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Overview
The author goes beyond the standard critical clichés about Goncharov to a contemporary reading of his entire artistic production. Proceeding from the assumption that meanings in art are intimately related to forms, he discusses Goncharov's works with close attention to style, structure, and distinctions of genre, to arrive at an understanding of Goncharov's themes and his view of experience. Milton Ehre's extensive knowledge of the Russian literature on Goncharov and his own literary sensitivity combine to provide a new understanding of Goncharov and his novels.
Originally published in 1974.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691618753 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2015 |
| Series: | Studies of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University , #1231 |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 2.30(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Oblomov and his Creator
The Life and Art of Ivan Goncharov
By Milton Ehre
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1973 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06245-7
CHAPTER 1
A Portrait of the Artist
A gentleman ... with the soul of a bureaucrat, without ideas and with the eyes of a boiled fish, upon whom God, as if for a joke, has bestowed brilliant talent.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
He had his unpleasant sides which were caused by proud seclusion, and he was a profoundly unhappy man in his domestic surroundings to which he clung with hands grown numb from terror of loneliness. But when he was in high spirits ... he was interesting, and instructive in manner, and touching in the mute plaints of his heart begging for love.
Anatoly Koni
Nature gave me delicate and sensitive nerves — hence that terrible impressionability and feverishness of my entire character; no one ever understood this — ... they [could] not decide what I am! — a dissembler, an actor, or a madman, or whether it is only the power of imagination, intelligence, and feeling that, sparkling diversely, struggles out of me and plays, while crying out ... for a form....
Ivan Goncharov
Gonchar is the Russian word for "a potter," and in the distant past the Goncharovs may have been artisans. At least since the early part of the eighteenth century they lived by trade, mostly of grain, in the middle Volga town of Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk). They were fairly successful at it, but either not venturesome or not lucky enough to accumulate significant capital. A massive stone house in the middle of a town where most homes were still of wood provided the most tangible sign of their prosperity. Simbirsk, though a provincial center, still had the look of a village while Ivan Goncharov was growing up, and the Goncharov home possessed many of the trappings of the rural estates of the gentry surrounding the town — barns, stables, huts for the domestic serfs, orchards, a garden. What it lacked were large expanses of land and the numerous field serfs found in the country. Later the novelist showed little interest in nature or the life of the peasantry.
In addition to owning a home that somewhat resembled an estate of the gentry, the Goncharovs had managed in the middle of the eighteenth century to become legal members of that class. Ivan's paternal grandfather, Ivan Ivanovich Goncharov, had served in the military and worked his way up through the ranks to become an infantry officer. His achievement gave him the official status of a "gentleman." It is doubtful, though, that parvenus like the Goncharovs had even begun to attain the cultural refinement and delicacy of manner that legend ascribes to the gentry but that in a backward country like Russia more often than not remained unrealized ideals. Despite his newly won status, Ivan Ivanovich retained legal membership in the merchant class and continued to live by trade. Russian merchants of those years little resembled the individualistic bourgeoisie of the West, who sought to dominate politics and culture as well as business. Living in a semi-feudal society, they usually shared the traditional customs and beliefs of the peasantry about them, especially in a sleepy backwater town like Simbirsk. As late as the middle of the nineteenth century the critic Nikolay Dobrolyubov's appellation "dark kingdom" for the society of backward and superstitious provincial merchants depicted in Ostrovsky's plays struck a chord in Russian readers. The Goncharovs may also have been Old Believers, as many merchants were, and Old Believers, among the most tradition-minded of Russian Christians, tended to be deeply suspicious of anything resembling secular culture.
Undoubtedly the grandfather was above the run-of-the-mill — he was literate and ambitious enough to have wanted to improve his family's situation. Also Ivan Ivanovich began a family chronicle — one of the very few sources of information about the Goncharov family — in which he displayed a modicum of interest in the world beyond his granaries and barnyards. Alongside the expected announcements of births, weddings, and deaths are quotations from religious texts, occasional notations of exceptional natural phenomena, and mention of outstanding historical events such as the Pugachev rebellion, which reached the outskirts of Simbirsk. However, the mechanical manner in which events are recorded in the chronicle, its dry matter-of-fact tone and lack of any embellishment, suggest a man whose vital concerns did not extend far beyond family and business. This may be the nature of a family chronicle. Nevertheless, the impression remains that language in the home of the future novelist, in its written form, was largely a tool for practical ends — whether to make inventories of sacks of grain or to keep track of the doings of the family.
Ivan Goncharov's father, Alexander Ivanovich, continued the family grain trade, also owned a candle factory, and was several times elected to serve as mayor (gorodskoy golova) of Simbirsk. Though his election would suggest that he was a fairly capable and ambitious man, we can assume that his intellectual and cultural horizons had not expanded significantly beyond those of the grandfather. Such posts in Tsarist Russia offered limited responsibilities and required little education. Ivan was only seven when his father died in 1819 at the age of sixty-five, and he seems to have forgotten him.
