Ivan Goncharov
1812–1891 · Russia
“One morning, in a flat in one of the great buildings in Gorokhovaia Street, the population of which was sufficient to constitute that of a provincial town, there was lying in bed a gentleman named Ilya Ilyitch Oblomov.”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through Ivan Goncharov
Drew From(3)
who shaped Ivan Goncharov
via Eugene Onegin
- Ilya Ilyich Oblomov is the apotheosis of a type Pushkin invented thirty years earlier in Eugene Onegin — the clever, well-bred Russian who is constitutionally incapable of action. Critics line them up in a single descent: Onegin, then Pechorin, then Oblomov, each more inert than the last.
- Goncharov inherits the diagnosis but removes the Byronic glamour. Onegin's listlessness still has a duel and a doomed romance in it; Oblomov's has a sofa, a dressing gown, and a dream of a manor that no longer exists.
via Dead Souls
- Goncharov came up inside the Gogol-launched 'natural school,' the realist movement Belinsky built around Dead Souls and 'The Overcoat,' and Oblomovka — the sleepy, serf-attended manor that breeds Oblomov's paralysis — is the natural school's method applied to a single estate.
- Gogol's Manilov, the landowner who plans grand improvements and accomplishes nothing, is the direct ancestor of Oblomov's dreaming inertia. Goncharov takes the comic minor type and gives it a whole novel and a national diagnosis: Oblomovism.
via Don Quixote
- The master-servant comedy of Oblomov and Zakhar is built on the model of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza: the same affectionate friction, the same gap between a grand interior life and a shabby reality, the same way the reader laughs and aches at once.
- The debt is traced directly in the scholarship — J. D. Hainsworth's 'Don Quixote, Hamlet, and Negative Capability: Aspects of Goncharov's Oblomov' (1980) reads the Oblomov-Zakhar pair against Cervantes' knight and squire.
Portraits
Shapiro's 1880 portrait from his published gallery of Russian literary figures — a widely reproduced late photograph of Goncharov.
Constantin Shapiro, 1880
The defining likeness of Goncharov — Kramskoi's formal 1874 Tretyakov Gallery portrait, the seated image reprinted on stamps and in collected editions. High-resolution color scan.
Ivan Kramskoi, 1874
Kramskoi's earlier 1865 study of Goncharov, predating the canonical 1874 oil — a younger likeness of the writer.
Ivan Kramskoi, 1865
The best-known studio photograph of Goncharov, taken by court photographer Charles Bergamasco the year before the Kramskoi painting — the photographic record of the bearded, elderly novelist.
Charles Bergamasco, 1873
Famous Quotes
With Oblomov, lying in bed was neither a necessity (as in the case of an invalid or of a man who stands badly in need of sleep) nor an accident (as in the case of a man who is feeling worn out) nor a gratification (as in the case of a man who is purely lazy). Rather, it represented his normal condition.
he costume in question consisted of a dressing-gown of some Persian material—a real Eastern dressing-gown—a garment that was devoid both of tassels and velvet facings and a waist, yet so roomy that Oblomov might have wrapped himself in it once or twice over.
nfortunately, in his dark-grey eyes there was an absence of any definite idea, and in his other features a total lack of concentration.
ow or never! 'To be or not to be!'
About Ivan Goncharov
Russian novelist of the realist generation, remembered chiefly for a single immortal anti-hero. Born in Simbirsk to a wealthy merchant family and educated at Moscow University alongside Lermontov and Turgenev, Goncharov spent most of his life as a civil servant, writing slowly and publishing little. His reputation rests on a trilogy of novels — A Common Story (1847), praised by the critic Vissarion Belinsky; Oblomov (1859), his masterpiece; and The Precipice (1869) — each tracing the collision between drowsy provincial Russia and the brisk new commercial spirit. In 1852 he sailed as secretary to a naval mission bound for Japan, turning the three-year voyage into the bestselling travelogue The Frigate Pallada (1858). For roughly a decade he also served as a government censor, a post that paid well, ranked high, and cost him the trust of more radical contemporaries. Reclusive and increasingly suspicious in old age — he once accused Turgenev of plagiarism — he died in St. Petersburg in 1891, having given the Russian language one of its most enduring words.