PREFACE
It is a disadvantage to Gontcharoff to be introduced for the first time to English readers who are already acquainted with the writings of his more thrilling and vivid successors, Tourgenieff, Dostoieffsky and Tolstoi. In the rapid development of the Russian realistic novel, Gontcharoff takes the second place in point of time. He was the first man to be roused by the example of Gogol, who wrote, shortly before he died in 1852 : 'I have pursued life in its reality, not in dreams of the imagination, and I have thus reached Him who is the source of life.' So could those later masters whom I have mentioned say, but Gontcharoff, who came a little before them, and was the first to take up the challenge thrown down by Gogol, if he had not penetrated to the sacred essence of things, could at least maintain that he had studied life in its reality. And this is why, although he is no poet, and cannot rend the heart like the young men who came after him, he is deserving of all recognition as an element in modern Russian literature.
Ivan Alexandrovitch Gontcharoff was born at Simbirsk, on the Volga, on the 18th of June,' 1813. His father, a rich merchant, died when the boy was three years old, and left him to the care of his mother and of his godfather, an aged retired officer of the navy. This old salt regaled the child with endless stories of adventures at sea, and awakened
in him a longing to sail about the world. At the village school to which he was sent, Ivan leamt French well from the wife of the pope of the parish, who had married a Frenchwoman. In 1825, he went to the Gymnasium in Moscow, where he was a diligent and blameless student. In 1831, he passed on to the University of Moscow, taking philology as his special subject. In 1835, ne went U P ^ rom the maternal house at Simbirsk, very much as Alexandr Fedoritch does in A Common Story^ to St. Petersburg, and received at the Ministry of Finance the post of Translator.
The earliest literary work undertaken by Gontcharoff, was exclusively in the line of translation. He published several Russian versions of well-known foreign novels. As a man of letters, he was absolutely the child of a romantic interest in the poet Pouschkine. He has recorded the emotion with which he gazed at the poet when he was pointed out to him for the first time in the church of the Nikitsky monastery in Moscow. Several years later, at the shop of the publisher Smirdine, Gontcharoff was presented to Pouschkine, and from this time forth he was in the habit of meeting him frequently, particularly in the studio of Maikoff, the painter. At that time, Pouschkine was the centre of all the hopes and the enthusiasm of the youth of Russia. The news of the assassination of the poet, in 1837, produced a sort of despair among those whose aspirations he had encouraged, and whose thoughts he had led. Gontcharoff has written: ' Never shall I forget the news of the death of Pouschkine. I was then a small employ^ in a public department. I had leisure enough to write a little, to translate, to study the poets, and to dabble in aesthetics. Winckelmann was my great hobby, but Pouschkine domi-
nated everything. His works held the place of honour on the book-shelves of my modest room. Every line he had published had been meditated upon and felt by me. And suddenly they come and tell me that some one had killed him, that he exists no longer! At that moment I was seated at my desk in my office. I groped my way out into the corridor, and then, with my face to the wall, I covered my eyes with my hands and wept bitterly. I wept as a lad weeps who receives a message that his mother is dead. . . . Three days later a portrait of Fouschkine appeared in the shop-windows, bearing these words, ' The fire is extinguished on the altar. 9 It was immediately seized and destroyed by the police.' The story recalls that of Tennyson's boyish emotion at the news of the death of Byron.
To the influence of Fouschkine, romantic and inflammatory, succeeded that of Gogol, with his new naturalistic ideas. The publication of the first part of Dead Sauls, in 1842, was an epoch for Gontcharoff, as for so many others. But he was slow in finding confidence to write. It was not until 1847 that he published, in the columns of a St. Petersburg newspaper, Obyknowenndia istorita, which is here for the first time presented to English readers as A Common Story. The novel enjoyed a very great success, and, in 1848, it was succeeded by a lighter and more comic sketch of bureau life in St. Petersburg, called Ivan Savite Poddja- , brin. In 1852, the Russian Government suggested to Gontcharoff that he should accompany Admiral Pontiatine, in the capacity of private secretary, on a voyage around the world. To see foreign countries had always been the first desire of his heart, and he accepted the offer with enthusiasm. The special mission of the admiral was to proceed to Japan to negotiate a new treaty of commerce.
