SOURCE: A Preface to A Common Story: A Novel, by Ivan Gontcharoff, translated by Constance Garnett, London Book Co., 1906, pp. v-xii.

In the following essay, Gosse describes Goncharov's literary influences and the lasting appeal of his novels.

It is a disadvantage to Gontcharoff to be introduced for the first time to English readers who are already acquainted with the writings of his more thrilling and vivid successors, Tourgenieff, Dostoieffsky and Tolstoi. In the rapid development of the Russian realistic novel, Gontcharoff takes the second place in point of time. He was the first man to be roused by the example of Gogol, who wrote, shortly before he died in 1852: "I have pursued life in its reality, not in dreams of the imagination, and I have thus reached Him who is the source of life." So could those later masters whom I have mentioned say, but Gontcharoff, who came...