It is a trick among the dishonest to offer sacrifices that are not needed, or not possible, to avoid making those that are required.

Being a direct response to Vissarion Belinsky's call for exposing a new 'curiosity type' that of a complacent romantic common at the time it was lavishly praised by the famous critic as one of the best Russian books of the year. Leo Tolstoy who liked the novel too though used the same word to describe social egotism and inability of some people to see beyond their immediate interests. While the latter "had been driven by ideas that's been prompted to its author by the best men of 1840s" The Precipice featured "just a bunch of people wandering to and fro without any sense of direction their lines of actions having neither beginning nor end" according to the critic.

6 June] 1812 – 27 September [O. S. Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov (Russian: Ива́н Алекса́ндрович Гончаро́в Ivan Aleksandrovič Gončarov; 18 June [O.