SOURCE: "Concerning a Monistic Conception of Goncharov's Art," in Soviet Studies in Literature, Vol. XXII, No. 2-3, Spring-Summer, 1986, pp. 90-122.

In the following essay originally published in Literaturovedenie. Sbornik statei in 1928, Pereverzev presents a unified assessment of Goncharov's novels, identifying the common traits of his heroes as manifestations of the bourgeois "smart operator" at a time of dramatic social and cultural change in Russia.

One of the most essential tasks in the scholarly analysis of a writer's artistic corpus consists in clarifying the links among his images and their mutual interdependence, the inner logic of their concatenation. Only by clarifying such links can we reach an understanding of the essence of a writer's art and only thus can we achieve a monistic view of the writer and reveal the fundamental unity in the many and varied images in his works.

Serious criticism has always striven for a monistic...