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:
A sickly languor lay heavy on Stepan's mind; in spite of his idleness his whole body felt unreasonably, unendurably tired; one fretting, gnawing thought alone obsessed him; that thought was — "This is my grave, my grave, my grave!"
He writes to her, through the bailiff, asking for boots:
the answer was that there were no leather boots to spare for him and that when the frosts came he would receive a pair of felt snow-boots. Arina Petrovna evidently intended to carry out her plan to the letter and 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. It is the coldest novel in Russian literature and one of the very greatest, and it was written by a serving official of the Russian Empire.
Mikhail Yevgrafovich Saltykov (1826–1889), who published as N. Shchedrin, wrote The Golovlyovs between 1875 and 1880. This is the Progress Russian Classics Series printing, first published in 1957 and reprinted in 1975, translated by Olga Shartse and illustrated by the Kukryniksy — the same caricaturist trio whose drawings accompany Gorky's Foma Gordeyev elsewhere in this series.
Shartse's decision on the central name is worth flagging at once, because it shapes the whole book in English. Porfiry Vladimirich Golovlyov is called, in Russian, Iudushka — a diminutive of Judas, something like "Judas-dear". Shartse renders it flatly as Judas, three hundred and five times. The English loses the horrible tenderness of the Russian suffix and gains a kind of hammering plainness. It is a defensible choice and a severe one.
The volume opens with a foreword of about four thousand words, "A Great Work of Russian Literature", by S. Makashin — Sergei Makashin, who spent his life on Saltykov and wrote the standard biography. This is the most scholarly piece of apparatus in the series.
Two things about Makashin's essay should be said plainly, because they cut against the pattern this series has been tracing.
First, it makes no attempt to annex Shchedrin. In four thousand words, Lenin is not mentioned and neither is Marx. Makashin describes his subject's politics precisely and without inflation: Shchedrin took "the ideological stand of a democrat and Utopian socialist". That is accurate — Shchedrin came out of the Petrashevsky milieu of the 1840s, read Fourier and Saint-Simon, and never became a Marxist because there was barely anything to become. A less honest foreword would have found the seeds of something.
Second, its historical framing is genuinely good:
For Russia this was an epoch of a decline of the serfdom system and all the ideologies built up on its basis, an epoch during which this enormous, backward country was drawn into the orbit of the capitalist industrial revolution.
That is the correct frame for this novel, and it is why The Golovlyovs matters more than any other title in the Russian Classics Series. 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.
Makashin is also excellent on how the book got written, which almost no commissioned foreword bothers with. The Golovlyovs was not planned. It began as a story, "The Family Court of Justice", thirteenth in a list of contents for a quite different cycle; the response decided the matter. Saltykov, Makashin notes, "was always prey to a lingering doubt in the plastic, artistic strength of his talent", called himself "a chronicler of the moment" and "a historian of the modern scene", and gave up his journalism for fiction only reluctantly. What changed his mind was praise from Turgenev and Nekrasov — one correspondent writing that he was "looking forward to the sequel — a description of 'little Judas's deeds'."
A novel now regarded as one of the summits of Russian prose exists because a satirist was talked out of thinking he could not write fiction.
There is one absence, and it is large.
Makashin tells the reader that Shchedrin's books were ones "for which he paid with an eight-year exile". True: in April 1848 Saltykov was exiled to Vyatka for a story, in the panic that followed the revolutions in Europe, and he was there eight years.
What the foreword does not mention is what he did during those eight years, or for the twenty after them. In Vyatka he was not a prisoner but an official: a senior official for special assignments under the governor, then an adviser to the provincial government. On his return he entered the Ministry of the Interior. In 1858 he was appointed vice-governor of Ryazan. In 1862 he moved to Tver, where he frequently acted as governor. He administered provinces. He signed things.
This is not a scandal and we do not offer it as one. It is the single most important fact about how The Golovlyovs came to be written, and its omission costs the reader something real.
