gogol-inspired genre known as "physiological essay", marked with fine style and precision in depicting life of a common man in the city.[3] It transpired later that in the early 1840s Goncharov was working on a novel called The Old People; manuscripts of it have been lost.[2]
In 1847, Goncharov's first novel, A Common Story, was published in Sovremennik (March and April issues); it dealt with the conflicts between the excessive Romanticism of a young Russian nobleman, freshly arrived in Saint Petersburg from the provinces, and the emerging commercial class of the Imperial capital with its sober pragmatism. The novel polarized the critics and made its author famous. A Common Story turned out to be a direct response to Vissarion Belinsky's call for exposing a new 'curiosity type', that of a complacent romantic, common at the time; it was Belinsky who praised the novel as one of the best books of the year.[2] The novelty term aduyevschina (after the last name of Aduyev, its main character) became popular with reviewers who saw it as synonymous with a penchant to vain romantic aspirations. Leo Tolstoy, who liked the novel too, though, used the word to describe social egotism and certain type of person's inability to see beyond their immediate interests.[3]
In 1849 Sovremennik published Oblomov's Dream, a would-be extract from Goncharov's second novel (known under the working title The Artist at the time), which worked well on its own, as a fine short story. Again, Sovremennik stuff lauded it. Slavophiles, while giving the author credit for being fine stylist, reviled the irony aimed at the patriarchal Russian ways.[5] The novel itself, though, appeared only ten years later, preceded by some extraordinary events in Goncharov's life.[3]
In 1852 Goncharov embarked upon a round the world tour through England, Africa, Japan, and back to Russia, on board frigate Pallada, as the secretary of Admiral Yevfimy Putyatin, whose mission was to inspect Alaska and other Empire's outer reaches, and also to establish trade relations with Japan. The log-book Goncharov's duty it was to keep served as a basis for his future book. Only on February 25, 1855, by land (through Siberia and Ural; this leg of the journed lasted six months) he returned to Saint Petersburg. His travelogue, a chronicle of the trip, The Frigate Pallada (The Frigate Pallas; "Pallada" is the Russian spelling of "Pallas"), started to appear first in Otechestvennye zapiski (April, 1855), then in The Sea Anthology and other magazines.[2]
The Frigate Pallada was published as a separate edition in 1858, garnered good reviews and became very popular. For a common Russian readers of the mid-XIX century the book came as a revelation, giving new insight into the world, hitherto unknown. Goncharov, a well-read man, who studied special literature on history and economics, proved to be competent and insightful writer.[2] Goncharov warned against treating his work as some kind of political or social statement, insisting it was a subjective piece of writing, but critics praised it as a well-balanced, unbiased report, containing valuable ethnographical material, but with it, some social critique, too. Again, anti-romantic tendency here prevailed: it looked very much as polemic with those Russian authors who tended to romanticize "pure and unspoiled" life of uncivilized world. Nikolay Dobrolyubov, whose review was among the most favourable, argued that Frigate Pallada was "bearing the hallmark of an epic novelist' gift".[3]
Throughout the 1850s Goncharov was working on his second novel, but the process was slow for many reasons. In 1855 he took the post of a censor in the Saint Petersburg censorship committee. In this capacity he's done a lot of good: helped publish important works by Ivan Turgenev, Nikolay Nekrasov, Aleksey Pisemsky and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which caused resentment by some of his bosses. According to Pisemsky, for giving a permission for his A Thousand Souls novel to be published, Goncharov has been officially reprimanded. Despite of all this, Goncharov has found himself a target of many satires and got a negative mention in Hertzen's Kolokol. "One of the best Russian author shouldn’t have taken upon himself this sort of a job", critic Aleksander Druzhinin wrote in his diary.[2] In 1856, as the official line in the publishing policy hardened, Goncharov quit the job.[3]
In the summer of 1857 Goncharov went to Marienbad to take some medical courses. There he wrote the novel, 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’s been growing me for several years, so what I had to do now was just sit and write everything down", he wrote.[2] Goncharov's second novel Oblomov was published in 1859 in Otechestvennye zapiski. It has evolved from "Oblomov's Dream. An Episode from an Unfinished Novel" ("Son Oblomova"), a short story, published earlier in Sovremennik (No. 4, 1849) which was later incorporated into the finished novel as "Oblomov's Dream" ("Son Oblomova"), Chapter 9. The novel caused much discussion in the Russian press, introduced another new term, oblomovschina, to the literary lexicon and in retrospect is regarded as a Russian classic.[3] In his essay What Is Oblomovschina? critic Nikolay Dobrolyubov provided an ideological background for the type of Russia's 'new man' Goncharov exposed. The critic argued that, while several famous classic Russian literary characters - Onegin, Pechorin, and Rudin - bore symptoms of the 'Oblomov malaise', for the first time ever one single feature, that of social apathy, self-destructive kind of laziness and total unwillingness to even try and lift the burden of all-pervading, killing dourness, had been brought to the fore and subjected to such a thorough analysis.[2]
