Ivan Goncharov was born in 1812 in Simbirsk, Russia. After attending boarding school, where he mastered German and French, the Moscow College of Commerce, and Moscow State University, Goncharov worked in the office of the governor of Simbirsk before moving to St Petersburg, where he was occupied as a government translator and private tutor while publishing poems and stories in small private handwritten publications called Almanacs. His first novel was published in 1847.