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 life, not simply a copy of life but a picture transformed into a new artistic reality, and as a result the happenings that have attracted his interest are brought in sharp relief by the brilliant light of his genius or talent, and sometimes we can even see through them.

Presumably, a real writer shows life only in its artistic representation. But in actual fact these "pure" writers are not so very many, and it may even be that there are none at all. More often than not a writer is both an artist and a philosopher.

Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov (1812-1891) has always been considered one of the most objective of Russian writers, a writer, that is, who does not let his own personal likes and dislikes influence his judgement of values. In his novels The Same Old Story (1847), Oblomov (1859) and The Precipice (1869), he portrays life objectively, indifferent as it were to both good and evil, leaving the reader to use his own judgement and pronounce the verdict.

This attitude of his is stated most clearly by one of the personages (an editor of a magazine) in the novel The Same Old Story. He says: "A writer can only write a worthwhile book when he is not influenced by his personal infatuations and predilections. He must observe life and people in general with a calm and clear look, otherwise he will express only his own ego which is of no use to anyone". In his article "Better late than never", Goncharov writes: "As for myself, I have to say that I belong to the latter category, that is, I'm carried away by my 'ability to paint' (as Belinsky said about me)."

In his first novel, The Same Old Story, Goncharov painted a picture of Russian life on a small country estate and also in St. Petersburg in the 1840s. He could not, of course, give a complete picture of life both in the country and in St. Petersburg, which no writer could do anyway, because real life has many more aspects to it than any picture of it could present. Let us now see if the resultant picture is as objective as the author wished it to be, or have any secondary considerations made it a subjective one?

The dramatic content of the novel can be called a duel fought by the two main personages: Alexander Aduyev, a young man, and his uncle Pyotr Ivanovich Aduyev. It is a fascinating, dynamic duel, with now one side scoring a point and now the other. Each fights for the right to live his life according to his own ideals which in the case of uncle and nephew are exact opposites.

Young Alexander Aduyev arrives in St. Petersburg straight from his mother's loving arms, clad from head to toe in an armour of lofty and noble impulses. He comes to the capital not prompted by idle curiosity but guided by his determination to give battle to all that is calculating, unfeeling, and vile. "I was drawn here by an unconquerable desire, by a thirst for noble activities," exclaims this fledgling, this naive idealist. And it is not just some one person that he challenges, but the whole world of wickedness. A poor little homegrown Don Quixote! And, mind you, a Don Quixote who has also read and listened to a lot of high-sounding rubbish.

The subtle irony with which Goncharov describes this young man whom he views with quite obvious mockery—his leaving home; the vows of everlasting love he makes to Sonechka and his friend Pospelov, and his first timid steps in the capital—endears this young man to us but the image already predetermines the outcome of the duel between the nephew and the uncle. Writers do not speak with irony about genuine heroes who are capable of performing great deeds.

And here is the opponent: Pyotr Ivanovich Aduyev, 39, a metropolitan, owner of a glass and porcelain factory, a high-ranking official, and a man with a sober mind and good practical sense. Goncharov endows him with a sense of humour and even sarcasm, but he himself does not treat this character with irony. And this makes us presume that he, the uncle, is the real hero of the novel, that he is the one the author invites us to model ourselves on.

These two characters who had attracted Goncharov's interest were the day's most striking types. Even before the plot of the novel had quite taken shape in his mind, Goncharov wrote: "The encounter between the nephew, a dreamer with a mild character who has led an idle, sheltered life, and the uncle with his practical mind, gave me a hint of a motif that was only just beginning to develop in St. Petersburg. This motif was the faint glimmerings of an awareness that it was imperative to be doing, not routine work, but to engage in real, vigorous activity to fight the Russia-wide stagnation."

Goncharov very much wants to take this "doing" man as a model for himself and, what is more, offer him as a model to readers.

With what sparkle he has written the dialogues of the uncle and nephew! How calmly, confidently and peremptorily does the uncle rout the nephew who is so impulsive but not armed with the terrible weapon of logic and experience! Every word of criticism spoken by the uncle is killing and irrefutable. It is irrefutable because what he says is true. The truth is grim, hurtful and pitiless sometimes, but it is the truth.

Take the episode where the uncle ridicules the "tangible signs of intangible relations"—the ring and the lock of hair which Sonechka had given her dear Alexander to take with him to St. Petersburg. "And is this what you carried with you over a thousand miles? You should have brought another sack of dried raspberries instead," says the uncle, and chucks these precious symbols of everlasting love out of the window. To young Alexander his uncle's cold words and action seem monstrous. Can he ever forget his dear Sonechka! Of course not. Never!