The main character, Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, was compared to Shakespeare's Hamlet who answers "No!" to the question "To be or not to be?". 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."[6] 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 just one Russian alive, Oblomov will be remembered!"[7]
Being a moderate conservative[8] at heart, Goncharov greeted the 1861 reforms, embraced the well-publicized the idea that "the government itself has come now to lead the progress", and found himself in opposition to the revolutionary democrats' camp. In the summer of 1862 he became an editor of Severnaya potchta, an Interior ministry's official newaspaper. A year later he returned to the censorship committee. Second time round, Goncharov proved to be a harsh censor: he's brought serious trouble upon Nekrasov's Sovremennik and Russkoye slovo, where Dmitry Pisarev was becoming now a leading figure. Condemning openly both 'nihilistic' tendencies and what he called "pathetic, imported doctrines of materialism, socialism and communism", Goncharov has found himself under heavy criticism from democratic headquarters.[2] 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; again it was previewed by extracts: Sophia Nikolayevna Belovodova (which he himself later subjected to heavy criticism), Grandmother and Portrait.[3]
In 1867, Goncharov retired from his post as a government censor and devoted all of his time to working on his third novel. The Precipice, a book he once called "my heart's child", took him twenty years to finish. Towards the end of this tormenting process Goncharov was despairing of ever finishing it, speaking of the novel as a "burden", and "insurmountable task" that totally blocked his development and made him unable to move any further as a writer. In a letter to Turgenev he confessed that, having finished part 3, entertained the idea of abandoning the whole thing altogether.[2]
In 1869 The Precipice was published in Vestnik Evropy (##1-5),[3] the story of a romantic rivalry among three men, which provided a condemnation of nihilism in defence of the religious and moral values of old Russia. Later critics came to see it as final part of the trilogy, each book introducing a character typical to a Russian high society of a certain decade: first Aduev, then Oblomov and finally Raisky, a gifted man, aborted in his artistic development by the "lack of direction". According to scholar S.Mashinsky, as a social epic, The Precipice was superior to both A Common Story and Oblomov.[2]
The novel was highly successful, but this time the left press turned against its author. Saltykov-Schedrin in Otechestvennye zapiski (The Street Philosophy, #6, 1869), compared it unfavourably to Oblomov. While the latter "had been driven by ideas that's been prompted to it's auther by the best men of 1840s", The Precipice featured "just a bunch of people wandering to and fro without any sense of direction, their lines of actions having neither beginning nor end", according to the critic.[3] Yevgeny Utin in Vestnik Evropy argued that Goncharov, like all writers of his generation, has lost touch with the new Russia and its people.[9] Much controversy has been caused by the Mark Vookhov character which, as the leftist critics argued, had been brought out in order to condemn 'nihilism' once again and, therefore, had made the whole novel 'tendentious'. Yet, as Vladimir Korolenko wrote later, "Volokhov and all things related to him will be forgotten, as Gogol’s Correspondence has been forgotten now, while huge <Goncharov's> characters will remain in history, towering over all of those spiteful disputes of old".[2]
Goncharov was planning to write a fourth novel, set in the 1870s, but it never materialized. Instead he became a prolific critic himself, writing theater, literature reviews, his Myriad of Agonies (1871) still regarded as one of the best essays on Griboyedov's Woe from Wit.[3] Goncharov also wrote short stories: his Servants of an Old Age cycle dealt with life in rural Russia; akin to it were his short storis of the time ("Irony of Fate", Ukha" and others). In 1880 the first edition of Complete Goncharov was published. Years later, after the writer's death, it transpired that he's burnt many of his latter years manuscripts.[3]
Towards the end of his life Goncharov wrote memoirs entitled An Uncommon Story, in which he accused his literary rivals, above all Turgenev, of having plagiarized his works and prevented him from achieving European fame. The document which some saw the product of an unstable and unhappy mind,[10] some regarded as an exceptionally valuable, albeit controversial piece of writing,[11] was not published until 1924.[12]
Goncharov, who's never married, spent the rest of his days absorbed in lonely and bitter recriminations because of the negative criticism some of his work received. He died in loneliness, in St. Petersburg on September 24, 1891, of pneumonia. He was buried at the Novoe Nikolskoye cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. In 1956 his ashes were moved to the Volkovo Cemetery in Leningrad.
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