[2] An Uncommon Story had one single agenda: to prove that Ivan Turgenev has not only borrowed major ideas, character types, and conflicts from Goncharov's The Precipice to use in his Home of the Gentry, but also (in the author's words) "infused the best European literature with them."

It was the latter who deemed the publication advisable since (according to scholar N. F. Budanova) "it shed an important light upon Goncharov and Turgenev's relations," and also provided researchers with "valuable material for making a comparative analysis of both classic novels which, indeed, had striking similarities.

Goncharov, who'd launched his career in a spectacular fashion and was declared by some a "true Nikolay Gogol heir", had no serious rival as a novelist on the Russian literary scene until the late 1850s; Fyodor Dostoyevsky was still in exile, Leo Tolstoy was writing novelets and short stories, and Turgenev was considered a master of miniatures.

Of all the possible explanations for the improbable manner in which Turgenev, a master of miniatures, could have suddenly re-invented himself as a novelist, only one for Goncharov looked plausible: the younger man must have nicked his own ideas, structures, conflicts, and character types, and "with these pearls started to play his own lyre."

At least one fact was undisputed: in 1855, having returned from his long sea voyage, Goncharov laid out before Turgenev, his then good friend, the whole plan of his future third novel, which he has conceived as far back as 1849.

In An Uncommon Story he wrote: "Once Turgenev told me briefly: 'As long as one single Russian remains on Earth, Oblomov will be remembered... Another time, as I was reading him form chapters I've written in Petersburg, he suddenly rose from his divan and departed to his bedroom.

[2] Prior to the publication of Home of the Gentry, Goncharov took an opportunity to get acquainted with the original text at recitals held by Turgenev for a circle of friends.

He pointed to its author that many ideas, fragments of a plotline and situations looked very much as though they had been copied from The Precipice, the novel which was yet unpublished but very familiar to Turgenev in every detail.

"[2] On March 29, 1860, in the critic Stepan Dudyshkin's flat an "arbitrary court" took place, with Pavel Annenkov, Alexander Druzhinin and Aleksandr Nikitenko present.

The court's verdict was conciliatory: "Since both Turgenev's and Goncharov's novels have had for their ground the very same soil of Russian reality, similarities and coincidences, in ideas and even phraseology, would only be natural and for both writers excusable.

The original manuscript, a notebook, consisting of 53 pages, held in the Russian National Library, according to N.Budanova, looks very much like a rough copy that's never been revisited by the author, with many edits, some fragments blotted out so as to be unreconstructable.

But in the course of the last 2.5 years lots of things have happened related to this case and I see that, having once started, I need to continue..." There is an inscription on the envelope: "These papers which have to do with me personally, I commit to Sophia Aleksandrovna Nikitenko for her to deal with them as I asked her to.

Parallels he's drawn between The Precipice and Turgenev's Fathers and Sons were proved to be far-fetched, as was his claim that Torrents of Spring, was 'an improvisation' on The Same Old Story' part I.

On the contrary, Turgenev has been praised by many as an avid a promoter of Russian classics: his own translations of the works by Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol into French did a lot to popularize them in Europe.

Forms and methods of such popularization have been different, and it is upon Turgenev's great authority that Western views on many Russian novels are still being based upon," wrote Soviet scholar Mikhail Alekseev in 1948.