The Golovlyov Family

The Golovlyov Family - Mikhail Yevgrafovich Saltykov (pen name: Shchedrin)

This novel  Gospodá Golovlévy, written in the 1870s and called “the grimmest of Russian novels,” features the members of a spectacularly dysfunctional family. In the back country of Russia, set just before and just after the emancipation of the serfs, the characters duke it out over money or anger over perceived ingratitude. Like many carriers of grudges, the characters enjoy play-acting while listing their sacrifices for an ungrateful world. It’s almost as if they were practicing their spiel for St. Peter in order to enter the Pearly Gates, posturing like the wretched goofs in Fargo (e.g. Wade, in the kitchen, pulling out a gun, cracking the barrel, peering in, saying “Okay ... here's your damn money, now where's my daughter?... Goddamn punk ... where's my damn daughter...”).

The character of Arina Petrovna Golovlyova is an outstanding businesswomen who has increased the size of the family estate with canny acquisitions of bankrupt estates. But since she has never felt, much less expressed, tender feelings for her children, they grow into idle, shallow, reprobate adults.  After two sons drink themselves to death, the son Porfiry Golovlyov, nicknamed Little Judas (Iúdiushka) and The Bloodsucker, eases Arina Petrovna out of the way. Porfiry is one of the most atrocious characters in the whole of Russian literature.  He chatters endlessly to divert himself and others from reality. When any threatening reality asserts itself, he distracts himself with religious platitudes and procrastination. One early critic noted Iúdiushka’s “cold, calculating, cynical hypocrisy, its miserly ferocity.”  The set pieces in which he thwarts serious conversation are masterworks of tension, between Porfiry’s humbug and the interlocutor’s hopeless desperation to get to a decision and then get away.

I suppose one could read this novel as an indictment of the horrible shapes that loveless childhoods and avarice twist people into. This novel is a social artifact, a presentation of manners among the landed gentry at their worst before serfdom was abolished. But I think the social interpretation would detract from the writer’s psychological insight into the roots of alcohol abuse and the artistic touches, such as Shchedrin’s brilliant treatment of silence. Plus, there’s that Russian audacity to treat in fiction the giant themes, the most desperate questions we face in life. Readers that liked Ivan Goncharov's 1859 Oblomov would probably like this one too. Grim, yes, but this novel exerts a spell I’ve not often fallen under while reading a novel.