GONÇALVES DIAS, ANTONIO (1823-1864), Brazilian lyric poet, was born near the town of Caxias, in Maranhão. From the university of Coimbra, in Portugal, he returned in 1845 to his native province, well-equipped with legal lore, but the literary tendency which was strong within him led him to try his fortune as an author at Rio de Janeiro. Here he wrote for the newspaper press, ventured to appear as a dramatist, and in 1846 established his reputation by a volume of poems—Primeiros Cantos—which appealed to the national feelings of his Brazilian readers, were remarkable for their autobiographic impress, and by their beauty of expression and rhythm placed their author at the head of the lyric poets of his country. In 1848 he followed up his success by Segundos Cantos e sextilhas de Frei Antão, in which, as the title indicates, he puts a number of the pieces in the mouth of a simple old Dominican friar; and in the following year, in fulfilment of the duties of his new post as professor of Brazilian history in the Imperial College of Pedro II. at Rio de Janeiro, he published an edition of Berredo’s Annaes historicos do Maranhão and added a sketch of the migrations of the Indian tribes. A third volume of poems, which appeared with the title of Ultimos Cantos in 1851, was practically the poet’s farewell to the service of the muse, for he spent the next eight years engaged under government patronage in studying the state of public instruction in the north and the educational institutions of Europe. On his return to Brazil in 1860 he was appointed a member of an expedition for the exploration of the province of Ceará, was forced in 1862 by the state of his health to try the effects of another visit to Europe, and died in September 1864, the vessel that was carrying him being wrecked off his native shores. While in Germany he published at Leipzig a complete collection of his lyrical poems, which went through several editions, the four first cantos of an epic poem called Os Tymbiras (1857) and a Diccionario da lingua Tupy (1858).
A complete edition of the works of Dias has made its appearance at Rio de Janeiro. See Wolf, Brésil littéraire (Berlin, 1863); Innocencio de Silva, Diccionario bibliographico portuguez, viii. 157; Sotero dos Reis, Curso de litteratura portugueza e brazileira, iv. (Maranhão, 1868); José Verissimo, Estudos de literatura brazileira, segunda serie (Rio, 1901).
GONCHAROV, IVAN ALEXANDROVICH (1812-1891), Russian novelist, was born 6/18 July 1812, being the son of a rich merchant in the town of Simbirsk. At the age of ten he was placed in one of the gymnasiums at Moscow, from which he passed, though not without some difficulty on account of his ignorance of Greek, into the Moscow University. He read many French works of fiction, and published a translation of one of the novels of Eugène Sue. During his university career he devoted himself to study, taking no interest in the political and Socialistic agitation among his fellow-students. He was first employed as secretary to the governor of Simbirsk, and afterwards in the ministry of finance at St Petersburg. Being absorbed in bureaucratic work, Goncharov paid no attention to the social questions then ardently discussed by such men as Herzen, Aksakov and Bielinski. He began his literary career by publishing translations from Schiller, Goethe and English novelists. His first original work was Obuiknovennaya Istoria, “A Common Story” (1847). In 1856 he sailed to Japan as secretary to Admiral Putiatin for the purpose of negotiating a commercial treaty, and on his return to Russia he published a description of the voyage under the title of “The Frigate Pallada.” His best work is Oblomov (1857), which exposed the laziness and apathy of the smaller landed gentry in Russia anterior to the reforms of Alexander II. Russian critics have pronounced this work to be a faithful characterization of Russia and the Russians. Dobrolubov said of it, “Oblomofka [the country-seat of the Oblomovs] is our fatherland: something of Oblomov is to be found in every one of us.” Peesarev, another celebrated critic, declared that “Oblomovism,” as Goncharov called the sum total of qualities with which he invested the hero of his story, “is an illness fostered by the nature of the Slavonic character and the life of Russian society.” In 1858 Goncharov was appointed a censor, and in 1868 he published another novel called Obreev. He was not a voluminous writer, and during the latter part of his life produced nothing of any importance. His death occurred on 15/27 September 1891.
GONCOURT, DE, a name famous in French literary history. Edmond Louis Antoine Huot de Goncourt was born at Nancy on the 26th of May 1822, and died at Champrosay on the 16th of July 1896. Jules Alfred Huot de Goncourt, his brother, was born in Paris on the 17th of December 1830, and died in Paris on the 20th of June 1870.
Writing always in collaboration, until the death of the younger, it was their ambition to be not merely novelists, inventing a new kind of novel, but historians; not merely historians, but the historians of a particular century, and of what was intimate and what is unknown in it; to be also discriminating, indeed innovating, critics of art, but of a certain section of art, the 18th century, in France and Japan; and also to collect pictures and bibelots, always of the French and Japanese 18th century. Their histories (Portraits intimes du XVIIIe siècle (1857), La Femme au XVIIIe siècle (1862), La du Barry (1878), &c.) are made entirely out of documents, autograph letters, scraps of costume, engravings, songs, the unconscious self-revelations of the time; their three volumes on L’Art du XVIIIe siècle (1859-1875) deal with Watteau and his followers in the same scrupulous, minutely enlightening way, with all the detail of unpublished documents; and when they came to write novels, it was with a similar attempt to give the inner, undiscovered, minute truths of contemporary existence, the inédit of life. The same morbidly sensitive noting of the inédit, of whatever came to them from their own sensations of things and people around them, gives its curious quality to the nine volumes of the Journal, 1887-1896, which will remain, perhaps, the truest and most poignant chapter of human history that they have written. Their novels, Sœur Philomène (1861), Renée Mauperin (1864), Germinie Lacerteux (1865), Manette Salomon (1865), Madame Gervaisais (1869), and, by Edmond alone, La Fille Elisa (1878), Les Frères Zemganno (1879), La Faustin (1882), Chérie (1884), are, however, the work by which they will live as artists. Learning something from Flaubert, and teaching almost everything to Zola, they invented a new kind of novel, and their novels are the result of a new vision of the world, in which the very element of sight is decomposed, as in a picture of Monet. Seen through the nerves, in this conscious abandonment to the tricks of the eyesight, the world becomes a thing of broken patterns and conflicting colours, and uneasy movement. A novel of the Goncourts is made up of an infinite number of details, set side by side, every detail equally prominent. While a novel of Flaubert, for all its detail, gives above all things an impression of unity, a novel of the Goncourts deliberately dispenses with unity in order to give the sense of the passing of life, the heat and form of its moments as they pass. It is written in little chapters, sometimes no longer than a page, and each chapter is a separate notation of some significant event, some emotion or sensation which seems to throw sudden light on the picture of a soul. To the Goncourts humanity is as pictorial a thing as the world it moves in; they do not search further than “the physical basis of life,” and they find everything that can be known of that unknown force written visibly upon the sudden faces of little incidents, little expressive moments. The soul, to them, is a series of moods, which succeed one another, certainly without any of the too arbitrary logic of the novelist who has conceived of character as a solid or consistent thing. Their novels are hardly stories at all, but picture-galleries, hung with pictures of the momentary aspects of the world. French critics have complained that the language of the Goncourts is no longer French, no longer the French of the past; and this is true. It is their distinction—the finest of their inventions—that, in order to render new sensations, a new vision of things, they invented a new language.
(A. Sy.)