SOURCE: "Life and How to Live It," an introduction to The Same Old Story, by Ivan Goncharov, translated by Ivy Litvinova, Progress Publishers, 1975, pp. 7-14.

In the following essay, Rozov explores two contrasting views of life—the idealistic and the pragmatic—dramatized in Goncharov's The Same Old Story (A Common Story).

The author explores life by two means—the intellectual, which begins with reflections on life's phenomena, and the artistic, the aim of which is to fathom the same phenomena and grasp them not with the mind (or, rather, not only with the mind) but with all one's being, intuitively as it is called.

The former, intellectual, means requires the author to logically render the material he has studied, while the latter, artistic means allows him to express the essence of the same phenomena through a system of artistic imagery. A fiction writer gives us a picture of...