16 Facts About Ivan Goncharov

Ivan Goncharov served in many official capacities, including the position of censor.

Ivan Goncharov was educated at a boarding school, then the Moscow College of Commerce, and finally at Moscow State University.

Ivan Goncharov was educated first by his mother, Avdotya Matveevna, and then his godfather Nikolay Nikolayevich Tregubov, a nobleman and a former Russian Navy officer.

In 1830, Ivan Goncharov decided to quit the college, and in 1831, he enrolled in Moscow State University's Philology Faculty to study literature, arts, and architecture.

Unlike Alexander Herzen, Vissarion Belinsky or Nikolay Ogaryov, his fellow Moscow University students, Ivan Goncharov remained indifferent to the ideas of political and social change that were gaining popularity at the time.

In 1834, Ivan Goncharov graduated from the University and returned home to enter the chancellery of Simbirsk governor AM Zagryazhsky.

In 1852 Ivan Goncharov embarked on a long journey through England, Africa, Japan, and back to Russia, on board the frigate Pallada, as a secretary for Admiral Yevfimy Putyatin, whose mission was to inspect Alaska and other distant outposts of the Empire, and to establish trade relations with Japan.

Ivan Goncharov returned to Saint Petersburg on 25 February 1855, after traveling through Siberia and the Urals, this continental leg of the journey lasting six months.

Ivan Goncharov warned against seeing his work as any kind of political or social statement, insisting it was a subjective piece of writing, but critics praised the book as a well-balanced, unbiased report, containing valuable ethnographic material, but some social critique.

Openly condemning 'nihilistic' tendencies and what he called "pathetic, imported doctrines of materialism, socialism, and communism", Ivan Goncharov found himself the target of heavy criticism.

In 1867, Ivan Goncharov retired from his censorial position to devote himself entirely to writing The Precipice, a book he later called "my heart's child", which took him twenty years to finish.

Towards the end of this tormenting process Ivan Goncharov spoke of the novel as a "burden" and an "insurmountable task" that blocked his development and made him unable to advance as a writer.

Ivan Goncharov planned a fourth novel, set in the 1870s, but it failed to materialize.

Ivan Goncharov wrote short stories: his Servants of an Old Age cycle as well as "The Irony of Fate", "Ukha" and others, described the life of rural Russia.

Ivan Goncharov died in Saint Petersburg on 27 September 1891, of pneumonia.

Ivan Goncharov was buried at the Novoye Nikolskoe Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra.