Ivan Goncharov may not be particularly well-known, but as Joseph Frank argues, his contributions to Russian literature and culture are just as important as those of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy.

Goncharov was by no means a prolific writer, publishing only three novels. His first, A Common Story, in 1847, was written without much difficulty, and aroused the enthusiasm of the important critic [Vissarion] Belinsky, as well as the praise of Tolstoy, who was just beginning his literary career. A chapter of Oblomov, the famous dream of his childhood, appeared in a collection of new writing published in 1849, but the novel itself was not completed until ten years later, in a burst of inspiration that surprised Goncharov himself. As for The Precipice, his letters contain endless complaints about the lack of a similar inspiration, though it was finally finished at the urging of the editor of an important journal. To be sure, Goncharov’s obligations as bureaucrat and censor gave him less time than others to devote to literary composition; but his notion of “realism” also proved a hindrance to the seemingly effortless productivity that he so obviously envied in his presumed imitator, the perfidious [Ivan] Turgenev.

Goncharov’s understanding of “realism” is expressed in an exchange of letters with Dostoyevsky, one of the contributors to an anthology of well-known writers that he was putting together in 1874. A famine had raged a year earlier in the province of Samara and the proceeds from this volume were to be used for famine relief. Dostoyevsky sent in a series of “little sketches,” one of which contained the depiction of a priest whose behavior indicated a certain influence of the fashionable Nihilism of the radicals. Goncharov found this portrait unconvincing and expressed his opinion to Dostoyevsky, who replied that priests of this kind did exist: his sketch had been taken from life; such a type was beginning to be known. Goncharov retorted that a type is formed only “when it has been repeated many times, or been noticed many times, has become customary and is well-known to all.”

Dostoyevsky’s sketch of this burgeoning type was deleted from his contribution, but it is easy to see how the creator of Raskolnikov would be especially alert to social and cultural phenomena of this kind. Goncharov’s own literary horizon, by contrast, was limited by his preconception of “the typical.” Its advantage was that it allowed him to endow a character such as Oblomov with an almost mythical stature. In 1859, a resounding article titled “What Is Oblomovshchina?” by the radical critic Nikolay Dobrolyubov, hailed the central figure of the novel as the epitome of all those “superfluous men”—beginning with [Alexander] Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and continuing in works by [Alexander] Herzen and Turgenev (the term comes from Turgenev’s story “The Diary of a Superfluous Man”)—that formed a sub-genre of the Russian novel up through the 1860s and beyond. Dostoyevsky’s Nikolay Stavrogin, in The Devils, may be considered an effort to provide this type with a religious-metaphysical foundation that was beyond Goncharov’s range.