An Uncommon Story

Ivan Goncharov

In the mid-1850s, Ivan Goncharov and Ivan Turgenev were on friendly terms. Goncharov, who'd launched his career in a spectacular fashion and was declared by some a "true Nikolay Gogol heir", had no serious rival as a novelist on the Russian literary scene until the late 1850s; Fyodor Dostoyevsky was still in exile, Leo Tolstoy was writing novelets and short stories, and Turgenev was considered a master of miniatures.

The success of Home of the Gentry must have come as a surprise to Goncharov, who'd never considered Turgenev a novelist. In a letter dated March 28, 1859, he wrote: "Would it be permissible for me to comment on your talent? I'd say you've got a gift for drawing tender landscapes, and have a keen ear, but you seem to be eager to erect monumental structures [...] and give us drama.[3] Goncharov's opinion seemingly never altered.[2]

Literary historians argued later that Turgenev's overnight success might have seemed totally undeserved for Goncharov, who, for quite a while, felt like he was the only master of his field. Goncharov produced one novel in a decade, but his new rival did it in a seemingly fleeting manner, which must have made the injustice look even more gross.

Of all the possible explanations for the improbable manner in which Turgenev, a master of miniatures, could have suddenly re-invented himself as a novelist, only one for Goncharov looked plausible: the younger man must have nicked his own ideas, structures, conflicts, and character types, and "with these pearls started to play his own lyre."

Some commentators later dismissed such claims as born out of jealousy, aggravated by Goncharov's natural suspiciousness, impressionability, and general hypochondria. Others argued that this would have been too simple an explanation, for while many of Goncharov's allegations were far-fetched, some were not altogether groundless. At least one fact was undisputed: in 1855, having returned from his long sea voyage, Goncharov laid out before Turgenev, his then good friend, the whole plan of his future third novel, which he has conceived as far back as 1849.[2]

Ivan Turgenev

In 1887, four years after Turgenev's death, Goncharov attached a note to this novel's original text, which read: "This manuscript contains the material for a novel which in 1869, as Vestnik Evropy was about to publish it, I gave the title The Precipice. Before that I used to refer to is as Raisky, the Artist and was freely expounding upon it to my fellow writers, mostly to Turgenev. It was to him that in 1855, soon after returning from my around-the-world journey, I recounted in detail, in the course of several meetings, all the details of it [...] because he, being a perceptive and sensitive man of art, seemed to be most sympathetic to those of my works that he promised a great future for."[2]

Judging by Goncharov and Turgenev's correspondence, in the mid-1850s, the two men were very close. Goncharov valued Turgenev as a well-educated, clever critic with an impeccable literary taste. In An Uncommon Story he wrote: "Once Turgenev told me briefly: 'As long as one single Russian remains on Earth, Oblomov will be remembered... Another time, as I was reading him form chapters I've written in Petersburg, he suddenly rose from his divan and departed to his bedroom. 'Old sparrow as I am, you touched me to tears', he said upon his return, wiping his eyes."[4]

Tellingly, Turgenev even prompted minor detail to Oblomov, namely, in the scene where Olga and Schtoltz converse in Switzerland. Goncharov acknowledged Turgenev's priority in "discovering nihilism", and admitted there was historical and artistic authenticity to Bazarov's character. In the late 1850s relations between the two apparently deteriorated, and in March 1860 things came to a head.[2]

An Uncommon Story was first published in 1924 by the Russian Public Library archives, with a foreword by D. I. Abramovich. It was preceded by the publication in 1923 of the whole of the Goncharov-Turgenev correspondence by Boris Engelgardt, who accompanied it with a thorough analysis of the two authors' relations.[7] For decades, the issue lay dormant.

Then in 1972, A. Batyuto suggested Goncharov might have been a major influence on early Turgenev, after all.[8] Having drawn the comparative analysis of Turgenev's On the Eve and Goncharov's The Precipice, the author came to the conclusion: the former most obviously used "methods of novel-structuring he'd borrowed from other writers, Goncharov included". According to Batyuto, when it came to the art of building up a novel, Turgenev in his early days was certainly taking cues from Goncharov.[9]

In 1976, O. Demikhovskaya in an article called "I.A. Goncharov and I.S. Turgenev" criticized the 'biased approach' to the problem demonstrated by Engelgardt, who in 1923 made an emphasis on Goncharov's personal idiosyncrasies as being the major factor behind the conflict. She presented Turgenev as the guilty party and recounted numerous quarrels he had with Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.[10]

According to V. Nezdvedtsky, the reason behind the two writers' conflict was "the typological resemblances of both and Goncharov's jealousy of his more fortunate rival." The author pointed out that, while working on a completely new type of Russian novel (and leaving behind Grigorovich and Pisemsky with their traditionalism), both Goncharov (who first came up with the idea of plotline's "poetisation") and Turgenev were up against common challenges and were therefore keenly aware of each other's works. This by no means involved plagiarism: Goncharov himself in An Uncommon Story drew nothing but parallels, the critic argued. Nezdvetsky thought the conflict might have been easily resolved should Turgenev have been more straightforward in admitting his earlier influences.[11] N. Budanova thought such thing would have been impossible at the time for it would have been perceived by the public as a confession of plagiarism.[2]

While the fact that The Precipice and Home of the Gentry had a lot in common, Goncharov's other allegations have been unanimously dismissed by literary historians as groundless. Parallels he's drawn between The Precipice and Turgenev's Fathers and Sons were proved to be far-fetched, as was his claim that Torrents of Spring, was 'an improvisation' on The Same Old Story' part I.[2] Goncharov's claims that some European authors started to use his ideas and character types through Turgenev's influence are seen to be void, although Budanova noted that some contemporary critics might have prompted such an idea to the author who in his later life grew to be highly impressionable and suspicious. For example, Aleksey Suvorin in his article "The French Society in Gustave Flaubert's new novel" suggested that the Sentimental Education' main character Frédéric Moreau was "akin to the so-called 'people of the 1840s' in Russia and that he was "similar to Raisky... its just that Flaubert has treated his character more objectively than our respected novelist."[12] Some similarities between Goncharov's characters and those of Madame Bovary have been mentioned by Russian critics too.[2]

Goncharov's allegations, made in An Uncommon Story, that Turgenev did a lot of harm to Russian literature in the West, have been proved invalid. On the contrary, Turgenev has been praised by many as an avid a promoter of Russian classics: his own translations of the works by Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol into French did a lot to popularize them in Europe. Several translations of important Russian works have been made through his recommendations. "We have every reason to insist that Turgenev preached Russian literature to the West. Forms and methods of such popularization have been different, and it is upon Turgenev's great authority that Western views on many Russian novels are still being based upon," wrote Soviet scholar Mikhail Alekseev in 1948.[13]