This translation is "condensed from the original". According to Wikipedia: "Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov (18 June 1812 27 September 1891) was a Russian novelist best known as the author of Oblomov (1859)... In 1867, Goncharov retired from his post as a government censor and devoted all of his time to working on his third novel. The Precipice, a book he once called "my heart's child", took him twenty years to finish.