Ivan Goncharov

Born to a merchant family in Simbirsk, Goncharov spent most of his working life as a government bureaucrat and eventually a state censor, a career that had him reading and sometimes suppressing exactly the kind of literature he was quietly writing on the side.

He sailed as secretary on the frigate Pallada during a two-year naval expedition that reached Japan among the first Russian ships to do so, and turned the voyage into a widely read travel book. Across his whole career he completed only three novels, laboring on Oblomov for the better part of a decade before its publication in 1859 made his slothful, dressing-gowned landowner an instant byword for Russian inertia.

In later years he grew increasingly convinced that Turgenev had stolen ideas from his unfinished novel The Precipice, a suspicion he never abandoned despite the lack of real evidence. He never married, and died a solitary bachelor in St Petersburg in 1891.