Ivan Goncharov

Ivan Goncharov

Birth : 1812-06-18, Simbirsk, Russian Empire [now Russia]

Death : 1891-09-27

History

Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov (1812–1891) was a Russian novelist best known for his novels 'The Same Old Story' (1847), 'Oblomov' (1859), and 'The Precipice' (1869, also translated as 'Malinovka Heights'). He also worked as a literary and theatre critic. Towards the end of his life Goncharov wrote a memoir called An Uncommon Story, in which he accused his literary rivals, first and foremost Ivan Turgenev, of having plagiarized his works and prevented him from achieving European fame. His novel 'Oblomov' caused much discussion in the Russian press, introduced another new term, oblomovshchina, to the literary lexicon and is regarded as a Russian classic. In his essay 'What Is Oblomovshchina?' Nikolay Dobrolyubov provided an ideological background for the type of Russia's "new man" exposed by Goncharov. The critic argued that, while several famous classic Russian literary characters – Onegin, Pechorin, and Rudin – bore symptoms of the "Oblomov malaise", for the first time one single feature, that of social apathy, a self-destructive kind of laziness and unwillingness to even try and lift the burden of all-pervading inertia, had been brought to the fore and subjected to a thorough analysis.

Profile

Ivan Goncharov
Ivan Goncharov

Movies

Gogol online: An Ordinary Story
Novel
Young and enthusiastic Alexander Aduev comes to St. Petersburg from the province, ready to conquer the whole world. Very soon all his ideals were crushed, and he himself repeated the fate of his practical and impassive uncle Peter.
Dream
Novel
Dream (1988) is a somnambulist short about dreams taking over reality and rendering protagonists inactive.
The Precipice
Novel
Boris Pavlovich Raisky, a bored Petersburg aesthet, comes to his family estate in a small town on the Volga. He hoped to find boredom and the faint-hearted provincials there, and did not expect that in the outback he was waiting for real life, dramatic love and serious passions. Boris Raisky’s estate is a blessed corner where everything pleases the eye: a native old house, tender greenery of birches and lindens, a silver strip of the Volga in the distance. And only a mysterious precipice at the end of the garden frightens the inhabitants of the estate. According to legend, at the bottom of it in ancient times, a jealous husband killed his wife and rival. “Precipice” is a symbolic word in the fate of the main character Vera. It fell to her to fall in love with a nihilist and a cynic who preaches "love for a term", painfully choose between feeling and duty, finally, go down to her beloved person in a cliff, cut off everything that connected with her former life...
Oblomov
Novel
St. Petersburg, mid 19th century: the indolent, middle-aged Oblomov lives in a flat with his older servant, Zakhar. He sleeps much of the day, dreaming of his childhood on his parents' estate. His boyhood companion, Stoltz, now an energetic and successful businessman, adds Oblomov to his circle whenever he's in the city, and Oblomov's life changes when Stoltz introduces him to Olga, lovely and cultured. When Stoltz leaves for several months, Oblomov takes a country house near Olga's, and she determines to change him: to turn him into a man of society, action, and culture. Soon, Olga and Oblomov are in love; but where, in the triangle, does that leave Stoltz?
Ordinary story
Writer
The film is a play based on the novel “An Ordinary History” by Ivan Goncharov directed by the Sovremennik Moscow Theater. The main roles were played by Oleg Tabakov, Mikhail Kozakov, Lyudmila Ivanova, Anastasia Vertinskaya and others.
The Precipice
Novel