Goncharov and his English rival in the novel: is a story common or simple?

The article deals with I. Goncharov’s reception of A Simple Story by Elizabeth Inchbald. The widely known episode of Goncharov’s epistolary address to A. Kraevsky in connection with the publication of A Simple story allows to read A Common Story both as a Bildungsroman, inheriting the tradition of the XVIIIth-century English novel about the education of senses, and as an episode in the development of the literary biography, the “education” of the writer.