Oliver Goldsmith

Goldsmith, Oliver 

Born Nov. 10, 1728, in the village of Pallas in Ireland; died Apr. 4. 1774, in London. English writer; son of a clergyman.

Oliver Goldsmith graduated from the university in Dublin in 1749. He wrote An Enquiry Into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759) and compiled histories of ancient Greece and Rome. He also wrote a series of satirical sketches on morals and manners entitled A Citizen of the World, or Letters of a Chinese Philosopher Residing in London to His Friends in the East (1762). The poem The Traveller (1765) was well known. Goldsmith’s comedies The Good-Natured Man (1768; Russian translation, 1955) and She Stoops to Conquer, or The Mistakes of a Night (1773; Russian translations. 1899 and 1954), as well as An Essay on the Theater, or a Comparison Between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy (1773), contrasted with the sentimental and moralistic type of comedy. Goldsmith’s best works are the poem The Deserted Village (1770; Russian translation, 1902). which is about the devastation of the countryside as a result of the agrarian revolution, and the novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766; Russian translations, 1786 and 1959), written in a sentimental style about the history of a village pastor’s family persecuted by the landlord. Criticism of bourgeois relations in Goldsmith’s writings is combined with the idealization of patriarchal society.

WORKS

Works, vols. 1–10. London. 1908.
Selected Works. London, 1950.

REFERENCES

Istoriia angliiskoi literatury, vol. I, issue 2. Moscow-Leningrad,1945. Pages 510–23.
Lozovskii, A. I. “Agrarnyi perevorot v Anglii serediny XVIII stoletiia i tvorchestvo Gol’dsmita.” Uch. zap. Krasnodarskogopedagogicheskogo in-ta, issue 21–a. 1957.
Paden, W. D., and C. K. Hyder. A Concordance to the Poems ofOliver Goldsmith. London, 1940.
Kirk, C. M. Oliver Goldsmith. New York [1967]. (Bibliography pp. 195–97.)
Hopkins. R. H. The True Genius of Oliver Goldsmith. Baltimore [1969].

IU. I. KAGARLITSKII