#im thinking about the talk i gave last november

Continuing my exploration of mid-19th-c. novels… Last week I finished Goncharov’s A Common Story [«Обыкновенная история»], and now I’m about a third of the way into Herzen’s Who Is To Blame? [«Кто виноват?»]. Why is my reaction to these two so different, and why do I like Herzen’s novel so much better (at least, so far)?

I think some of it is just that Herzen is a more imaginative writer — his language is more vivid, his metaphors are more striking, and his characterizations feel more nuanced. But I think another significant component is how the two writers conceptualize their storylines. In Goncharov’s novel, the outcome of each episode in our hero’s life is understood to be pretty much inevitable, to the point of being easily predictable in-universe by characters with more life experience. (That’s kind of the point: see his choice of title.) Herzen, in contrast, treats his story as a series of branching paths. (Which is also plot-relevant to the kind of story he’s telling: whose fault is it, ultimately, that it all turned out the way it did, when there were so many chances for things to go in a different direction?) He keeps calling attention to pivot points in the narrative, and projecting the alternate lives his characters might have lived if they had made a different decision. That is a narrative structure I find particularly compelling.