In a November 9, 1856 letter to his friend Baron A. E. Vrangel, Fedor Dostoevskii described Ivan Goncharov as having “the soul of a government official, without a single idea, and with the eyes of a steamed fish, whom, as if as a joke, God endowed with a brilliant talent.” Goncharov in the Twenty-First Century explores such contradictions in the author's life, work, and historical milieu in a collection of ten essays that, according to editors Ingrid Kleespies and Lyudmila Parts, “view Goncharov's texts anew through the lenses of contemporary literary and cultural theory” drawn from fields like queer studies, genre studies, and post-colonial studies” (xiv-xv). The volume is framed in the major historical, cultural, and political shifts of the mid-nineteenth century in Russia and deals with an array of issues that include gender, sexuality, consumerism, class, political extremism, mental health, economy, imperialism, globalization, the public sphere, modernization, and market forces. Chapters are organized into thematic categories, each consisting of two or three contributions. Part One deals with Goncharov's life as both writer and literary censor; Part Two offers readings of his novels through select western philosophies; Part Three considers Goncharov's challenges to realism; and Part Four focuses on the genre and imperialist framing of Frigate Pallada.
Part One offers two translations of essays by Kirill Zubkov and Sergei Guskov published in Russian in 2017. Zubkov provides a well-researched history of Goncharov's position as government censor, its effect on his work, and Goncharov's frustrated efforts to build relationships between the community of writers (the public sphere) and the Main Directorate of Censorship (the state). While Zubkov concludes that Goncharov's dual roles were ultimately incompatible, Guskov—citing richness of language and variety of social perspective—considers the relationship between “the official” and “the creative” as a “fruitful interplay” that had a positive aesthetic influence on Goncharov's work (15).
Part Two is aptly named “The Challenges of Philosophy,” which might describe the familiar balancing act between philosophical frameworks and close readings. Vladimir Ivantsov sees parallels between specific Platonic texts and passages in Oblomov, although he tends to overlook the well discussed irony of Goncharov's narrating consciousness, especially apparent in references to classical Greek ideals and imagery. Victoria Juharyan considers Goncharov's three novels as an intentional if ironic demonstration of G.W.F. Hegel's dialectical understanding of historical development, seen mostly in the characters’ movement from youthful romanticism to pragmatism in later life. Sonja Koroliov's chapter on desire and scarcity uses several theories—among them sentimentalism, consumerism, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Jacques Derrida—that ultimately reinforce traditional assumptions about Oblomov's perceived immobility and failure to advance in life. In the context of economy and free will, Koroliov glances at Oblomov's serf Zakhar, but, like the rest of the volume, side steps the issue of slavery and the Emancipation, important elements of rapid social changes and the problematics of nostalgia in Russia at the time Goncharov was writing.
Part Three explores Goncharov's implicit challenges to realism, starting with Valerie Sobol's excellent piece on the use of the Gothic in The Precipice as a way to probe the sense of cultural anxiety at the heart of the trilogy and champion artistic truths and the creative imagination over realism's mimetic reproduction of reality. Ani Kokobobo and Devin McFadden's chapter uses Milton Ehre's description of Goncharov's creative process as the foundation of their analysis of The Precipice as a queer rejection of family life that is “settled, stable, and formed over a long period of time” (133). The essay focuses on Mark Volokhov as the symbol of “queer non-heteronormativity” whose alternative lifestyle subverts the family as a social institution with its traditional expectations of marriage and reproduction (134). Although twenty-first century theory expands the understanding of “queer” in a way to allow such a reading, the chapter might also have considered Goncharov's complex and deeply ironic nineteenth century references to Mark the Evangelist (the lion-like features, the “naked man,” the iconography with apples, the connections to Rome) and his own revolutionary ideas about marriage.
Three essays make up the final part of the volume with readings of Frigate Pallada. Aleksei Balakin's chapter—a translation of his contribution to a 2012 volume on Goncharov—opens the section with a broad discussion of the genre of travelogue in the nineteenth century, although direct analyses of Goncharov's text is minimal. Ingrid Kleespies offers an outstanding analysis of the use and themes of various forms of optics in Goncharov's representation of London. Her insightful reading is situated in important and recent scholarship as it considers the effect of the mechanical or mechanized gaze on Goncharov's understanding of realism, modernism, and empire. Lyudmila Parts contributes an intriguing study on the use of laughter in colonial discourse and the construction of empire. Focusing on “micro encounters” in Frigate, Parts parses types of laughter and how they might objectify, dehumanize, or establish social power structures. Like other essays in this collection, Parts's analysis begs the question of serfdom as a form of domestic colonization (with the portrayal of Oblomov's Zakhar traditionally perceived as a comic element), which, on the eve of the Emancipation, certainly fed the cultural anxiety that Parts describes. Indeed, like the Gogolian reference in the title (“Who are you laughing at?”), the essay suggests that laughter is fundamentally self-revealing.
There are some issues with the volume overall, including a distracting number of typographical errors in some chapters, a rather sparse index, and the use by some authors of various translations of Goncharov's work instead of an authoritative Russian text. The collection would also have benefitted from more demonstrated awareness among chapters. Especially when authors contradict each other or interpret identical passages, readers may be interested in knowing more about the interplay of ideas among the scholars. Bibliographic references to all of the original Russian essays for the three (extremely well) translated chapters would also be of value to researchers. Overall, disregarding the inconsistencies mostly typical of a volume of collected essays, Goncharov in the Twenty-First Century offers many fine chapters that provide new information and insight to reacquaint readers with an author many think they know well.
