ABSTRACT
Ivan A. Goncharov made a hit with his A Common Story simultaneously with Turgenev's first Sportsmans Sketches. This novel appeared in The Contemporary in 1847 and took the public by storm. But it took more than ten years before Goncharov published, in The Fatherland's Annals, his masterpiece Oblomov, which some eleven years later was followed by his third and last novel, The Precipice. Goncharov is perhaps the most pedestrian author in Russian literature. Goncharov's reputation survived the onslaughts because of his other two novels, which is among the masterpieces of world literature. Competent at describing things seen and experienced, he remained a mediocre thinker. For a long time Goncharov was regarded as one of the most detached and objective of Russian realists. Whatever faults may be found with the latter, Goncharov the portraitist and the painter in words can always occupy one of the foremost places in Russian fiction.
