Ivan Goncharov

Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov (Russian: Иван Александрович Гончаров; Simbirsk, June 6^Jul./ June 18, 1812^greg. – St. Petersburg, September 15^jul./ September 27, 1891^greg.) was a Russian novelist.

Biography

He was the son of Aleksandr Goncharov from Simbirsk, a small town on the Volga. Losing his father at the age of seven, and his mother fully engaged in the family business, he attended various private schools and entered a boarding school where the sons of the nobility studied, achieving a solid education and mastery of French, English and from German. He then went to Moscow, at whose Commercial School he stayed until in 1831 he switched to the Philological Faculty of his University, where he graduated in 1834.

Despite having coincided with Vissarion Belinski, Ivan Turgenev, Aleksandr Herzen and Nikolai Ogarev, he kept out of the political circles at the university that were bustling in those years. He then began his career in the civil administration of the State, first in the Ministry of Foreign Trade as a translator, later in the Ministry of Public Instruction and later in other senior positions, such as General Director of Publishing and Printing and General Censor, post the latter in which he retired in 1867.

At the end of the 1930s, Goncharov became part of the literary gathering of the Maikov family, a lineage of poets, painters, publishers and patrons, and collaborated on their almanacs El Crocus and Noches de luna, where he published his first verses and short novels: The evil of impetus and A happy error. In 1846 he began to collaborate in the magazine El Contemporáneo , then directed by Visarión Belinski. He led a comfortable and peaceful life, without great ups and downs; his fame would come to him from the three great novels he wrote after him.

He published his first long novel, An Ordinary Story, in 1847. The work depicts the gradual debasement of Aduev, a young man driven by noble aspirations and sublime ideals, and his transformation into a deceitful civil servant, unscrupulous and prosperous at any cost.

In 1858 he would publish his most important creation, Oblomov, one of the central works of Russian literature, in which he confronts two typical characters: one, the one who gives the work its title, and whose His name comes from oblómok ("hulk, ruin"), he is the idle representative of the Russian nobility and tradition, lazy, lethargic, mediocre and apathetic, who sacrifices his dreams to inaction by living, without However, his disappearance as a drama; he became proverbial representing a typically Russian archetype; the second, Stolz, whose name in German means "haughty", is the opposite model, balanced, of moderate political ideas, in favor of renewal, the West, industrialization, business and action. The novel was constantly retouched until its final version ten years later.

Goncharov's third great novel is The Precipice (1869), and its argument is built through the opposition of two ideologies and two worlds: on the one hand, the revolutionary nihilism represented by Mark Volokhov, and on the other the conservative and traditional world of grandmother Berezhkova. Between both worlds, young Vera is undecided, who finally leans towards the conservative side. The novel caused harsh controversy due to the caricatural way in which the character of Volokhov was represented: cynical, rude, capable of lying and forging documents to get money, cruel and contemptuous. In front of him rises the matriarchal figure of grandmother Berezhkova, bearer of the old and perennial values of Christian charity and love, sweetness, understanding and unshakable faith combined with absolute firmness and awareness of her role in the world., all surrounded by a halo of authentic and deep religious spirituality.

In 1858 he would write The Frigate Pallas, which describes his voyage around the world by ship between 1852 and 1855, as secretary to Admiral Yevfimi Putyatin. He also wrote essays such as Notes on Belinsky, Maikov, Notes on the Anniversary of Karamzin, A Million Doubts (essay on Griboyedov's comedy The Evil of Reason), articles on the theater by Aleksandr Ostrovsky.

Goncharov died of pneumonia at the age of seventy-nine, in 1891, and is buried in the cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Saint Petersburg. His complete works occupy nine volumes.

In Russian literature, Goncharov has remained the author of a social novel and one of the best representatives of the narrative of the XIX century. According to Lev Tolstoy, Oblomov is a masterpiece. It is a costumbrista novel that earned the author 10,000 rubles, a detail that is enough to give an idea of the popularity that he came to enjoy while still alive. In 1860 he accused Ivan Turgenev of stealing arguments from him and leading a conspiracy against him. This idea pursued him until his death.

For Léon Thoorens, "Goncharov appeared as the authentic follower of Gogol, although of the realist Gogol, as the critics of the time classified him. His realism is absolute, cold and impassive, without mystical or ideological background, and above all without humor... Goncharov was a discontented and skeptical individual, with permanent cold anger. Instead, he was endowed with a penetrating intelligence and a faculty of observation that was nothing short of diabolical & # 34;.

Goncharov in Spanish

• Oblomov, Barcelona: Alba, 1998. Translation: Luisa Kúper de Velasco.
• Oblomov. Barcelona: Debolsillo, 2009. ISBN 978-84-9908-117-5
• Ninfodora Ivánovna. Madrid: Amaranto editors, 1999. ISBN 978-84-921605-6-3
• An ordinary story. Barcelona, Alba editorial, 2003. ISBN 978-84-8428-197-9
• The evil of the impetus, Minute Editorial, 2009 ISBN 978-84-95587-73-2

Movie adaptations

• Iván Goncharov on Internet Movie Database(in English).