Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov [0]
IVAN ALEKSANDROVICH GONCHAROV (1812–91) was the son of a rich merchant family. He attended Moscow University for three years, graduating in 1834, and spent most of his life as a civil servant, eventually becoming a censor. Besides publishing three novels, Obyknovennaya istoriya (1847; tr. C. Garnett, A Common Story, 1917), Oblomov (1859; tr. D. Magarshack, 1954), and Obryv (1869; tr. anon., The Precipice, 1915), the main event in his otherwise monotonous life was a voyage to Japan (1852–5) as secretary to a Russian mission, described in Fregat Pallada (1858). Both in himself and in his environment, he saw the clash between dreamy traditionalism (which could be well-meaning and imaginative) and vigorous practicality (which could be prosaically limited). This conflict is worked out in A Common Story with ingenious artificiality and in The Precipice with uneven diffuseness; but in Oblomov it is the foundation of one of the most profound Russian novels.
DAVID MAGARSHACK was born in Riga, Russia, and educated at a Russian secondary school. He came to England in 1920 and was naturalized in 1931. After graduating in English literature and language at University College, London, he worked in Fleet Street and published a number of novels. For the Penguin Classics he translated Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, and The Brothers Karamozov; Dead Souls by Gogol; and Lady with Lapdog and Other Tales by Chekhov. He also wrote biographies of Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Pushkin, Turgenev and Stanislavsky; and he is the author of Chekhov the Dramatist, a critical study of Chekhov’s plays, and a study of Stanislavsky’s system of acting. His last books to be published before his death were The Real Chekhov and a translation of Chekhov’s Four Plays.
MILTON EHRE is Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. Among his publications are Oblomov and His Creator: The Life and Art of Ivan Goncharov (1973), Isaac Babel (1986), translations of the plays of Gogol and Chekhov and poems by Anna Akhmatova.
IVAN GONCHAROV
Oblomov
Translated by DAVID MAGARSHACK
with an Introduction by MILTON EHRE
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Oblomov was first published in 1859
This translation first published in 1954
Reprinted with a new Chronology, Introduction and Further Reading 2005
1
Translation copyright 1954 by David Magarshack
Chronology, Introduction and Further Reading copyright £ 2005 by Milton Ehre
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
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EISBN: 9781101492147
CONTENTS
Chronology
Introduction
Further Reading
Oblomov
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
CHRONOLOGY
1812 6 June (Old Style): Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov born in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk), son of Alexander Ivanovich and Avdotya Matveyevna, the second of six children, four of whom survived. His paternal grandfather achieved gentry status in the middle of the eighteenth century through military service, but the family