Ivan Goncharov

Ivan Goncharov (1812–1891) was a Russian novelist who also spent most of his working life as a government official. He was born in Simbirsk, now called Ulyanovsk, into a prosperous merchant family, and studied at Moscow University before taking up a career in the civil service in St Petersburg. He later worked as a censor, a task that sat oddly beside his literary life.

Goncharov is remembered above all for three novels about Russia in a time of change: A Common Story, Oblomov and The Precipice. He also wrote a travel narrative about a voyage on a Russian naval ship. His writing is patient, detailed and gently humorous, and it explores the clash between dreamy tradition and the practical, restless modern world. Oblomov, his best-known book, gave Russian a word for chronic inertia, and it still reads as a wise and affectionate portrait of a very human failing.