Ivan Goncharov isn't well known to most people in the English speaking world. However he is a very well known and rather important nineteenth century novelist in Russia. Goncharov is often regarded as the successor to the far better known Ukrainian novelist Nikolai Gogol. (1)
Indeed Goncharov's best known work is his 1859 novel 'Oblomov', which is regarded as a 'great comic novel' (2) as well as the 'archetypal Russian realistic novel'. (3) Therefore it is easy to see that while Goncharov may be unknown to many outside of Russia; he is still one of the world's literary greats.
Inside Goncharov's work we find not a few allusions to jews. In his 1847 novel 'A Common Story' he writes that a character named Anton Ivanovich is a 'wandering jew' who has existed 'everywhere from the most ancient times'.
Goncharov explicitly tells us that the jew in Russia takes many forms, but in this particular form the jew is the greedy exploiter and habitual liar. He tells us that Anton Ivanovich has twelve serfs who he mortgages and re-mortgages continually as a scam in order to get money, while he himself is very cheap. Living as he does in a ramshackle log cabin, which for the last twelve years he has been declaring that he will 'rebuild come the spring'.
We are further informed that Anton Ivanovich is a serial abuser of hospitality (which was, and is, a central element of Russian culture) in that he has never had any one over to dine at this home or offered any kind of hospitality (such as taking tea) to anyone. Instead he takes hospitality from every one else and Goncharov puts a figure on it of over fifty individual instances per year of Anton Ivanovich abusing the Russian custom of offering hospitality.
Anton Ivanovich is described as extremely fat and has no emotions of his own; instead he spends his whole life talking about the sorrows and cares of others (i.e., he is a gossip and what has been termed a 'psychic vampire'). He understands nothing and is not able to do anything productive for society, but yet he is always ready to wheedle some free hospitality from the custom-bound hard-working Russians he meets.
Here Goncharov is portraying the jew as a kind of soulless being, which lacking any creativity of its own only cares about its material condition, but only in so far as it allows them to be completely idle. Essentially Goncharov is describing the jew as the ultimate parasite on the body of Russian people taking as much as it can, but giving nothing in return.
This is confirmed in Goncharov's 1869 novel 'The Precipice', which labels jews as merciless usurers perpetually running after the wealth and belongings of the Russian people. As well as referring to the 'jew-like exactness' of a woman calculating the share of goods she is owed. In other words the jews are a mercantile people who creative nothing, but desire to own everything.
That Goncharov meant exactly what he wrote is obvious when we note that he was an extremely meticulous writer who wrote and re-wrote his work until he was completely happy with it. (4)
In other words to Goncharov; the jews as a people were inveterate parasites on the Russian national body and one that was part of a pattern of jewish behaviour being first recorded in Biblical times.
References
(1) Victor Erlich, 1969, 'Gogol', 1st Edition, Yale University Press: New Haven, p. 173
(2) H. Gifford, 1973, 'Goncharov', p. 137 in John Fennell (Ed.), 1973, 'Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature: Studies of Ten Russian Writers', 1st Edition, Faber & Faber: London
(3) Richard Freeborn, 1989, 'The Nineteenth Century: 1855-80', p. 288 in Charles Moser (Ed.), 1989, 'The Cambridge History of Russian Literature', 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York
(4) Gifford, Op. Cit., p. 133