Competing causes of the doom of the Golovlyovs - blind, unexpected, haphazard

“It would be lovely to have soup with goose giblets or mushrooms fried in sour cream,” the thought flashed through her mind so vividly it made her mouth twitch.  (124)

Absolutely.  I am still fussing over The Golovlyov Family.  The tough old matriarch has mistakenly handed the estate over to her worthless son Porphyry and is on short rations, which turns out to be the beginning of the blah blah blah descent into the void.  “She had been afraid of death before, but now she seemed to have completely forgotten about it” (124) – in this novel’s world, forgetting about death is the first step to death.

Porphyry, the hypocrite, make a great pretense of piety, and even prays frequently.  His argumentation is so perverse that it at times turns religion into blasphemy, which is perversely one of the pleasure of the novel, watching Porphyry go too far:

“No road, no path showing – all covered with snow.  And there are wolves too.  But here with us it is lights and comfortable, and we are not afraid of anything…  We won’t drink more than we need, but will drink just as much as we should.  And why is this?  It is because God is kind to us.  If it had not been for him, for the King of Heaven, we might be wandering about the fields now, in the cold and the dark, dressed in some wretched old jerkin tied with a shabby belt, with bark shoes on our feet.”  (136)

Porphyry’s mother interrupts now, objecting that she is a lady and would never wear bark shoes, which is not exactly what I meant by going too far.  I see at least two other ironies, here.  One, that Porphyry is himself a kind of wolf, and two, that later in the novel he takes to the hard stuff in despair, so that “all sense of pain disappeared and both the past and present were obliterated by a luminous void” (326).  Perhaps this is part of a religious crisis.  In the last few pages of the novel Shchedrin almost offers the possibility of redemption, before cruelly kicking it away.  Not for these characters.

In the middle of the novel, one of Porphyry’s nieces returns for a time.  She and her sister had escaped Golovlyovo to become provincial actresses, and she is able to escape again.  A naïve reader, like I was at that point, could wonder if the novel had taken something like a feminist turn.  Strong, independent women striking out on their own, throwing off the poison of their horrible family.  Maybe in a less stringently pure novel.  The result here is poverty, prostitution, alcoholism, suicide, disease.  But they could have done worse.  They could have stayed home.

In a remarkable passage near the novel’s end, Shchedrin briefly turns in to Émile Zola, offering a materialistic explanation for the “kind of doom” destroying the Golovlyovs.  “Everything in those pitiful families’ existence – both success and failure – is blind, unexpected, haphazard” (321).  It is all just luck.  They have had enough bad hereditary throws of the dice that they fall apart, like Zola’s Macquarts or Faulkner’s Compsons.

Yet only a few pages later, the religious theme dominates.  Maybe the characters are being punished for their sins.  Maybe there is no way to tell the competing explanations apart.

A Golovlyov death - window, window, window

The author of The Family Golovlyov is hardly the artistic equal of Leo Tolstoy, nor does he have the strong personality of Fyodor Dostoevsky or the imagination of Nikolai Gogol.  But he has comic integrity.  I want to look at the first major death in the book.  This will not convince anyone that the novel is comic.

Stepan Vladimiritch Golovlyov, also called (by his mother) Styopka the dolt, is bad with money and a drunk.  I have a five dollar bet with myself that each of the novel’s seven chapters were first published in a magazine.  The first chapter, anyways, stands on its own.  It is Styopka the dolt’s story, his life and death.  He has squandered his (advanced) inheritance and moves back to the estate with his chintzy mother.  He does nothing but drink, when he can get the money, and stare out the window.

He sat in his room all day gazing through the double glass of the window at the row of peasant huts sunk in the mud.  None the worse for the summer’s hard work, people were flitting to and fro like black dots in the autumn fog.  (54)

He has begun his descent into oblivion.

He had nothing to do except sit at the window and watch the heavy masses of clouds… The clouds stood there as though spell-bound: an hour, two hours, three hours passed and they were still in the same place, without the slightest change in their shape or color.  (55)

The description of the clouds is elaborate.  It was about here that Shchedrin’s writing began to get my attention, as where a cloud is hanging over a village “as if to strangle it.”  “Clouds, clouds, and clouds – all day long.”

Is that the first triplet?  No, see just above, hours, hours, hours.  Keep an eye out for triplets.

