The Golovlyov Family

By Shchedrin
Translated from the Russian by Natalie Duddington
Introduction by James Wood

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 Judas.

One of the great books 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.

Read the introduction (PDF)

Reviews

Gogol has been passed from school to school for thirteen decades. Even Bulgakov, who regarded Saltykov [Shchedrin] as his teacher, who is the most satirical writer after Saltykov, and whose main works were unpublished until ten years ago, has been written about by representatives of many different critical sects. That Saltykov's works have not had this kind of appeal is somewhat puzzling... Even a Freudian novice could work Oedipal themes out of the autobiographical elements in The Golovlyov Family ("Saltykov and his Mother"), and the Tartu University school could draw complex diagrams to show how The Golovlyov Family is that most wonderful of all things, a "unified whole." ...It is time that Saltykov stopped being the exclusive property of critics whose primary concerns are sociological or historical. As the reader of The Golovlyov Family will see—with considerable pleasure—Saltykov's prose has much more to offer than that.
— Carl R. Proffer

Mrs. Duddington's is a very good translation, ingenious in its rendering of topical expressions.
— Times Literary Supplement

. . . Strikingly powerful, convincing, and impressive.
— The New York Times

This is a tragic story, deeply moving, and by means of the figures that pass through it, relentlessly depicts the Russia that so inevitably prepared the Revolution. The book is a classic in its own country, and it is obvious why.
— The Spectator

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