Alas, the uncle proves right. Very soon Alexander falls in love with Nadenka Lubetskaya, he falls in love with all the ardour of youth, with all the passion which is part of his nature, recklessly and blindly. He has completely forgotten Sonechka. His love for Nadenka fills his whole life. His radiant happiness will last forever. And as for the business which is uncle always talking about, what does he care for business when he spends all his waking hours at the Lubetskys' country place? Oh, that uncle of his, he has nothing but business on his mind! He's so unfeeling. How can he have the heart to say that Nadenka, his Nadenka, this angel, this perfection, might jilt him! "Who, Nadenka?" Alexander cries, appalled. "That angel, that embodiment of sincerity. . . ." And the uncle replies: "But for all that a woman—and she will probably deceive you." Oh, these men with the sober, pitiless minds and worldly experience! The uncle proved right again: Nadenka did jilt him. She fell in love with a count, and gave Alexander his congé. The world was painted black for him at once. And there was his uncle with his: "I told you so, I told you so."

Alexander fails with a crash in absolutely everything: in love, in friendship, in his attempts to write, in work. Everything, absolutely everything that his teachers and books had taught him turned out to be so much rot, and with a faint crunch it was ground to dust by the iron tread of sober reason and practicalness. In the most dramatic scene where Pyotr Ivanovich and his wife come to see Alexander who, driven to despair has taken to drink and gone to pieces, the uncle parries the nephew's self-defensive mumbling: "What I demanded of you was not just my own fancy." And his wife asks: "Whose then?"—"The age's."

Here is the key to the behaviour of Pyotr Ivanovich Aduyev! The bidding of the age. The age demanded such behaviour. He says: "Look at the young men of today—what fine fellows they are! What mental activity, what energy, how deftly and easily they cope with all that nonsense which in your old-fashioned language is called upsets, sufferings, and God knows what else!"

This is the culmination of the novel. The opponent's decisive blow. Such is the age! "And is everybody bound to obey whatever this age of yours invents? Is all this so sacred, is it all so true?" Alexander makes a last feeble protest. "It is all sacred," his uncle replies brusquely.

The question of how must a person live—guided by his feelings or his reason—may well be called an eternal problem. Strange as this may sound, the other day, at a readers' conference in the Moscow Polygraphic Institute where I was the speaker, I received the following note from one of the students: "Please tell us how best to live—at the bidding of the heart or the mind?" And this, mind you, in the seventies of the 20th century! A hundred and twenty five years after The Same Old Story was written.

There is one extremely significant passage in the novel.

Alexander says: "According to you, feeling also has to be controlled like steam: let out a little, then stop abruptly, now open the valve, now close it. . . ." To which his uncle replies: "Yes, that's what Nature gave man this valve for—it's reason."

Through the whole novel the reader follows these two ways of living life. At moments it seems to us that Goncharov is advising us, in no uncertain terms, to live by reason and only reason, or at least to use our reason to verify our feelings, as Salieri used algebra to verify his harmony. But that advice comes from a thinker, a man who reflects on life philosophically. Had Goncharov been only that he would certainly have proved to us that that is how we must live. But he was an artist before all else, and a realistic artist at that. He portrays life as it is and not as he would like to see it. Being a true son of his age, Goncharov is wholly on the side of the older Aduyev, as he himself admits when he says: "The duel of the uncle and the nephew also reflected the breaking up, which had just begun, of old notions and mores—sentimentality, ridiculously exaggerated feelings of friendship and love, poetised idleness, the family lie of affected, never really existing devotion. . . . All this was outliving its day, and receding into the past: faint glimmerings of a new dawn appeared, of something sober, businesslike and sound."

Intuitively, Goncharov felt that the older Aduyev was a man of the new type. He was that indeed. And on him the writer pinned his hopes.

What sort of man was he, this Pyotr Ivanovich Aduyev, this model worthy of emulation, this sober-minded man of business? Historically, we've had him classified long ago: this was a new type, a capitalist, a man of business and sober calculation, who came to replace people who clung to their decrepit feudal mores.

In the novel, the older Aduyev always speaks of the need to be calculating in everything. In business. In friendship. In love. In marriage. And coming from him it never sounds discreditable. Even in art one must be calculating, and when his nephew tells him he is writing a book the uncle asks: "And are you sure you have talent? Without it you will merely be an unskilled labourer in the field of art, and what's the good of that? If you have talent—that's another matter. It would be worth while working. You can do a lot of good. That's capital—worth a great deal more than your hundred souls." Alexander gasps: "Do you measure that by money, too?"—"How else? The more people read what you write, the more money you will be paid."

This is calculation expressed in its most realistic form—money. Everything is measured with money.

"You seem unable to picture a moneyless tragedy!"

"Some tragedy, if it's not worth a farthing."

