Ivan Goncharov - Biography

Biography

Ivan Goncharov was born in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk); his father was a wealthy grain merchant and respected official who was elected mayor of Simbirsk several times. The Goncharovs' big stone manor in the town center occupied a vast territory and had all the characteristics of a rural manor, with huge barns (packed with wheat and flour) and numerous stables. His father, Aleksander Ivanovich Goncharov, died when the boy was seven years old. First his mother Avdotya Matveevna, then his godfather Nikolay Nikolayevich Tregubov, a nobleman and a former Navy officer, took it upon themselves to give a boy a good education. Tregubov, described as man of liberal views and member of the secret masonic lodge, who knew personally some of the Decembrists, and who was one of the most popular men amongst Simbirsk intelligentsia, was later cited as the major early influence on Goncharov, especially with his sea travel stories. With Tregubov around, Goncharova could engage herself in domestic affairs. "His servants, cabmen, the whole household merged in with ours, and we formed a common family. All the practical issues now were mother's, and she proved to be an excellent housewife. All the intellectual duties were his," Ivan Goncharov remembered.

Goncharov spent the years 1820 to 1822 at a private boarding-school owned by Rev. Fyodor S. Troitsky. It was here that he learned French and German languages and started reading European writers' original texts that he borrowed from the Troitsky's vast library. Yet Goncharova wanted her both sons to follow their late father's steps, and in August 1822 he was sent to Moscow to join a college of commerce. There he spent eight unhappy years, detesting the dismal quality of education and nonsensically severe discipline, taking solace in self-education. "My first humanitarian and moral tutor was Karamzin," he remembered. Then Pushkin came as a revelation, with Evgeny Onegin being published as a series, capturing young man's imagination. In 1830, Goncharov decided to quit the college and in 1831 (missing one year because of a cholera outbreak in Moscow) he enrolled in the Moscow University's philological faculty, where he took a special interest in literature, arts, and architecture.

In the University with its atmosphere of intellectual freedom and lively debate, Goncharov's spirit thrived. One episode proved to be especially memorable: when his then-idol Aleksander Pushkin arrived as a guest lecturer to have a public discussion with professor M. T. Katchenovsky on the issue of Slovo o polku Igoreve’s authenticity. "It was as if sunlight lit up the auditorium. I was enchanted by his poetry at the time, for me it was like mother's milk, his verses were making me tremble with delight. It was his genius that formed my aesthetic background - although the same, I think, could be said of all the young people of the time who were interested in poetry", Goncharov wrote. Yet, unlike Hertzen, Belinsky, or Ogaryov, his fellow Moscow University students of the time, Goncharov remained indifferent to the ideas of political and social change that were gaining popularity at the time. Reading and translating were his main occupations. In 1832, the Telescope magazine published two chapters of Eugène Sue's novel Atar-Gull (1831), translated by Goncharov. This was his debut publication.

In 1834, Goncharov graduated from Moscow University and returned home to enter Simbirsk governor A. M. Zagryazhsky's chancellery. A year later, he moved to Saint Petersburg where he became a translator at the Finance Ministry's Foreign commerce department. Here in the Russian capital, he became friends with the Maykov family (he was young Apollon and Valerian's tutor for a while, teaching the boys Latin and Russian literature) and joined the elitist literary circle based in their house and attended by people like Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Dmitry Grigorovich. Maykovs' home-made Snowdrop almanac featured many of young Goncharov's poems. Soon he stopped dabbling in poetry altogether; some of those early verses were later incorporated into A Common Story novel as Aduev's writings, a sure sign their author stopped treating them seriously.