GONCHAROV, IVAN ALEXANDROVICH (1812 1891), Russian novelist, was the son of a rich merchant in the town of Simbirsk. At the age of ten he was placed in one of the gymnasiums at Moscow, from which he passed into the Moscow university. He then entered the civil service, being first employed as secretary to the governor of Simbirsk, and afterwards in the ministry of finance at St. Petersburg (Leningrad). Absorbed in bureaucratic work, Goncharov paid no attention to the social questions then ardently discussed by his contemporaries, Herzen, Aksakov and Bielinsky. His first original work was Obyknoven naya Istoria, "A Common Story" (1847, Eng. trans. by C. Garnett, 189o, 2nd ed. 1917). In 1856 he sailed to Japan as secretary to Admiral Putiatin, returning by the then tedious land route through Siberia. He published a description of the voyage under the title of "The Frigate Pallada." In 1857 appeared his masterpiece, Oblomov (Eng. trans. by C. J. Hogarth, 1915), which was imme diately recognized as a classic. He had been at work on it for ten years. What Prince Mirsky has called the "indolent and impo tent determinism of the hero" was recognized as of general sig nificance in Russian life, especially in the life of the country gentry. Dobrolubov said of it, "Oblomovka (the country-seat of the Oblomovs) is our fatherland : something of Oblomov is to be found in every one of us." Pisarev, another celebrated critic, declared that "Oblomovism," as Goncharov called the sum total of qualities with which he invested the hero of his story, "is an illness fostered by the nature of the Slavonic character and the life of Russian society." In 1858 Goncharov was appointed a censor, and in 1868 he published another novel called Obryv (Eng. trans., The Precipice, 1915), on which he had worked for 20 years. This contains a charming picture of a great Russian household, ruled by a despotic and benevolent grandmother, but aroused great hostility among the intelligentsia by the unsympathetic por trait of the nihilist. Goncharov was convinced that Turgenev bor rowed from The Precipice, and wrote an account of his wrongs. He died on Sept. 15-27, 1891.
See A. A. Mazon, Un Maitre du roman russe: Ivan Gontcharov (1914) . A new translation of Oblomov, by Natalie A. Duddington, appeared in 1929.