CHAPTER EIGHT

THE TWO SIDES OF

While Turgenev was at odds with his Latin and his German professors, Ivan Goncharov was occupied with an entirely diffe• rent question: "Is it Good or Bad to Live in the World?" This is the title of an essay which he wrote somewhere in the 1840's.1 Nowa• days the midlife crisis, which manifests itself in men who want to do something about the world and life, takes place somewhere around their fortieth birthday. A hundred and fifty years ago, it seems, this crisis burst out shortly after their thirtieth birthday. At any rate, the case of Goncharov brings this to mind irresistibly. To say Goncharov is to say . But Goncharov wrote two other novels besides Oblomov. They were published at great inter• vals: 1846 ; 1859 Oblomov; 1869 The Precipice. It should be noted, however, that they were all conceived in the 1840*5 (Goncharov was born in 1812) and that all three of them are fairly autobiographical. The main character is always a figure who sees his high, romantic and sunny expectations of life dis• appear into the shadows of the valleys of disillusion. Furthermore, three "letters" were published in 1848 under the tide Letters of a Friend from the Capital to a Bndegroom in the Country.2 In 1849 Oblo- mov's Dream appeared as a separate publication.* It was published again ten years later as chapter nine of the first part of Oblomov. What was it like to be "Living in the World"? Good or Bad? Well, Goncharov thought it was Good and Bad. Life has two sides, after all, according to Goncharov, and in due course both of them get a chance, at least if one does not behave too foolishly. One of these two sides is the side in which one has to do all sorts of things. In this sector reason rules. "Man brings a lot of sacrifices

1 First published in E.A. Lyatsky, Roman i zhizn. Razvitie tvorcheskoi lichnosti I.A. Goncharova. Zhizn i byt, 1812-1857, Prague 1925, p. 119-125; reprinted in A.G. Tseitlin, I.A. Goncharov, Moscow 1950, p. 445-449. * 1848, No. 12, published under the name A. Chelsky; reprinted in I.A. Goncharov, Sobranie sochinenii, komm. A.G. Tseitlina, vol. 7, Moscow (Biblioteka Ogonyok) 1952. 5 Sovremennik 1849, No. 4: "Oblomov's Dream. Episode from an Un• finished Novel". 306 THE TWO SIDES OF IVAN GONCHAROV to this despot, many of the best moments in his life". The other side is the side of feeling, the heart, beauty. "You do not have to live for the other here, here you live entirely for yourselP. Gon- charov here is the realist who does not want to forget about roman• ticism completely, or the romantic who realises that there is such a thing as reality. According to him, those who see only one of those two sides make life harder and more miserable than it is. This dichotomy can regularly be found in Goncharov's work.4 In this chapter I will focus on a number of passages which show that Goncharov's references to classical antiquity always occur in his descriptions of moments and situations that are part of the romantic side, the side of feeling and the heart. From these references it appears furthermore that the realist Goncharov rates the (novelistic) characters who are exclusively concerned with the romantic side, for instance because of their obsession with the "beauty" of classical antiquity, among those who make life un• necessarily hard and miserable. The references to classical antiquity stem partly from reality, but seem to have a symbolical function as well. Aleksandr Aduev, the main character of A Common Story, is in love. He dreams sweet dreams and walks on clouds. His uncle Pyotr Ivanych thinks this is exaggerated and unsensible. He knows how these dreams end: on a certain morning you wake up, you see your face in the mirror, and you sense that it is over. But cousin Aleksandr has not arrived at that point yet, he is completely mesmerized. In the excitement of his infatuation he blots a letter to his beloved. This makes him even more nervous. How to remove this stain? He started to scratch, polish and rub until he had made a hole in the letter. The table was shaking with all that rubbing and touched the étagère. On the étagère stood a bust of Italian alabaster, of Sophocles or Aeschylus. Because of the shock, the great writer of tragedies swung to and fro on his pedestal at first and then crashed down from the étagère and fell into pieces.5

It is not only the bust of Sophocles or Aeschylus that falls to pieces. Anyway, the thing was standing on a shaky pedestal. "I sense

4 Cf. Milton Ehre, Oblomov and his Creator. The Life and Art of Ivan Gon• charov, Princeton 1973, p. 25. 5 I.A. Goncharov, Obyknovennaya istoriya", Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1, Moscow (Gosud. izd.) 1952, p. 70.