Ordinary Story

Ivan Goncharov

Description

An Ordinary Story describes the coming of age of Alexander Aduyev, a romantic young man from the provinces who moves to Petersburg in search of love and a career. Psychologically acute in its delineation of Aduyev's relationship with his successful and unsentimental mentor uncle, this is a work of complexity and great charm. Featuring a stage adaptation, this edition of An Ordinary Story will enhance Goncharov's reputation as one of the legends of Russian literary history.

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 07 avril 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781468311969
• Langue: English

Extrait

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This edition first published in the United States in 2015 by The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
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Ivan Goncharov, An Ordinary Story and Viktor Rozov’s stage adaptation of the novel
Translated by Marjorie L . Hoover
Copyright © 1994 by Ardis Publishers
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goncharov, Ivan Aleksandrovich, 1812-1891.
[Obyknovennaia istoriia . English]
An Ordinary Story / Ivan Goncharov; translated by Marjorie L . Hoover
p. cm.
“Includes a translation of Viktor Rozov’s stage adaptation of the novel which premiered in Moscow in 1966”–CIP data sheet.
ISBN 0-87501-088-1 (alk . paper)
I . Rozo v , Viktor, 1913- Obyknovennaia istoriia . English.
1994 . II . Hoover, Marjorie L . III . Title.
PG3337.G60213 1994
891.73’3–dc20       93-11284                             CIP
Manufactured in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1076-4 US
ISBN: 978-0-7156-5002-8 UK
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
AN ORDINARY STORY
NOTES
“AN ORDINARY STORY,” STAGE ADAPTATION BY VIKTOR ROZOV
INTRODUCTION
By date of birth, 1812, Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov was thirteen years younger than Alexander Pushkin and two years older than Mikhail Lermontov . He met both writers while studying at Moscow University, read their work as it appeared and felt their literary concerns as a contemporary . Goncharov’s first important novel, An Ordinary Story ( Obyknovennaia istoriia ), was also conceived in the first half of the nineteenth century and in 1847 began to appear in installments in The Contemporary (Sovremennik) , the magazine founded by Pushkin . Yet despite these ties to an earlier era, the author and his novel anticipate the second half of the century, the period following the bourgeois revolution of 1848 which so incisively changed government and society in Western Europe and reverberated in Eastern Europe as well . Goncharov rightly belongs, then, alongside Ivan Turgenev, Lev Tolstoy and Alexander Ostrovsky in the group photograph of contributors to The Contemporary . At mid-century they were considered a promising new generation of writers.
These new writers have been called realists because they described the contemporary scene as they saw it in a critical light, in so far as the censorship allowed . The most quoted literary critic of the 1840s, Vissarion Belinsky, strongly concurred in the criticism implicit in An Ordinary Story , hailing Goncharov’s first novel as “a terrific blow struck at Romanticism, day-dreaming, sentimentality, provincialism” (in a letter to Vasily Botkin, 15-17 March 1847) . Nikolai Dobrolyubov, the arbiter of the next decade, the 1850s, made the title hero of Goncharov’s next and best-known novel famous by entitling his article about it “What is Oblomovism? ” Though the novel’s hero, Oblomov, like Hamlet, sees what he must do to set the time right, he relapses ever more into inaction and ultimately fails to do anything . The same conflict between romantically idealistic plans and the practical action needed to realize them obtains in An Ordinary Story . Here this conflict, so relevant to the early industrialization of Russia, is embodied in the confrontation between a younger idealist, Alexander Aduyev, and an older pragmatist, his uncle Pyotr . Alexander’s experiences and discussions with his uncle form a significant part of his education and he develops to maturity under Pyotr’s tutelage . In essence, then, this is an ordinary story familiar since the Greek myths of Jason, the medieval epics of Parsifal and the Renaissance picaresque novels about heroes from Simplicissimus to Tom Jones and on.
Here, though, we have a specifically Russian hero set against a Russian background . The realist Goncharov confessed himself incapable of fantasizing either character or event, so both derive from his image of the reality he knew: “…there opened before my eyes, as if seen from an elevation, a whole region, with cities, villages and a crowd of people.…” 1 How much of this author’s experience of reality is used in An Ordinary Story ? Certainly Alexander Aduyev’s history is partly autobiographical . Like him Goncharov came from the provinces, though he was not born on a farm, but was the son of a tradesman, a grain dealer in a river town, the provincial capital of Simbirsk on the Volga (now Ulyanovsk) . Goncharov’s father died when he was seven, and his education and that of his sisters and his older brother Nikolai was left to his energetic mother and a godfather, an estate owner and much-traveled retired naval officer with wide experience and an interest in the humanities . At the private boarding school to which he was sent at age eight with his brother Goncharov gained a fluency in French, German and English and a background in literature . Both boys, however, were then made to spend eight years at the Moscow Commerce Institute, supposedly in preparation for earning a living . Their mother withdrew Ivan from the course two years early at the time that Nikolai finished, whereupon Ivan studied literature and philosophy at Moscow University . He read widely there and went often to the theater (1831-34) . Alexander Aduyev’s university experience reflects that of his creator.
After finishing his studies at the university, while awaiting his diploma, Goncharov spent the summer at home and at his godfather’s prompting he took the post of secretary-for-all-work to the provincial governor in Simbirsk . The governor strikingly showed off the virtues and vices of his aristocratic heritage . Trained for nothing but the military, he cut a dashing figure with his pretty wife and sixteen-year-old daughter, for whom Goncharov had to serve as dancing partner, in addition to taking practically sole responsibility for the government . The figurehead governor might have survived longer the crush between mortgage payments on his impoverished estates, gambling debts and his extravagant Parisian tastes, had he not carried on in full view his final profligacy, womanizing . Upon the governor’s inevitable reassignment Goncharov followed the family to St . Petersburg in a second coach . Throughout that long journey in May 1835, with its numerous stops, he had to tend to an impossible coachmate, the governor’s gifted alcoholic ghost writer, who alternated between flat-out unconsciousness and violent attacks of delirium tremens . Like his fictional hero, then, Goncharov first arrived in the capital by coach, but one loaded with difficulties, not with the gifts of a solicitous mother.
Again like Alexander Aduyev, Goncharov at once entered government service . Until his retirement in 1867 he worked there full-time, first as translator for the Ministry of Finance; after 1856 he served as government censor and rose finally to the fourth highest rank of Actual Councillor of State with the appellation “Your Excellency.” Known for his writing, Goncharov obtained the assignment of secretary to an admiral who in 1852 went round the world to inspect Russian possessions, including those in North America . This resulted in Goncharov’s travel journal, The Frigate Pallada , which has at last been translated into English, whereupon it was praised as a near masterpiece. 2
At first Goncharov supplemented his government clerk’s pay by tutoring two sons of the painter Nikolai Maykov . He was soon also spending his free time in the merry Maykov circle with weekend picnics and parties where he met writers and contributed to an in-house literary magazine . He never founded a family of his own, for in 1855 he was rejected by the one love of his life, Elizaveta Tolstaya . However, his housekeeper, Alexandra Treygut, who was with him at his death from pneumonia in 1891, and to whom he left his estate, is sometimes assumed to have been his common-law wife . Society at the Maykovs freed him from a bachelor’s solitude . He discussed his literary plans there, as he did also with Turgenev, whom he first met at Belinsky’s . Goncharov talked to Turgenev and others several times about his ideas for his third and last major novel, The Precipice ( Obryv