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Original Title:	Господа Головлевы
ISBN:	0940322579 (ISBN13: 9780940322578)
Edition Language:	English
Characters:	Vladimir Mikhaylovich Golovlyov, Arina Petrovna, Stepan Vladimirovich, Anna Vladimirovna, Porfiry Vladimirovich, Pavel Vladimirovich

The Golovlyov Family

Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin

Paperback | Pages: 358 pages

Rating: 4.04 | 2230 Users | 100 Reviews

Mention Of Books The Golovlyov Family

Title	:	The Golovlyov Family
Author	:	Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	First Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 358 pages
Published	:	May 31st 2001 by NYRB Classics (first published 1880)
Categories	:	Cultural. Russia. Fiction. Literature. Russian Literature. Classics

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Searingly hot in the summer, bitterly cold in the winter, the ancestral estate of the Golovlyov family is the end of the road. There Anna Petrovna rules with an iron hand over her servants and family-until she loses power to the relentless scheming of her hypocritical son Porphyry.

One of the great classic novels of Russian literature, The Golovlyov Family is a vivid picture of a condemned and isolated outpost of civilization that, for contemporary readers, will recall the otherwordly reality of Macondo in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Rating Of Books The Golovlyov Family

Ratings: 4.04 From 2230 Users | 100 Reviews

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"A kind of doom seems to hang over some families. One notices it particularly among the class of small landowners scattered all over Russia who, having no work, no connection with public life, and no political importance, were at one time sheltered by serfdom, but now, with nothing to shelter them, are spending the remainder of their lives in their tumble-down country houses. Everything in those pitiful families existence - both success and failure - is blind, unexpected, haphazard." (321)The

My review is for the terrific 1961 Signet version, The Golovlovs, translated by the unfortunately named Andrew MacAndrew. I get the feeling from comments here that the NYRB translation doesn't properly capture the novel. The Golovlovs is not "gloomy" but often riotously funny, perhaps the best black comic Russian novel I've read. It is also not about an "evil" family, but an extremely conniving and greedy one, and the fact that the family members are quite pious in their way adds to the humor.

Here we have the episodic misadventures of the Golovlyov family, somewhat centered on 'Little Judas', the greedy and tight-fisted tsar (or star!) of this accursed clan. From proud landowners to paragons of avarice, we are witness to their downfall, slow and incremental true, but downfall nonetheless.Almost every page is infused with doom (and gloom), adversity follows calamity follows catastrophe. Saying I enjoyed it is misleading, there is nothing enjoyable in this bleak Russian classic.

We Russians have no strongly biased systems of education. We are not drilled, we are not trained to be champions and propagandists of this or that set of moral principles but are simply allowed to grow as nettles grow by a fence. This is why there are very few hypocrites among us and very many liars, bigots, and babblers.There is no thrift there is greed To obtain more and more in order to have just more than the others. There is no knowledge there are rumours, hearsay and superstitions. There



I read this novel in my own language. This is an excellent book for anybody who loves Russian literature. It's a very depressing story about a Russian noble family, whose weakness and low moral is passed on from parents to children, whose destiny then is to continue or repeat their parents' downhill of unhappy life.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and although it is kind of a nasty story, it didnt seem as grim to me as everyone else appears to find it. There is humour in Anna Petrovna and in Judas, and the landscape and the estates arent as universally lousy as others find them.That said, it can be sad, and maddening, and troubling, and may even cause the reader to look into their own soul. What more can you wish for in a book?