Gospoda Golovlyovy Reading Order

Gospoda Golovlyovy (The Golovlyov Family, 1875–80) by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin is the darkest family novel in Russian literature — a systematic portrait of a provincial gentry family destroying itself through hypocrisy, greed, and the complete absence of genuine human feeling. Arina Petrovna, the matriarch, is a woman of tremendous practical energy who has never loved anything except money and property; her children are a drunk, a coward, and Porfiry Vladimirovich Golovlyov — known as Iudushka (Little Judas) — who is the novel's terrifying central figure: a man who has replaced all human feeling with an endless stream of pious, affectionate, meaningless words that he pours over every act of betrayal, exploitation, and cruelty. Saltykov-Shchedrin was the greatest Russian satirist of the nineteenth century — his History of a Town (1869–70) is a political allegory that makes Gogol look gentle — but The Golovlyov Family is not satire in the usual sense; it is a tragic-realistic portrait of spiritual death so complete and so sustained that Tolstoy called Iudushka the most terrifying figure in Russian literature. The novel was published in serial installments, and each chapter chronicles the next stage of the family's destruction: the death of each son, the arrival of each grandchild, the systematic stripping of each human being of whatever made them worth saving. By the end, Iudushka himself is alone in the empty house, surrounded by the dead.