Ivan Goncharov

Ivan Goncharov wrote Oblomov — and gave the language a word: “Oblomovism.” A man lies on his sofa and cannot get up — not because he is ill, but because there is no reason to. Russia recognized itself, laughed, and was ashamed.

He was born in Simbirsk in 1812, into a merchant family. His father died early; he was raised by his godfather, a cultivated landowner with a good library. Then Moscow University, and a clerk’s post in Petersburg.

In A Common Story (1847) a nephew arrives in the capital full of dreams, and an uncle explains life to him. Oblomov (1859) took ten years to write; The Precipice (1869), another ten.

A censor by profession, a writer by vocation, he died in 1891, alone, in his Petersburg apartment.