The novelist's mother, who was nineteen when she married the fifty-year-old Alexander (it was his second marriage), was also of the merchant class, but in Mazon's phrase plus peuple que bourgeoise. Her responsibilities in managing a large household of servants and children (four survived out of six) did not permit Avdotya Matveevna to supplement her meager education with that modicum of knowledge of the affairs of the world the Goncharov men had been able to achieve. Nevertheless, Ivan adored his mother — "there is nothing and no one about whom my thoughts are so bright, my memories so sacred, as of her" (italics in original) he wrote his sister Alexandra on the occasion of her death. The ways in which he remembered her and the terms in which he stated his adoration are important and revealing. It was not, of course, for any qualities of mind or imagination that the writer admired her, though he considered her intelligent; nor was it an unusual capacity for maternal warmth and tenderness that stirred him. Instead, whenever Goncharov went beyond a vague expression of affection to particulars, it was always her talents for housekeeping that he commended. His mother was "an excellent, experienced, and strict housekeeper," he recalled in his reminiscences; "... her work was so strictly executed," he exclaimed in eulogizing her to Alexandra. The frequency of the modifier "strict" or "severe" is striking. She loved her children, but with "strict justice." Faced with breaches of discipline, she was "severe" and could be "implacable." Did a certain reproach hide behind the epithets "strict" and "severe"? Was Avdotya Matveevna, for all her managerial talents, deficient in her ability to convey maternal warmth? The product of her upbringing points to such a conclusion, since for much of his life Ivan Goncharov behaved like a man who had received too little love as a child. Once he admitted as much, ironically in the same letter to Alexandra where he had declared the sanctity of his mother's memory, though he denied any feeling of grievance — "She loved you more than the rest of us, ... but who of us can complain that you were singled out and we were neglected."
Mothers or maternal figures play an important role in the lives of the heroes of Goncharov's three novels. Alexander Aduev's mother in A Common Story (Obyknovennaya istoriya), Boris Raysky's great-aunt (affectionately called "grandmother") of The Ravine (Obryv), and Oblomov's housekeeper differ from their obvious prototype in a number of ways. What they have in common is an undeniable talent for maintaining an orderly and comfortable home — a virtue that in the fiction is always praiseworthy and even idealized. In the case of Oblomov's housekeeper — her name, Agafya Matveevna, points straight to the novelist's mother — the mother-substitute suffers from an almost total inability to express whatever feelings she may have. Instead, the very act of housekeeping — feeding, cleaning, caring for Oblomov — becomes her means of self-expression. When we come to the novel, we shall discover that this total absence of passion in Goncharov's most famous maternal figure, instead of being viewed as a fault, has also been turned into a virtue, though a highly ambiguous one.
If Avdotya Matveevna was somewhat cold, it may have been because she was "suspicious" or "mistrustful," as her son Ivan once described her. Her "suspiciousness" was apparently something more acute than a mere provincial mistrust of the outside world or the traditional caution of merchants, for Goncharov goes on to call suspiciousness his "innate and inherited illness." According to the novelist's nephew and Avdotya's grandson, Alexander Nikolaevich Goncharov, suspiciousness or "fear of people," as well as a susceptibility to melancholy, inertia, and apathy ran deep in the Goncharov family. Alexander felt he belonged to "a psychically sick and unstable family." He was born too late to recall his grandmother or to have known his grandfather, but family accounts told that Ivan Goncharov's father "was an abnormal man, a melancholic who often spoke incoherently and was very pious...." Alexander remembered his own father, the novelist's brother Nikolay, as prone to bouts of extreme melancholy and an absentmindedness approaching total abstraction. Nikolay avoided people, behaved obsequiously before his superiors, whom he secretly resented, and was capable of "amazing suspiciousness." He would return home from his teaching duties in the Simbirsk gymnasium, where he could not control his students, and spend hours searching through the house for something or someone — no one knew what. Fearful of authority and hesitant about asserting himself, he took out his frustrations on his children, whom he beat frequently and arbitrarily. What was said to have been the extreme piety of the novelist's father was in his brother religious fanaticism and exaggerated scrupulousness over ritual detail — a Byzantine formalism, in Alexander's description, that characterized Avdotya Matveevna's home as well as her son's. Anna, the other Goncharov sister — Alexandra seems to have escaped the family malady — underwent periods of abnormality during which she would buy up great stores of material and spend days on end sewing, while slandering and abusing anyone who dared to approach. At such moments she gave vent to "fantastic suspicions" which, she felt, were inherent in the Goncharov family. Otherwise Anna was bright, had a sense of humor, and was "a superb housewife."
