Oblomov

OBLOMOV

IVAN ALEKSANDROVICH GONCHAROV (1812–91) was the son of a rich merchant family. He attended Moscow University for three years, graduating in 1834, and spent most of his life as a civil servant, eventually becoming a censor. Besides publishing three novels, Obyknovennaya istoriya (1847; tr. C. Garnett, A Common Story, 1917), Oblomov (1859; tr. D. Magarshack, 1954), and Obryv (1869; tr. anon., The Precipice, 1915), the main event in his otherwise monotonous life was a voyage to Japan (1852–5) as secretary to a Russian mission, described in Fregat Pallada (1858). Both in himself and in his environment, he saw the clash between dreamy traditionalism (which could be well-meaning and imaginative) and vigorous practicality (which could be prosaically limited). This conflict is worked out in A Common Story with ingenious artificiality and in The Precipice with uneven diffuseness; but in Oblomov it is the foundation of one of the most profound Russian novels.

DAVID MAGARSHACK was born in Riga, Russia, and educated at a Russian secondary school. He came to England in 1920 and was naturalized in 1931. After graduating in English literature and language at University College, London, he worked in Fleet Street and published a number of novels. For the Penguin Classics he translated Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, and The Brothers Karamozov; Dead Souls by Gogol; and Lady with Lapdog and Other Tales by Chekhov. He also wrote biographies of Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Pushkin, Turgenev and Stanislavsky; and he is the author of Chekhov the Dramatist, a critical study of Chekhov’s plays, and a study of Stanislavsky’s system of acting. His last books to be published before his death were The Real Chekhov and a translation of Chekhov’s Four Plays.

MILTON EHRE is Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. Among his publications are Oblomov and His Creator: The Life and Art of Ivan Goncharov (1973), Isaac Babel (1986), translations of the plays of Gogol and Chekhov and poems by Anna Akhmatova.

IVAN GONCHAROV

Oblomov

Translated by DAVID MAGARSHACK
with an Introduction by MILTON EHRE

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Oblomov was first published in 1859
This translation first published in 1954
Reprinted with a new Chronology, Introduction and Further Reading 2005
1

Translation copyright 1954 by David Magarshack
Chronology, Introduction and Further Reading copyright £ 2005 by Milton Ehre
All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
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EISBN: 9781101492147

CONTENTS

Chronology

Introduction

Further Reading

Oblomov

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

CHRONOLOGY

1812 6 June (Old Style): Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov born in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk), son of Alexander Ivanovich and Avdotya Matveyevna, the second of six children, four of whom survived. His paternal grandfather achieved gentry status in the middle of the eighteenth century through military service, but the family continued as merchants in a prosperous grain trade. Memoirists recall Goncharov’s mother as ‘severe’ and ‘suspicious’; Ivan, who loved her deeply, remembered an intelligent and caring woman. His father was successful and respected – he was several times elected mayor, though in despotic Russia the position offered limited responsibility. He was pious and melancholic. A grandson described ‘a psychically sick and unstable family’. Goncharov suffered from depression and for a period harboured paranoid enmity, most notoriously towards his friend and fellow novelist Ivan Turgenev.

1819 Father dies when Ivan is seven; education of children is assumed by Nicholas Tregubov, a boarder and a retired naval officer of aristocratic lineage and liberal views. His cosmopolitan background is in stark contrast to the traditionalism of a merchant family. The author remembers him as embodying ‘everything that is expressed by the English word “gentleman”’, but is also critical of his genteel impracticality and abstract idealism.

Ivan and his brother Nicholas are the first Goncharovs to receive a formal education. At the age of eight Ivan is sent to a boarding school run by a priest; he encounters literature (writing in the Goncharov household was limited to business papers), studies French and German.

1822 Enters Moscow Commercial School; the school offers a broad curriculum in liberal arts and sciences, but the teachers are inferior to those in schools for the gentry and the discipline is harsh.

1831 Enrolls at Moscow University. Among his classmates, besides the outstanding poet and novelist Mikhail Lermontov, are men who were to shape the intellectual life of their era and the future of Russian thought: Vissarion Belinsky, Alexander Herzen, Nicholas Stankevich, Konstantin Aksakov. Romanticism and German philosophical Idealism are in vogue; Goncharov does not participate in the famous discussion circles at the university. In the forties the Moscow circles split into camps of Westernizers and Slavophils.

1834 Graduates Moscow University.

1835 Begins 33-year career in the government bureaucracy. Moves to St Petersburg. Becomes a habitué of the Maykov salon; the Maykovs were a cultured aristocratic family – among its members were distinguished artists and poets.