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Ivan Goncharov was born in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk). His father Alexander Ivanovich Goncharov was a wealthy grain merchant and a respectable state official who several times has been elected a mayor of Simbirsk.[1] The family's big stone manor in the town center occupied a vast territory and had all the characteristics of a rural manor, with huge barns (packed with wheat and flour) and numerous stables.

Alexander Ivanovich died when the boy was seven years old.
First mother Avdotya Matveevna, then his godfather Nikolay Nikolayevich Tregubov, a nobleman and a former Russian Navy officer, took it upon themselves to give a boy a good education.[1] Tregubov, described as a man of liberal views and a secret Masonic lodge member,[2] who knew personally some of the Decembrists, and who was one of the most popular men amongst Simbirsk intelligentsia, has later been cited as the major early influence upon Goncharov, especially with his seafaring stories he used to tell the boy.[3] With Tregubov around, Goncharova could engage herself in domestic affairs. "His servants, cabmen, the whole household merged in with ours, that was a single family. All the practical issues now were mother's, and she proved to be an excellent housewife. All the intellectual duties were his," Ivan Goncharov remembered.[2]

In 1820-1822 Goncharov was studying at the private boarding-school owned by Rev. Fyodor S. Troitsky. It was here that he learned the French and German languages and started reading European writers' original texts, borrowing books from Troitsky's vast library.[1] Goncharova wanted both her sons to follow their late father's steps, and in August 1822 Ivan was sent to Moscow and joined a college of commerce. There he spent eight unhappy years, detesting dismal quality of education and nonsensically severe discipline, taking solace in self-education. "My first humanitarian and moral tutor was Karamzin," he remembered. Then Pushkin came as a revelation, with Evgeny Onegin, published serially, capturing young man's imagination.[2] In 1830, Goncharov decided to quit the college and in 1831 (missing one year because of a cholera outbreak in Moscow) he enrolled into the Moscow University's philological faculty to study literature, Arts and architecture.[3]
At the University with its atmosphere of intellectual freedom and lively debate, Goncharov's spirit thrived. One episode proved to be especially memorable: when his then-idol Alexander Pushkin arrived as a guest lecturer to have a public debate with professor M.T.Katchenovsky on the issue of Slovo o polku Igoreve’s authenticity. "It was as if sunlight lit up the auditorium. I was enchanted by his poetry at the time... It was his genius that formed my aesthetic background - although the same, I think, could be said of all the young people of the time who were interested in poetry," Goncharov wrote.[4] Unlike Hertzen, Belinsky, or Ogaryov, his fellow Moscow University students of the time, Goncharov remained indifferent to the ideas of political and social change that were gaining popularity at the time. Reading and translating were his main occupations. In 1832, the Telescope magazine published two chapters of Eugene Sue's novel Atar-Gull (1831), translated by Goncharov. This was his debut publication.[3]
In 1834, Goncharov graduated from the University and returned home to enter Simbirsk governor A. M. Zagryazhsky's chancellery. A year later, he moved to Saint Petersburg and started working as a translator at the Finance Ministry's Foreign commerce department. Here in the Russian capital, he became friends with the Maykov family and was both Apollon and Valerian's tutor for a while, teaching the boys Latin and Russian literature).[2] He became a member of the elitist literary circle based in the Maykovs’ house and attended by people like Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Dmitry Grigorovich. Maykovs' home-made Snowdrop almanac featured many of young Goncharov's poems, but soon he stopped dabbling in poetry altogether. Some of those early verses were later incorporated into A Common Story novel as Aduev's writings, a sure sign the author stopped treating them seriously.[2][3]