In April 1846 the 34-year-old Ivan Goncharov asked Nikolay Yazykov to read his debut novel and inquired whether it might be passed along to St. Petersburg literary critic Vissarion Belinsky for a final verdict.

"[3] "Even three months after this presentation Belinsky, each time we met, was bursting into congratulations, speaking of the bright future that awaited for me," Goncharov wrote in his Uncommon Story memoirs.

The novel is about a young Russian nobleman named Aleksander Aduev, who arrives in St. Petersburg from the provinces and loses his romanticism amidst the rampant pragmatic commercialism.

"[2] Years later, explaining the plot's major dilemma, Goncharov wrote in his "Better Late Than Never" essay: "This nephew versus uncle opposition was the reflection of the process that has been just starting at the time, when system of old concepts and customs was beginning to crumble down – and with it sentimentality, grotesque expression of feelings of love and friendship, poetisation of idleness, nets of domestic lies, knitted from preposterous, totally groundless emotionalism.

In Otechestvennye Zapiski (No.1, 1848), critic Stepan Dudyshkin, horrified by the Aduev-senior character, wrote: "I'd rather have people remaining romantics than have this business-like positivity of Pyotr Ivanovich for an alternative."

Belinsky gave such a characteristic to Aduev-junior: "He's thrice a romantic: by nature, by upbringing and by circumstances of life, while one single reasons would have been enough to misguide a good man and prompt him doing lots of silly things.

[...] But sometimes the one who feels stronger, lives on a weaker emotional scale: poetry, music and literary images make him sob, while real pain fails to, and he passes indifferently through all the suffering that's around him."

"This poor man cannot realise that it is very easy, sitting in a cabinet, to be overcome all of a sudden by fiery love to all mankind, far easier than to spend one sleepless night by the bed of a seriously ill person.

And from half a continent and three lifetimes away he can still make new readers laugh and gasp with recognition over timeless human foibles, so I am glad that he was translated, and I trust you will be, too.While Goncharov's first novel lacks the perfected artistry of Oblomov, the conversations between Alexander and his uncle are witty and gripping, the various love affairs poignant and credible, several minor characters are deliciously comic, and the whole book well worth rediscovery.