Cliff

"Cliff" (1869) - the final novel of the trilogy, which I. A. Goncharov (1812-1891) perceived as a whole. “The Scripture of this novel was drawn for twenty years - it could not be otherwise. He was written how the period of life was drawn, ”the author answered about "cliff", summing up the results of his creative activity. The hero of the novel by the artist Paradise is an artistic nature striving to realize his ideal in works of art. But his problem is quite "Oblomovskaya" - the inability to coordinate the ideal and reality, to separate his own life from art. For Goncharov, this is a dangerous symptom of the disease of Russian society, which has not managed to get used to the stormy era of political and economic reforms. Criticism met a “cliff” coolly. "Saltykov-Shchedrin called him with an awkward and untimely feat. As for the untimely, he, perhaps, turned out to be right: even the most literary form - "Matryoshka" (the author’s novel about how his hero is trying to write a novel) - "Cliff" greatly ahead of his time. "Such a “cliff” seems to be a novel not from the past literature, but from its distant future - something in the spirit of a “gift” Nabokov rather than the prose of Turgenev ”(Kirill Zubkov).

The accompanying article by Kirill Zubkov

Kirill Yuryevich Zubkov (born 1986) - candidate of philological sciences, teacher of St. Petersburg State University, employee of IRLI RAS (Pushkinsky House), specialist in the history of Russian literature in the mid -19th century, author of several dozen books and articles, a researcher at the preparation of the full Collected works and letters of I. A. Goncharov in 20 volumes. The sphere of scientific interests, in addition to Goncharov’s work, includes the history of literary criticism, the interaction of literature and censorship, as well as the work of A. N. Ostrovsky