A sickly languor lay heavy on Stepan Vladimiritch’s mind, in spite of his idleness his whole body felt unreasonably, unendurably tired; one fretting, gnawing thought obsessed him; that thought was – “This is my grave, my grave, my grave!”  Those black dots flitting by the village threshing-yards against a dark background of mud were not obsessed by that thought…  (56)

Styopka is numbing himself with drink.  But I do not believe this is merely a naturalistic description of the effects of vodka.

… at last the darkness disappeared and was replaced by space filled with phosphorescent brilliance.  It was a dead, endless void, sinister and luminous, without a single sound of life…  He felt frightened; he wanted to stifle his consciousness of the outside world so completely that even this void should cease to exist.  (58)

Even the void should cease to exist.  This is interesting.  Styopka’s mother calls him “a bottomless pit” (61), but she is referring to his expenses, to money.

He had not a single thought, not a single desire.  The stove was in front of him, and his mind was so occupied with taking it in that it was impervious to any other impression.  Then the window replaced the stove; window, window, window…  He wanted nothing, nothing at all.  (58-9, ellipses in original)

A reader of Schopenhauer might suggest that we are witnessing the eradication of Styopka’s Will.  The chapter is almost over.  Nothing is what he is going to get.  The clouds return.

It was as though a black cloud enveloped him from head to foot and he did nothing but watch it, following its imaginary curves, and at times with a shudder trying as it were to ward it off.  This mysterious cloud swallowed up both the outer and the inner world for him.  (64)

In subsequent chapters, each member of the family succumbs to the cloud.  It is a kind of theme and variations structure.  Perhaps it sounds a bit narrow.  I suppose it is.

The Golovlyov Family - as though she were trying to understand something and could not

Russian literature is depressing, people say, and they have not even read The Golovlyov Family by Shchedrin* (1876).  It may be the bleakest novel I have ever read.  Eh, probably not, but one of them.  The book is, of course, a comedy.  If it were all meant seriously it would be too easy to laugh at it, but as a comedy it is truly grim.

The Golovlyov Family is the story of a family destroyed by the meaninglessness of everything.  Arina Petrovna Golovlyov and her offspring waste their pointless lives and then die miserably, one by one, mostly one per chapter.  Life has no meaning, but it is well-organized.

Golovlyovo – that was death itself, cruel, greedy death, that is forever stalking a fresh victim…  All deaths, all poison, all sickness – all came from here.  (318)

At first – no, for quite a while – I did not think this novel had much to do with the Turgenev \ Chernyshevsky \ Dostoevsky chain we will all have so much fun with in April, but I see now that I was wrong.  Shchedrin, a famous satirist, has watched fifteen years of debate about nihilists and thought: you want nihilism, I’ll give you real nihilism.

Sorrow and joy, love and hate, did not exist for him: the whole world was in his eyes merely something dead that simply provided one with an opportunity for an endless flow of talk.  (151)

This is Shchedrin’s most original creation, Porphyry Golovlyovo, the hypocrite, if “hypocrite” is a sufficiently strong word.  Porphyry does not mean what he says, about religion or family or work, not because he is hiding his real meaning but because he never means anything at all.  He just wants to talk.  The line above is in a paragraph about his indifference to his son’s suicide.

Porphyry’s emptiness leads to evil, more from the absence of any other value rather than from maliciousness.  It is the evil of the void.  The story, such as it is, is about a succession of characters falling into the void.  They do not die in agony – that would be a different kind of miserable novel – but slide into the pit.

“Mamma! dearest! bless me!“ [Porphyry, of course, always talking]

But Arina Petrovna did not hear.  Her wide-open eyes gazed dully into space as though she were trying to understand something and could not.  (177)

The back cover of the NYRB edition (tr. Natalie Duddington) invokes William Faulkner and One Hundred Years of Solitude.  The Faulkner feeling was present early, the Faulkner of the almost unbearably horrible or stupid characters of As I Lay Dying, another great comedy, or the decaying Compson family of The Sound and the Fury.  I first thought the comparison to García Márquez was cheating, since he was so influenced by Faulkner, but by the end of Golovlyov it almost seems false that the manor, the estate, and the entire world of the novel do not collapse into the void much like One Hundred Years of Solitude disappears into itself.  Shchedrin instead gets in one last joke.

*  I am honestly confused about how to refer to the author.  Shchedrin is a pseudonym.  James Wood uses it, so I guess I will, too.