The measure of all values is money.

Goncharov the thinker and the sociologist wants to see the ideal in this new type of man, in Pyotr Ivanovich Aduyev. But Goncharov the artist will not let his vision become blurred. In fathoming the truth, the artist is, in a certain sense, more accurate than the thinker, for—to quote Chekhov—"Fine literature is, in fact, called fine literature because it paints life the way it really is. Its designation is to show the truth—unconditional and honest."

With a feeling of unquestionable superiority, from the heights of his experience, worldly wisdom and age, Pyotr Ivanovich Aduyev shatters his nephew's naive and pure faith in the "world of perfection", and shatters it very thoroughly. This is what now goes on in the soul of the once ebullient young Alexander:

"He inspected his life, questioned his heart, his head, and was appalled to discover that not a single dream, not a single rosy hope was left anywhere—all that was behind him. The mist had dispersed, and he was confronted, as by a desert, by naked reality. Heavens, what boundless space! What a dull, joyless prospect! The past had perished, the future was destroyed, there was no such a thing as happiness. All was chaos—and yet one must go on living."

Alexander, reduced to a most pitiful state, tries and fails to commit suicide. Goncharov does not spare him, and strips him of all glamour. No doubt that's exactly what happens to people when they become so utterly disillusioned.

"At least teach me what to do now, Uncle." Alexander cries in the extremes of helplessness.

"Do? Why . . . go back to the country."

Cursing the city where he has buried his finest feelings and lost the strength to live, Alexander goes back to the country. He is defeated. It is his uncle who won the duel. He triumphed over Alexander completely.

It is a vain hope that in the country he will be resurrected. Resurrection is impossible, all he can have is a change of heart. And this is what does happen. Strange as it may seem, at home he began to feel homesick for St. Petersburg, that same evil, sinister and soulless city which he cursed such a short while ago. New thoughts began to stir in Alexander's changed mind: "In what way is my uncle better than I am? Am I incapable of finding a path for myself? . . . I cannot stay here and perish. . . . And my career, my fortune? I alone lag behind—and what for? Why?" And he rushes back to St. Petersburg to make his career and his fortune.

He writes to his aunt: "It is not a madman, a dreamer, a disillusioned being, or a provincial who is coming back to you, but simply a man like those of which Petersburg is full, such a one as I ought to have become long ago."

I have long noticed this phenomenon: there are young men who are prone to idealise reality, who rant and rave against any sign of human weakness and demand ideal behaviour from others, but when they grow up and see their contemporaries who may not be so very ideal but who have advanced far ahead along their ordinary course of life, these young men suddenly clutch at their heads and start catching up with them. They must catch up with them at all costs! And here these same sweet idealists turn into extremely practical men who will stop at nothing to attain their belated aims, and become far nastier characters than the people they have just been accusing of all the mortal sins.

This is precisely what happened to Alexander. This naive, provincial idealist became a monster, pure and simple. Goncharov debunks his hero's claims to any charm completely. He seems to be telling us that such is the end of a man who enters life with spurious notions about it. First he bruises his ideal forehead against the realistic sharp corners of life, then this forehead hardens, a horny growth sprouts on it, and the man becomes a rhinoceros.

Let us see now, what were the fruits reaped by the winner, by Pyotr Ivanovich Aduyev, the author's favourite hero in whom he saw a man of business, capable of fighting the Russia-wide stagnation? Strangely and even alogically, the fruits of victory were one more bitter than the other. This man with a realistic, sober world outlook, has spiritually murdered his nephew to whom he was rather attached in his own way, and reduced the wife he loved to a shadow threatened with TB. At the end of the novel we find Pyotr Ivanovich planning to sell his factory, retiring and dreaming of one thing only—to go and live in Italy where he may be able to prolong the life of his wife.

The nephew has changed into the uncle, and with a vengeance too. The uncle has to a certain extent changed into the nephew. Quite involuntarily Goncharov, who tried to prove to us the advantages of sober reason and a calculating mind, now screams at the top of his voice that loving your fellow-creatures is more important than any calculations or business considerations in the world. Because he was a genuine artist, Goncharov saw no way out of this dramatic collision, no possibility of combining big business with the essentially human. The world of private enterprise is a cruel world indeed and it will take its toll of victims.

In the course of the whole novel a struggle was fought between Goncharov the thinker and Goncharov the artist. The artist won. And we have every right to place him with those outstanding 19th century writers whose realism, to quote F. Engels, "could manifest itself irrespective of views."

I would advise the student who sent me that note at the readers' conference to re-read Goncharov's The Same Old Story. To be sure, the novel does not give a straightforward answer to the question. But this old novel will greatly help the young to find the answers to some of the questions posed by our own 20th century.