The reason the novel's account of the Russian provincial world is unanswerable is that its author had run one. The estate management, the wrangling over souls and allotments, the deference of the bailiff, the exact mechanism by which a mother starves a son while observing every propriety — none of it is observed from outside by a literary man on a visit. Saltykov knew the paperwork. He had been the man to whom the petitions came.
The pen-name was not decoration. N. Shchedrin existed because Mikhail Saltykov, vice-governor, could not publish what he saw under the name on his commission. A foreword that presents its author purely as a writer persecuted by the autocracy has told the truth and lost the interesting half of it: he was also, for most of his working life, the autocracy's employee, and the satire is the report of an insider.
Porfiry Vladimirich is the greatest hypocrite in fiction, and what makes him unbearable is that he is not a liar.
He believes what he says, more or less, at the moment of saying it. He deploys endearments, proverbs, calculations of the household accounts and appeals to God's will in a continuous, unstoppable stream that has no object beyond its own continuation — and people die inside it. His brother Pavel dies while Judas sits by the bed discussing arrangements. His mother, who built the estate by forty years of accumulation, ends up dependent on him and is talked into the ground. Both his sons die: one shoots himself after Judas refuses to cover a gambling debt, with an expression of sorrow and a short homily on responsibility.
Here he is in full, and it is worth reading twice. His sister Anna has died, leaving two orphaned daughters. Arina Petrovna writes to her sons with the news. Porfiry replies:
"I am stricken with grief at the news that Anna Vladimirovna, my beloved sister and dear companion of my childhood, has departed this life, and my grief is all the greater at the thought that you, dearest Mamma, have been sent another cross to bear in the persons of the two orphans. Surely it should be enough that you, the benefactress of us all, are denying yourself in everything and, with no thought for your health, are devoting all your strength so that your family should be provided not merely with what are necessities, but with luxuries as well! Truly, sinful as it may be, one cannot help repining sometimes. And in my opinion the only comfort for you in your present trouble, dearest, is to recall as often as possible what Christ Himself had to endure."
Read what that letter does. A woman has died and two children have been orphaned. Not one word is spent on the dead sister beyond the epithets, and not one on the children except as "another cross" laid on their grandmother. The death is converted, within three sentences, into a compliment to his mother's self-denial and an advance argument against the expense of taking the girls in. It closes by recommending the Passion as a consolation — for her.
Every clause is unimpeachable. There is nothing in it a priest could object to. And it is an act of violence.
Shchedrin's word for this in the novel is idle talk — the endless pious verbiage that stands in for every human relation. It is the exact literary equivalent of the administrative style: correct forms, applied without mercy, by a man who has never once had to look at what they do.
Nobody who had not written official minutes could have invented him.
The two orphans Judas did not want to pay for are the novel's one movement outward, and Shchedrin makes their escape sound like freedom for exactly as long as it takes to read a letter.
Arina Petrovna pulls it out of her pocket and hands it to Judas:
"Don't send us any more fowls or turkeys, Grandmamma. Don't send us any money either, but put it in the bank. We are not in Moscow now, but in Kharkov; we have gone on the stage, and in the summer we will tour the fairs. I, Anninka, made my first appearance in Perichole and Lubinka in Pansies. I was called several times, especially after the scene when Perichole comes out slightly tipsy and sings, 'I am re-a-dy, I am ready, I am re-a-a-a-dy.' Lubinka too was a great success. The manager pays me a hundred rubles a month..."
It is a wonderful letter — brisk, competent, faintly boastful, and touchingly concerned that the grandmother should bank the money rather than send poultry. Two girls have got out of Golovlyovo and are earning.
What they have got out into is Offenbach at the provincial fairs, and Shchedrin follows it all the way down: the manager, the merchants who pay for supper, the officer who keeps one and then the next, the touring, the drinking. Lubinka poisons herself. Anninka comes back to Golovlyovo because there is nowhere else, and drinks.