The tour, which occupied three years, closed with a land-journey across the steppes and mountains of Siberia.
The events of this memorable expedition were described by Gontcharoff in two large volumes, The Frigate ' Pallada? 1856-57. To recover from the fatigue of his travels, Gon-tcharoff proceeded in 1857 to the baths of Marienbad, and there he wrote, in six weeks, the most famous of all his works, the novel called Oblomoff. It appeared in book-form in 1859. The rest of the novelist's life presented little that is of interest. In 1870, he published a third novel, ^Obryv ('The Abyss'). In 1873, ^ e was made chief director of the general post-office in St. Petersburg. He published a bibliographical and critical study of the radical and free-thinking critic, Belinsky, who died in 1847; his own Souvenirs, in 1879; a story, Mark the Nihilist, in 1886; and other minor contributions to literature. He died, in his seventy-ninth year, on the 28th of September, 1891.
At the time of the death of Gontcharoff, the distinguished critic, Michel Zagoulai'eff, published a study of his work, from which I extract the following passages:
' More than forty years ago, replying to the question what was the position of Gontcharoff in Russian literary life, our great critic, Belinsky, with his astonishing prescience of the future, declared, after the publication of Gontcha-rofFs first novel, A Common Story, that the author of that book would never be anything but a ' great artist in words/ on account of the complete absence in him of all inclination to deal enthusiastically with any of the social questions of the day.' We all know how hard Gontcharoff strove later on to protest against this verdict in a sort of apologia for his writings, entitled Better Late than Never. After having
enriched the literature of Russia with three masterpieces, A Common Story, Oblomoff, and The Abyss, the great writer attempted to prove that these three beautiful books possessed more than mere literary merit, and that he too, like Tour-genieff, Dostoieffsky and Count Leo Tolstoi, had the right to be considered a commentator on the social life of his age. This interesting point has been the subject of much debate. There are those who are of opinion that the immortal type of Oblomoff is a synthesis of a certain condition of intelligent humanity as general as those of Don Quixote and of Hamlet. Others hold that in creating the hero of the most perfect of his three great novels, Gontcharoff has done no more than portray his own character, and that even in Russia this type is not so universal as Dobroliouboff supposed when he created the word ' Oblomovism' to characterise the lack of energy supposed to be inherent in our national character. . . .
' When A Common Story first appeared, we were passing through a period of transition, social as well as literary. The struggle between the new ideas and the ideas imposed on Russian society by the political rSgime which had been in force since 1825, was only beginning. A vague prescience of some change in the near future created among Russians an instinctive demand for something more than a mere platonic profession of beautiful sentiments. When Gontcharoff contrasted with the dreaming and sentimental hero of his first novel the man of action whom he has depicted in Peter Adouev, the public at once perceived the piquancy of the bitter irony of the uncle in face of the nonchalant and effeminate idealism of Alexandr Adouev. What was not at first perceived was that the sympathies of the author were really all on the side of the latter. That was more
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than Russian criticism, in those early days, could comprehend. The novel was written with an incomparable maestria of style, its author was proclaimed an ' artist' of the first order, and it was taken for granted that he was ironically indifferent to all that was fermenting in the Russian society of that time.
' Gontcharoff did not attempt to protest On the contrary, when, several years later, he participated in the diplomatic mission of Admiral Pontiatine to Japan, he brought back from his voyage around the world nothing but picturesque memorials, in which we may vainly seek for the least trace of a serious interest in the somewhat important political work to which he had been called to contribute. His beautiful work, The Frigate * Palladaj is of deep interest in this connection, and we are astonished at the slight notice which has been given to it by the posthumous appreciators of the great writer.
' It was the novel called Oblomoff which raised the literary reputation of Gontcharoff to its height. Since the prose writings of Pouschkine, the Russian public had never been presented with a work of such technical perfection. The brilliant commentaries of Dobroliouboff, in spite of the paradoxical nature of that critic's explanation of the
