THE PRECIPICE
The last and longest novel of Goncharóff, The Precipice, has not the unity of conception and workmanship which characterise Oblómoff. It contains wonderful pages, worthy of a writer of genius; but, all said, it is a failure. It took Goncharóff full ten years to write it, and having begun to depict in it types of one generation, he remodelled later on these types into types from the next generation—at a time when the sons differed totally from their fathers: he has told this himself in a very interesting critical sketch of his own work. As a result there is no wholeness, so to speak, in the main personages of the novel. The woman upon whom he has bestowed all his admiration, Vyéra, and whom he tries to represent as most sympathetic, is certainly interesting, but not sympathetic at all. One would say that Goncharóff’s mind was haunted by two women of two totally different types when he pictured his Vyéra—the one whom he tried—and failed—to picture in Sophie Byelovódova, and the other—the coming woman of the sixties, of whom he saw some features, and whom he admired, without fully understanding her. Vyéra’s cruelty towards her grandmother, and towards Ráisky, the hero, render her most unsympathetic, although you feel that the author quite adores her. As to the Nihilist, Vólokhoff, he is simply a caricature—taken perhaps from real life,—even seemingly from among the author’s personal acquaintances,—but obviously drawn with the desire of ventilating personal feelings of dislike. One feels a personal drama concealed behind the pages of the novel. Goncharóff’s first sketch of Vólokhoff was, as he wrote himself, some sort of Bohemian Radical of the forties who had retained in full the Don Juanesque features of the “Byronists” of the preceding generation. Gradually, however, Goncharóff, who had not yet finished his novel by the end of the fifties, transformed the figure into a Nihilist of the sixties—a revolutionist—and the result is that one has the sensation of the double origin of Vólokhoff, as one feels the double origin of Vyéra.
The only figure of the novel really true to life is the grandmother of Vyéra. This is an admirably painted figure of the simple, commonsense, independent woman of old Russia, while Martha, the sister of Vyéra, is an excellent picture of the commonplace girl, full of life, respectful of old traditions—to be one day the honest and reliable mother of a family. These two figures are the work of a great artist; but all the other figures are made-up, and consequently are failures; and yet there is much exaggeration in the tragical way in which Vyéra’s fall is taken by her grandmother. As to the background of the novel—the estate on a precipice leading to the Vólga—it is one of the most beautiful landscapes in Russian literature.