“The Ivan Goncharov that emerges from the pages of this collection is one of the most modern of nineteenth-century Russian writers. … Goncharov for the Twenty-First Century offers a wealth of new ways to think about his literary legacy. … The overall result is an exciting, wide-ranging, and valuable collection.” — Vadim Shneyder, The Russian Review“The editors of this attractive volume stress their desire to distance the study of Ivan Goncharov from a ‘conventional psychological, Freudian approach’ (p. xiv), while escaping the ‘unquestioned dominance of Oblomov’ (ibid.) in the author’s oeuvre. Laudable yet complicated aims. … Goncharov in the Twenty-First Century is to be praised for its ambition and its work of contextualization and expansion. It rouses readers of Goncharov from the comfortable divan of tradition on which, in our dressing-gown-clad idleness, we might prefer to subside.”— James Womack, University of Cambridge, Modern Language Review (Vol. 118, No. 1)“Goncharov in the Twenty-First Century is a much-needed reassessment of this classic Russian writer and our understanding of his place in the canon. Bringing together work by Russian and Western scholars, it allows us to see Goncharov through a variety of contemporary theoretical lenses (such as queer theory and postcolonial studies) while also shedding new light on the writer’s historical moment and how it shaped his career (for example in the interplay between Goncharov’s art and his work as a state servitor and censor). The volume promises to open up significant avenues of research for a new generation of international scholarship on this key figure.”—Anne Lounsbery, Department Chair, Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, New York University“This volume brings together an international group of outstanding scholars to explore the work of Ivan Goncharov from a wide range of contemporary methodological perspectives. Genre criticism, post-colonial and queer theory, theories of fictionality, literary-institutional and philosophical approaches—all are brilliantly represented in their application to the work of one of the most intriguing literary figures of the age of Russian realism. Goncharov appears to us here not only as a novelist, but as a civil servant, a censor, an author of a travelogue, a memoirist, and a literary critic. The book gives us Goncharov as an author who continues to provoke methodological questions and to open new areas of critical exploration.”—Ilya Kliger, Associate Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, New York University“The go-to volume in English for new approaches to Goncharov, this important book significantly reevaluates his life, work, and thought. These ten articles reframe the classic Oblomov, unify Goncharov’s novelistic trilogy, bring into focus The Precipice and The Frigate Pallada, and probe his career as public servant and censor. Goncharov emerges with surprising force here as a thinker engaged with the challenges of modernity and reflecting on historical and cultural legacies of the past. We learn how varieties of reserve, resistance and desire shape his artistic and existential choices as he negotiates contemporary social, professional and literary pressures, and how both his professional and literary careers were mangled in the jaws of the 1860s. While Goncharov’s contemporaries often poorly understood the significance of his work and saw it as outmoded, this volume identifies multiple currents in it that pull deeply towards the future and illuminates Goncharov as a quiet prophet of unconventionality.”—Sara Dickinson, Associate Professor of Russian Literature and Culture, University of Genoa
