Goncharov was also surprisingly and unconventionally frank and even graphic in depicting both male and female sexuality. But above all, Goncharov was a great master at presenting, often in a matter-of-fact and sadly ironic way, conflicting impulses and unresolvable tensions.
Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov was born on 6 June 1812 into a well-to-do merchant family in Simbirsk, a medium-sized Volga town that was also the birthplace of one of Goncharov's literary idols and early influences, Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin. Simbirsk was provincial and slow-paced; Goncharov, though fond of the place, often described it in somnolent terms. "The whole appearance of my home town," he wrote in 1887, "was a perfect picture of sleepiness and stagnation. . . . One wanted to fall asleep as well while looking at all this immobility, at the sleepy windows with their curtains and blinds drawn, at the sleepy faces one saw inside the houses or on the streets. 'We have nothing to do!,' they seemed to be saying while yawning and lazily looking at you. 'We are in no hurry.'"
Goncharov's father, Aleksandr Ivanovich Goncharov, traded in grain and owned a candle factory.
This is a free page. This page contains 186 words. This
biography contains 10,768 words (approx. 36 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov Access Pass.
