The Golovlyov Family (Russian: Господа Головлёвы, romanized: Gospoda Golovlyovy; also translated as The Golovlevs or A Family of Noblemen: The Gentlemen Golovliov) is a novel by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, written in the course of five years, first published in 1880, and generally regarded as the author's magnum opus.
However, the idea of a large family chronicle novel, designed to show the stagnation of the land-based gentry (dvoryanstvo), was formed only in 1876, when Saltykov stopped publishing stories about the family under the title The Well-Meant Speeches.
Arina Petrova, matriarch of the Golovlyov family, runs a large estate (4,000 serfs) in Russia.
She was a practical and strict noblewoman, and she banished her drunken husband Vladmir Mihailitch to his room for several decades while she ran the estate.
She was very upset when Anna died (“throwing her two brats on to my shoulders”) and when Stepan returned.
She keeps her family on a very tight financial leash, and they live at poverty level despite their wealth.
Arina declares that she hates him, and says "he has been nothing but a worry and a disgrace to me all his life.” She wonders who she is saving her money for.
Stepan is let back into the estate, but becomes depressed and runs away one winter evening.
Arina leaves the big house and moves in with her orphaned twin granddaughters to the Pogorelka estate.
She gives birth to a boy; Porphyry feels guilty for having a child out of wedlock, so he sends the baby to the orphanage without Yevpraxeya’s knowledge.
A messenger goes to inform a distant relative (Nadya Galkin) about being the new heir to the Golovlyov estate and capital.
The Golovlyov Family grew up from The Well-Meant Speeches, a series of satirical stories and sketches, intended as critical studies of the "pillars of society".
On January 2, 1881, Saltykov explained his work in a letter to Yevgeny Utin: "I took a look at the family, the state, the property and found out that none of such things exist.
[2] However, as I. P. Foote notes, social-historical interest of the novel is overshadowed by the psychological portrayal of the two main characters, Porfiry Vladimirovich and Arina Petrovna.
In this sense, Porphyry is a modernist prototype: the character who lacks an audience, the alienated actor.
The hypocrite who does not know that he is one, and really be told that he is one by anyone around him, is something of a revolutionary type of character, for he has no "true" knowable self, no "stable" ego... Around the turn of the twentieth century, Knut Hamsun, a novelist strongly influenced by Dostoevsky and the Russian novel, would invent a newkind of character: the lunatic heroes of his novels Hunger and Mysteries go around telling falsely incriminating stories about themselves and acting badly when they have no obvious reason to. [...]
The role of conscience in "bringing about a transformation of human life" is an important theme in Saltykov's other works, particularly in the novel The History of a Town.