We want to be careful here, because it would be easy to read this as a moral about the stage, which is not what it is. The girls' talent is real and their industry is real. What destroys them is that in the Russia of the 1870s a gentlewoman without property had precisely two markets, and the theatre was the one that paid a hundred rubles a month while quietly requiring the other. Shchedrin knows exactly what he is describing and does not once say it outright. The class that could not keep its daughters and would not train them sent them to the fairs.
The thing that finally reaches Judas is not remorse in any ordinary sense. It is arithmetic.
Alone in the house with Anninka's drinking and her reminders, he begins to be visited:
The dead and injured seemed to creep out of every corner of that cursed house. Whichever way he looked, in whatever direction he turned, grey ghosts were stirring everywhere. There was his father Vladimir Mikhailich in a white nightcap, jeering at everyone and quoting Barkov; there was his brother, Styopka the blockhead, and beside him his other brother, the dull and quiet Pavel; there was Lubinka and there were the last scions of the Golovlyovo house, Volodenka and Petenka. All of them drunken, lecherous, tortured and bleeding.... And a living ghost was hovering above all those shadows — he himself, Porphiry Vladimirich Golovlyov, the last representative of the derelict family.
Note the last clause. He does not join the dead as their killer; he joins them as another ghost, "the last representative of the derelict family". Even at the moment of reckoning, Judas arrives at himself through an inventory — a list of the house's casualties with his own name at the end of it.
Shchedrin will not grant him a conversion. He grants him a total, and the total is what walks out into the snow.
The family consumes itself. Stepan dies in the estate office; Pavel dies; Arina Petrovna dies; both of Judas's sons die; his nieces Anninka and Lubinka go on the provincial stage and are destroyed by it, and Lubinka poisons herself.
At the end Judas is alone at Golovlyovo with Anninka, who is drinking herself to death. Something — Shchedrin will not say what — reaches him one night in March. He gets up, walks about the room, stops in front of "the icon of the Redeemer in a crown of thorns lighted by a sanctuary lamp", and decides:
It is hard to say to what extent he was conscious of his own decision, but a few minutes later he stealthily walked to the hall and undid the front-door latch. A wind was howling and a March snow-storm blinded the eyes with whirling masses of sleet. But Porphiry Vladimirich walked along the road, stepping in the puddles, noticing neither the wind nor the snow and only instinctively wrapping his dressing-gown closer about him.
He is going to his mother's grave. He is found frozen next morning, a few steps off the road, in his dressing-gown.
And then Shchedrin writes the last sentence of the novel, which is the reason this book belongs in a series like ours:
Then another messenger was dispatched to Goryushkino, to Nadya Galkina (daughter of Auntie Varvara Mikhailovna), who ever since the autumn had kept close watch on all that was going on at Golovlyovo.
1880
A relative nobody has heard of, in a place nobody has been, who has been watching since the autumn. The Golovlyovs have annihilated themselves down to the last man, and the estate does not revert to anybody's better nature. It passes to the next watcher, who will do it all again.
That is not a moral ending and it is not a hopeful one. It is a structural observation: the rot was never in the family. It was in the thing the family was attached to, and the thing is still there when they are gone.
This is the Russian Classics volume that needs the least defending and the most reading.
The Golovlyovs does what almost no novel of decline manages: it refuses to make its dying class either wicked or tragic. Arina Petrovna is a formidable manager who spends forty years accumulating property for children who are worthless, and Shchedrin lets you feel the waste of her competence. Judas is a monster assembled entirely out of respectable materials — piety, thrift, family feeling, correct procedure. Nobody in the book breaks a rule.
And it was written by a man who had spent his life administering the system he was describing, published under another name because his own was on a governor's commission. The foreword to this volume does not tell you that, and we think you should know it before you begin, because it changes what kind of document you are holding. This is not an attack from outside. It is testimony.