Goncharov shares their love of art for its own sake rather than for political ends.

1836–8 His first known literary works appear in the Maykovs’ family journal.

1840s Plans his three novels. All three deal with a young man seeking his place in the world, a reason for regarding them as a trilogy. According to the novelist, A Common Story is conceived in 1844, written in 1845 and finished the following year.

1846–8 Work on Oblomov begins, probably in 1847.

1847 A Common Story is published.

1849 ‘Oblomov‘s Dream’ is published. Plans The Precipice.

1852–5 Secretary to the admiral on an official journey to Japan and the Far East. Returns through Siberia.

1855 Falls in love with Elizaveta Tolstoy, whom he first met at the Maykovs in the early 1840s. She is the only known romantic relation of Goncharov’s life. She chooses someone else; he never marries.

1855–7 His account of his journey to the Far East, The Frigate Pallas: Notes of a Journey, is published as individual sketches.

1856 Begins service as a government censor.

1857 Summer: Writes bulk of the novel Oblomov.

1858 The Frigate Pallas: Notes of a Journey is published as a book.

1859 Oblomov is published. Goncharov accuses Turgenev of plagiarism.

1860 A committee of prominent figures from the literary community finds no basis for the accusation.

1867 Retires from government service.

1869 The Precipice is published.

1878 Assumes responsibility for Alexandra Treygut, the wife of his manservant, and her three children, upon her husband’s death.

1890 Suffers a stroke.

1891 Dies after a brief illness. Leaves most of his estate to Alexandra Treygut and her three children.

INTRODUCTION

Ilya Ilich Oblomov belongs to a line of outsized comic heroes who make us laugh and yet touch our sympathies – Don Quixote is an archetype. His monumental indolence has led Russians to turn him into a symbol of this supposed vice of the national character. Upon the novel’s appearance in 1859, a critic diagnosed his passivity as the illness of ‘oblomovitis’, and the term stuck. Lenin often employed it in tirades against inefficient bureaucrats.

Some critics – Russian and Western – have held a more benign view. Recent years have witnessed a tendency to vindicate Oblomov, to see his massive inertness (a good part of the book is over before he gets out of bed) as an antidote to the endless striving of Faustian man. He has even been proposed as a candidate for sainthood.

In over fifty years of literary activity Ivan Goncharov managed to write only three novels: Oblomov, A Common Story (1847) and The Precipice (1869; sometimes translated as The Ravine). He also left a handful of short stories and a charming account of his journey to Japan as a member of a naval expedition, The Frigate Pallas: Notes of a Journey (1858). Unlike genteel Oblomov, Goncharov worked for a living. Literature was the love of free time wrested from his duties as a bureaucrat in the government service, including a stint as a censor. He came from a family of merchants in the Volga town of Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk). The Goncharovs had officially risen to the status of gentry in the semi-feudal Russian system as a reward for the military service of Ivan’s grandfather, but they continued to earn their living from the grain trade. Almost all his fellow writers were from the landed gentry, the lucky ones living on revenues from their estates.

Goncharov came to maturity in the dark years of Nicholas I’s despotic rule (1825–55). He belonged to a remarkable generation, the so-called ‘men of the forties’. Dostoevsky, Turgenev and the poet Nekrasov appeared in print in that decade; Tolstoy followed on their heels in the early fifties; the influential critic Vissarion Belinsky and the brilliant Alexander Herzen were at the height of their powers.

The mood was anti-romantic, though romanticism proved more resilient than many supposed. Emotionalism, fantasy, metaphysical aches were out of fashion; sobriety, accuracy of depiction, ‘ordinary’ life were in. Russians were becoming more aware of their country’s economic and social backwardness. Their fathers had triumphed over Napoleon only to discover the higher standard of living of the defeated. ‘Action’, ‘work’, ‘deeds’ were slogans of the day. The son of practical-minded merchants responded to the new rhetoric, running the hero of his first novel through an education in the value of sensible activity and emotional restraint.

A Common Story follows a deflationary plot line characteristic of nineteenth-century realism, slipping from ‘great expectations’ to ‘lost illusions’. Alexander Aduyev, an innocent from the provinces, comes to the capital with high hopes of fortune and love, but stumbles through a series of comic mishaps. For emerging realism, parody was the major weapon against romanticism. (Even The Frigate Pallas may be read as a parody of expectations travellers garnered from books.) An aspiring writer, Aduyev identifies finding himself with finding a style.