Saltykov Shchedrin S The Golovlyovs

A critical look at the Russian gentry from the 1830s to the 1870s, M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin's novel The Golovlyovs exposes the insubstantiality of the family as one of the proclaimed bases of Russian social life. In sharp contrast to his contemporaries, including Aksakov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Goncharov, Saltykov-Shchedrin shows the gentry family, as represented by the Golovlyovs, as disintegrating, corrupted by its status and way of life. The book, the sixth in the AATSEEL Critical Companions to Russian Literature series, begins with a brief sketch of Saltykov-Shchedrin's life and literary career, then goes on to explain the novel's content and characters, including reference to contemporary events relevant to the narrative and discussion of the major points of the novel and its conclusion. An extensive bibliography includes a listing and brief assessment of the various English translations of the novel.

The Golovyov Family is a thought-provoking and powerfully written novel. Recognized as a classic since it first publication in Russia in 1880, it recounts the history of a family of landowners through three generations. In a letter written shortly after the book’s publication, the author reflected that "I wrote The Golovyov Family as an attack on the family principal." As Russian scholar Carl Proffer wrote: "Gogol has been passed from school to school for thirteen decades. Even Bulgakov, who regarded Saltykov-Schhedrin as his teacher, who is the most satirical writer after Saltykov, and whose main works were unpublished until ten years ago, has been written about by representatives of many different critical sects. That Saltykov's works have not had this kind of appeal is somewhat puzzling. Even a Freudian novice could work Oedipal themes out of the autobiographical elements in The Golovlyov Family, and the Tartu University school could draw complex diagrams to show how The Golovyov Family is that most wonderful of all things, a "unified whole." It is time that Saltykov stopped being the exclusive property of critics whose primary concerns are sociological or historical. As the reader of The Golovlyov Family will see with considerable pleasure Saltykov’s prose has much more to offer than not."

Arina Petrovna rules the Golovlev family with an iron hand. Around her swarm her family; her alcoholic sons, dissipated grandchildren and degenerate husband. But in his darkened study, her son Porfiry schemes for an overthrow of power. In this powerful novel, the great Russian satirist presents a stark portrait of the Russian gentry sapped by generations of idleness and social irrelevance.

This book offers a new understanding of the relationship between family structures and narrative structure in the nineteenth-century novel. Comparing Russia and England, it argues that the two nations had fundamentally different conceptions of the family and that these, in turn, shaped the way they constructed plots. The English placed primary value on the vertical, diachronic family axis--looking back to ancestors and head to progeny--while the Russians emphasized the lateral, synchronic axis--family expanding outward in the present from nuclear core, to extended and chosen kin. This difference shaped the way authors plotted consanguineal relations, courtship and marriage, and alternative kinship constructions. Idealizing the domestic sphere and emphasizing family continuity, the English novel made family a conservative force, while Russian novels approached it as a backward site of patriarchal tyranny in desperate need of reform. Russian family plots offered a progressive, liberalizing push toward new, nontraditional family constructions. The book's comparative approach calls for a re-evaluation of reigning theories of the novel, theories that are based on the linear English family model and cannot accommodate the more complex, Russian alternative. It reveals where these theories fall short, explains the reasons for their shortcomings, and offers a new way of conceptualizing family's role in shaping the nineteenth-century novel. Classics from Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope, to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev are contextualized in the broader literary landscape of their day, and Russia's great women writers regain their rightful place alongside their male counterparts as the book draws together family history, literary analysis, and novel theory.

The centre of the estate that he managed was an important trading village in which there were many taverns. He liked to take a glass of tea in a tavern and boast of his mistress's great power. And in the course of his boasting he would sometimes unconsciously blab out secrets. His mistress was always with a lawsuit on her hands, so that her trusty's garrulousness sometimes brought her sly stratagems to the surface before they could be executed.

Arina Petrova, matriarch of the Golovlyov family, runs a large estate (4,000 serfs) in Russia. She learns that her first born son, Stepan/Styopka/The Dolt has squandered the land and house she gave to him. She was a practical and strict noblewoman, and she banished her drunken husband Vladmir Mihailitch to his room for several decades while she ran the estate. Arina sent Stepan to college, where he was the class clown. He worked in a series of government jobs, but lost them all due to laziness. He returns home after losing his estate. Arina's second child is Anna, who ran off and married a musician named Ulanov. Anna has twin girls Anninka and Lubinka. Ulanov soon abandons his family, and Anna dies of an illness 3 months later. Arina hoped to be rid of her children by giving them estates. She was very upset when Anna died ("throwing her two brats on to my shoulders") and when Stepan returned. Her third son is Porphyry/Iudushka/Bloodsucker; he is an obsequious, scheming son. Her fourth son is Pavel; he is normal and unremarkable in any way. She keeps her family on a very tight financial leash, and they live at poverty level despite their wealth. Stepan, having nowhere to go, sadly travels back home. Arina declares that she hates him, and says "he has been nothing but a worry and a disgrace to me all his life." She wonders who she is saving her money for. Stepan is let back into the estate, but becomes depressed and runs away one winter evening. He is found alive but never speaks again; he dies shortly thereafter.