Bücher von Ivan Goncharov

It is a winter evening, and Yegor Aduyev, the scion of a wealthy family from the landed gentry, slips into the house of Baron Neilein with the intention of asking his beautiful daughter, the eighteen-year-old Yelena, to be his wife. Will the besotted lover be successful in his pursuit or will the young coquette - who seems at times to reciprocate his feelings, but who lavished lingering looks on two dashing princes during a recent ball - shatter his hopes, his dreams and his entire world? A Serendipitous Error, an early novella of 1839, written when Goncharov was still in his twenties, is accompanied here by An Evil Malady. Taken together, these two stories - translated for the first time into English by Stephen Pearl - are further proof of the eclectic narrative skills of the celebrated author of Oblomov.

'Stephen Pearl's new translation of Goncharov's ''Obyknovennaya Istoriya,'' will introduce English speakers to a Russian classic that made its author famous, and which is just as amusing and fascinating as Goncharov's better known ''Oblomov,'' which probably owes its greater fame to the fact that the self-indulgence of the eponymous Oblomov became part of the Russian vocabulary. The same psychological insight that makes ''Oblomov'' so compelling permeates ''The Same Old Story'' with its contrast between Alexander, a young nobleman fresh from the simplicity of country life, and the older uncle, Pyotr. Readers of whatever age and from very milieu will recognize in themselves Alexander's unreal ambitions and expectations and the sadder but wiser responses of Uncle Pyotr.

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