The Goncharov family was not one to produce confident and independent children. Suspicious and mistrustful people — paranoids in the jargon of our day — are unlikely to permit themselves spontaneous expressions of emotion, as Avdotya Matveevna apparently did not, and will appear arbitrary to a child who has no way of understanding the rationalizations with which they justify their fears. Men tend to repeat the habits of their parents, and it is a good bet that Nikolay, whom we know more intimately than the novelist's parents, thanks to the reminiscences of his son and his former students, typified a pattern of parental behavior learned in the Goncharov household. The death of Ivan's father, coming when the boy was only seven, surely heightened the insecurity of a child already exposed to an unstable family situation. The child was separated in age from his father by almost six decades; if those family accounts the nephew heard are correct, the melancholia and self-absorption of the father made him even more distant; now the child was irrevocably separated from the father by the fact of death. Understandably he put all his hopes on his mother and turned to her in search of the security he so desperately needed. If the mother was cold, or if she really loved his sister and neglected him, the child could still see a sign of caring in her energetic devotion to housekeeping, a token of love in her dispensing of food, strength and control in her severity. The big gap was the missing father. Fathers are as conspicuously absent from Goncharov's fiction as "mothers" are omnipresent. Alexander Aduev is fatherless, Boris Raysky is an orphan, Oblomov's father appears as a dim shadowy figure in a dream. The mature Goncharov, though he was able to feel close to a number of women, tended, sooner or later, to run into difficulties with his male friends, especially when they were men of accomplishment and authority such as the editor and publisher of the European Messenger (Vestnik Evropy), Mikhail Stasyulevich, or in the most famous instance of all, Ivan Turgenev.
Fortunately for Ivan Goncharov and for Russian literature, a man the novelist called his substitute-father stepped into the breach created by his father's death. The Goncharovs kept a boarder who had become very close to the family and was the godfather of all four Goncharov children. With the death of the father, Nikolay Tregubov moved from the separate building where he had resided into the great stone house and assumed responsibility for the upbringing and education of the children. Tregubov had many of the things the Goncharovs lacked — considerable wealth, education, and experience of the larger world beyond Simbirsk. He had graduated from the Russian Naval Academy and served as an officer with the Russian fleet. Ivan Goncharov remembered him as a man who was an aristocrat in manner as well as lineage; Tregubov was "everything that is well expressed by the English word 'gentleman'; ... he was an unalloyed original of honesty, honor, and nobility...."
As Tregubov presented to the young Ivan an image of aristocratic refinement unknown in his own family, he was also able to introduce him to the finer aspects of the culture of the gentry. Simbirsk was something of a joke in the early nineteenth century for its provincial tedium and inactivity — "Sleep and idleness have taken complete hold of Simbirsk," Lermontov complained in "Sashka" — and the line catches Goncharov's feelings about the place. Nevertheless, many of the gentry of the area kept homes in town, and a small minority had attained to that high level of culture that permitted the gentry to set the tone of Russian civilization well into the nineteenth century. Alongside the usual run of balls and parties, those who had entrance to the salons of the local aristocracy could attend theatrical performances and concerts, visit picture galleries, and meet men and women interested in art and ideas. A striking number of Russian writers — Nikolay Karamzin, the poets Ivan Dmitriev and Nikolay Yazykov, Pavel Annenkov, Dmitry Grigorovich, the talented families of the Freemason Ivan Petrovich Turgenev and the novelist Sergey Aksakov — came from the Simbirsk area or had lived there. Tregubov was himself something of an intellectual, though his interests turned to the physical sciences, history, and not imaginative literature. He moved in a circle of men interested in books and ideas, specifically the ideas of the French Enlightenment. One of their circle, a Prince Mikhail Barataev — from all accounts a remarkable man — had organized a local Masonic lodge called the Key to Virtue, and several members, including Tregubov, had contact with the Decembrists of the 1825 revolt. Tregubov and his friends seem to have been representative figures of the liberal segment of the gentry of the age of Catherine and Alexander I. They were cultured aristocrats, ardent disciples of Voltaire and the French Encyclopedists, men dedicated to enlightenment and the rational reform of society, who at the same time showed few scruples about owning other human beings as serfs. For the most part their liberalism proved quite ephemeral before the wave of reaction following the ascension of Nicholas to the throne. It was such men, and especially Tregubov, who gave Ivan Goncharov his first important contact with liberal and humanistic ideals, as well as a glimpse of a broader and more subtle way of life than that found in a narrow, tradition-rooted merchant family.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Oblomov and his Creator by Milton Ehre. Copyright © 1973 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- PREFACE, pg. vii
- CONTENTS, pg. xi
- CHAPTER I. A Portrait of the Artist, pg. 1
- CHAPTER II. Esthetic Views, pg. 68
- CHAPTER III. The Creative Method and1 the Writing of the Novels, pg. 83
- CHAPTER IV. Early Efforts, pg. 98
- CHAPTER V. A Common Story, pg. 114
- CHAPTER VI. A Prosaic Imagination: The Journey of the Frigate Pallas, pg. 142
- CHAPTER VII. Oblomov, pg. 154
- CHAPTER VIII. The Ravine, pg. 233
- CHAPTER IX. Goncharov and His Trilogy, pg. 264
- CHAPTER X. Last Works, pg. 269
- A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 280
- INDEX OF PROPER NAMES AND TITLES, pg. 289