The Golovlyovs

The eldest son has been sent home to die, and he knows it. He walks up and down an unlit estate office because his mother will not give him candles, and one thought obsesses him: "This is my grave, my grave, my grave!" He writes asking for boots. The answer is that there are none to spare, and that when the frosts come he will receive felt ones. His mother intends to do no more than keep him from starving.

Nobody in The Golovlyovs is murdered. Every one of them is administered to death - by a mother's household economy, by a brother's piety, by the correct application of family feeling. Nobody in the book breaks a rule.

It is not a novel about bad people. It is a novel about what happened to a class when the basis of its existence was withdrawn in 1861, and about the forms its decomposition took. Arina Petrovna spends forty years accumulating property for children who are worthless, and you are made to feel the waste of her competence. Judas is a monster assembled entirely out of respectable materials.

And it is testimony rather than attack. Saltykov published as Shchedrin because his own name was on a governor's commission: he spent his working life administering the system he was describing.

Progress Publishers, Russian Classics Series, 1975. Translated by Olga Shartse, with drawings by the Kukryniksy.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.