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THE PRECIPICE

Original Russian Title: _OBRYV_

By Ivan Goncharov



TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL RUSSIAN; TRANSLATOR UNKNOWN
{This text is condensed from the original.}




PREFACE

Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov (1812-1891) was one of the leading members
of the great circle of Russian writers who, in the middle of the
nineteenth century, gathered around the _Sovremmenik_ (Contemporary)
under Nekrasov's editorship--a circle including Turgenev, Dostoyevsky,
Tolstoy, Byelinsky, and Herzen. He had not the marked genius of the
first three of these; but that he is so much less known to the western
reader is perhaps also due to the fact that there was nothing
sensational either in his life or his literary method. His strength was
in the steady delineation of character, conscious of, but not deeply
disturbed by, the problems which were obsessing and distracting smaller
and greater minds.

Tolstoy has a characteristically prejudiced reminiscence: "I remember
how Goncharov, the author, a very sensible and educated man but a
thorough townsman and an aesthete, said to me that, after Turgenev,
there was nothing left to write about in the life of the lower classes.
It was all used up. The life of our wealthy people, with their
amorousness and dissatisfaction with their lives, seemed to him full of
inexhaustible subject-matter. One hero kissed his lady on her palm, and
another on her elbow, and a third somewhere else. One man is
discontented through idleness, another because people don't love him.
And