social range of the character of the hero of this novel, of the widespread presence of Oblomovism amongst us, placed Gontcharoff finally in the rank of those Russian writers who have understood their own age the best.
' When, many years later, The Abyss appeared, Dobroliouboff had passed away, and the views which he had defended with so much brilliant paradox were beginning to lose ground. This new novel was admired mainly for its literary qualities and no attempt was made to study its social
aim. Gontcharoff was so much distressed at this, that, in spite of his inveterate hatred of literary polemics, he himself undertook to produce a commentary on his novel, and he published that Better Late than Never, of which we have ^ already spoken.
' The great writer declared, in this essay, that his three novels had had but one and the same purpose, that of illustrating the struggle between the new spirit which came from the West in consequence of Peter the Great's reforms, and the instinctive resistance of the national Russian character against this stream of foreign influence. In spite of all his explanations, he scarcely made it plain why, after showing himself a resolute partisan of the new ideas in A Common Story and in Oblomoff, he came to place himself quite as firmly, in The Abyss, on the side of the past, as against the present and the future. His position, when he had explained it, remained as enigmatical as it was before.
' The only way in which this enigma is to be solved, is, we think, by examining the personality of Gontcharoff himself. It has generally been held that of all the authors of the first order who adorned that literary Pleiad, of which ornaments he unquestionably was one of the purest and most splendid—Gontcharoff was also the most objective. He has always been represented as an impossible observer, disdainful even to indifference of the facts and the characters which he has depicted in his works. At the risk of seeming paradoxical, I venture to believe that this is a mistake, and that the basis of the three novels of the illustrious writer is nothing else than the permanent inward struggle between diametrically opposed sides of his own character. The two Adouevs of A Common Story, Oblomoff and Stoltz, Raisky and his old aunt in The Abyss, seem to
me to be successive incarnations of the two contrasted facets of the soul of the man who created these types.
' By his temperament, Gontcharoff was all his life the typical representative of the national Russian laisscr- aller against which his cultivated intelligence and his vast and varied knowledge energetically protested. This doubling of the type, so frequent with us Slavs, perpetually weighed down to the ground his great intellect and his beautiful soul. What will render immortal and for ever sympathetic to Russian readers the various works of this incomparable writer, is the constant recurrence in them of the most typical sides of our national character, the complexity of which is the real cause of all the incoherence of social life in Russia during nearly two centuries.
' When this is definitely understood and established, our critics will waste their time no longer in endeavouring to draw more or less ingenious parallels between Gontcharoff, on the one side, and Tourgenieff, Dostoieffsky and Tolstoi, on the other. The author of Oblomoff will take his place apart, and his works will be studied as a valuable testimony to a condition of mind which explains many of the historical faults which have been made in Russia during the last fifty years.'
This lucid exposition of the place held by Gontcharoff among his contemporaries cannot, I think, fail to be of service to those who make their first acquaintance with him in the pages of A Common Story.
EDMUND GOSSE.
A COMMON STORY
CHAPTER I
In the village of Grahae one summer day on the estate of Anna Pavlovna, a landowner of moderate means, every one in the house was up by daybreak, from its mistress to the house-dog Barbos. ? But Anna Pavlovna's only son, Alexandr Fedoritch, was still sleeping tlie sound sleep of a Boy of twenty; every/' one else in the house was _bustling and hurrying about. But they alf walked on tlp-iofiL and spoke in whispers, so as not to wake the young master. If any one made the least noise or spoke aloud, Anna Pavlovna would rush out at once like a lioness enraged and punish the indiscreet person with a severe rebuke or an abusive epithet, or, when her anger and her energy were equal to it, with a blow. 'T
In the kitchen three servants were kept busy codEing on a scale fit for a dinner of ten persons, though the whole family consisted of no more than Anna Pavlovna and her son Alexandr Fedoritch. In the coach house they were rubbing and greasing the carriage. AIL were busy and were r-working with all their might 'Barbos^vas the only one^ who was doing nothing, but even^Tie'~tbok a share in the general activity in his own way. When a groom or coachman came near him or a maid ran by, he wagged his tail and sniffed the passing figure anxiously, while his eyes seemed to ask : ' Are they ever going to tell me why we are all in such a bustle to-day ? '
T he bustle was because Anna Pa vlovn a was sending her son to Petersburg to get a post In the Civil Service there, v or, as 'she herself expressed it, to see the world and show
A
himself. A fatal day for her ! This was why she was so i
broken-down and unhappy. Often in her distress she would open her mouth to give some direction, and would suddenly stop in the middle of a word, her voice failed and she turned aside, and wiped away her tears, or let them fall into the trunk which she was herself packing with Sashenka's linen.
Tears had long been gathering in her heart, they rose into her throat and choked her and were ready to burst out *
in torrents; but she was saving them up as it were for the leave-taking and did not often waste them drop by drop.
It was not only Anna Pavlovna who was grieved at the coming separation. Sashenka's valet, Yevsay, was also }
terribly.distressed. He was to set off with his master to Petersburg, and had to leave the warmest corner in the house, a place on the stove in the room of Agrafena, the prime minister of Anna Pavlovna's household, who was also, a fact of prime importance to 'Yevsay, in charge of the keys of the stores.
Behind the stove there was only room for two chairs and a table, which was set with tea, coffee, and eatables. Yevsay »
had long had a place behind the stove and in the heart of Agrafena. On the other chair she was sitting herself.
The relations of A grafena and Yevsay were by now ancient history in the household. They, like every one else in the world, had been the subject of gossip and scandal, t
and then like every one else they had been dropped. Even their mistress had grown used to seeing them together, and '
for ten whole years they had been happy. Can many '
people out of all their lives count up ten years of happiness ? And now the moment of parting was at hand. Good-bye to the warm corner, good-bye to Agrafena Ivanovna, no more playing cards, and coffee and vodka and liqueurs— good-bye to it all!
Yevsay sat in silence, sighing deeply.
Agrafena, with a frown on her face, was bustling about her duties. She showed her sorrow in her own peculiar way. She poured out tea to-day with exasperation, and instead of giving the first cup of strong tea to her mistress as usual, she poured it away, as though she could not bear any one to get the benefit of it, and she took all reproof with stolid indifference*
She boiled the coffee too long, the cream was burnt, the cups slipped out of her hands. She could not put the tray down on the table without a crash; she could not shut the cupboard or the doors without slamming them. She did not shed tears, but was angry with everything and everybody instead. This, however, was always a prominent characteristic of hers. She was not often contented; things were mostly not to her taste; she used to grumble and complain of everything. But at this moment, so fatal for her, her character showed its full capabilities. More than anything she seemed to be angry with Yevsay.
' Agrafena Ivanovna !' he said in a sad subdued voice, quite out of keeping with his tall stout figure.
' Well, why did you sit down there, you booby ?' she asked, just as though he had taken a seat there for the first time. ' Get along with you, I want to get out a towel.'
'Ah, Agrafena Ivanovna !' he repeated lazily, sighing and getting up from his chair, and then at once falling back into it when she had taken the towel.
' He can do nothing but whimper! Here the fellow sticks ! Good Lord, what a nuisance, there's no getting rid
