Ivan Goncharov

Born on June 18, 1812, in Simbirsk, the same Volga city that would later produce Lenin, Ivan Goncharov came from a wealthy merchant family that had been elevated to the Russian nobility for his grandfather's military service. He was educated at a boarding school, the Moscow College of Commerce, and finally Moscow State University, after which he served briefly in the office of the Governor of Simbirsk before moving to Saint Petersburg to work as a government translator. His first novel, The Same Old Story (1847), published in Sovremennik, depicted the collision between provincial idealism and metropolitan cynicism. But it was his second novel, Oblomov (1859), that became one of the great works of Russian literature, its hero, a nobleman who cannot bring himself to get out of bed, gave the Russian language the word "oblomovshchina" to describe a condition of paralysis, indolence, and moral inertia that seemed to capture something essential about the Russian gentry. His third and final novel, The Precipice (1869), was less successful but no less ambitious. He also worked as a literary and theater critic and served as an official censor. In his final years he grew increasingly bitter, writing a memoir called An Uncommon Story in which he accused Ivan Turgenev of plagiarizing his works and preventing him from achieving European fame, a charge that posterity has not upheld. Dostoevsky considered him an author of high stature. Chekhov said Goncharov was "ten heads above me in talent." He died in Saint Petersburg on September 27, 1891.