Ivan Goncharov
1812–1891
Biography
Ivan Goncharov (1812–1891) was a Russian novelist and critic. He was born in Simbirsk, now Ulyanovsk, into a merchant family that had been raised to the nobility for his grandfather's military service. After schooling and university study in Moscow, he moved to Saint Petersburg, where he worked as a government translator and private tutor, and for a time as a censor, while publishing poetry and prose in almanacs. His first novel, The Same Old Story (1847), also known in English as A Common Story, appeared in the journal Sovremennik.
He is best remembered for Oblomov (1859), a novel about a landowner who spends most of his life on his sofa, unable to act, and whose name has become a byword for idle apathy in Russian. Its counterpoint is Stolz, Oblomov's brisk and practical friend. His last novel, The Precipice (1869), followed a decade later. He also wrote theatre and literary criticism. In a memoir he left behind, which was not published until 1924, he accused his rivals, above all Ivan Turgenev, of copying his work.
Two of the books on this site are his. Oblomov is his most famous novel, a study of inertia and of the provincial gentry world he watched closely. The Precipice (Обрыв), his third and final novel, is set in the provincial Russia of its time and shows the same patience and wit in its portrait of character and manners. Both show a novelist who wrote carefully, and with humour, about the society around him.
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Books
Обломов
by Иван Александрович Гончаров
Ilya Oblomov, a gentle landowner, cannot bring himself to leave his sofa, let alone manage his estate or marry the woman who loves him. Goncharov's slow, funny and tender novel turns one man's inertia into a portrait of a whole way of life. This book uses the racial and other…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Обрыв
by Иван Александрович Гончаров
The sceptical Raisky comes home to his grandmother's estate on the Volga and falls into the lives of his cousins Vera and Marfenka. Vera's hidden love for a radical outsider leads her to a precipice, in the last of Goncharov's three novels. This book uses the racial and other…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.