So my re-reading task for April was to go back to my list of books read in 2004 – there were 29 of them, including a couple I didn’t get to the end of—and see what I might re-read. Some of them I remember quite well (David Copperfield, for example, or Waugh’s Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold) while others I can’t seem to recall much at all. These include the one I’m here to write about: The Golovlyov Family by Nikolai Shchedrin.
I can remember exactly where and when I bought this particular volume, a pre-war Everyman edition – it was in a second-hand-book shop in Brecon, the weekend of the town’s 2004 Jazz Festival. But almost nothing has stuck in my memory from my first reading of this Russian novel from the 1870s.
I did remember, though, that it was not a novel with a happy ending, and no happy beginning or middle either. Indeed, The Golovlyov Family has been described as “the gloomiest in all Russian literature”. Shchedrin is of course not as famous as his near contemporaries Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but Arnold Bennett, writing in 1916 said TGF was “a masterpiece … a work of the very first order” – and that after admitting that he had only read it in a French translation. (A decade later, when he was writing a weekly column for the Evening Standard, Bennett claimed that the twelve best novels were all Russian – and yet did not mention Shchedrin at all.)
The novel’s titular family, owners of “a distant estate”, are not an attractive bunch. We start with Arina Petrovna, the formidable matriarch who manages the estate with ruthless stinginess and with very little help from her “clownish” husband. Of her children elder son Stepan squanders his inheritance in Moscow, returns home and drinks himself to death; daughter Anna soon disappears, having made an unfavourable marriage, and leaves two daughters, Anninka and Lubinka, to be looked after; Pavel also dies from drink; only Porphyry, nicknamed “Iudushka”, lasts to the end of the novel and is in the end the main character: a boring, religiose hypocrite who has “an uncanny flair for death”. Interestingly the previous owner of my copy had preserved a clipping from the New Statesman of 8 April 1943, in which V.S. Pritchett, in a “Books in General” column, expatiates on TGF, and in particular on the character of Iudushka – “ a remarkable example of a man whose cunning requires an atmosphere of vagueness and meaningless moral maxims. He has the stupidity of the slippery”. I think Pritchett’s got that right, though his claim that “we must be struck by the essential closeness of Shchedrin’s novel to the life of the successful middle class in England” is less convincing.
It’s an atmosphere of boredom that I’d say was most prevalent in this novel, and on the whole Shchedrin writes about it in a non-boring way. Chapter 3 has a seven-page conversation between Arina Petrovna and the servant Yevpraxeya that would be boring to listen to – they ramble on about the weather, God, war, the best way of pickling cucumbers, cards and vodka among other topics – but somehow it can be read without effort. Tellingly, I couldn’t help noticing that words such as “depressing” and “oppressive” seem to occur again and again in the novel:
It is hard to say what impression was produced on Stepan Vladimiritch’s mind by the picture of the busy autumn in the country, or indeed whether he grasped that in the squelching mud under a constant downpour of rain people were working as hard as they had done in the summer; but there is no doubt that the grey tearful autumn sky depressed him (p52)
There is something dreary and depressing about a sleepless night in the country … (p118)
… an oppressive mass of empty words seemed to crowd around [Iudushka] … He knew that nothing could catch him unawares or cause him to make the slightest deviation from the stale and meaningless precepts that entangled him from head to foot as in a net (p145)
I think those quotes give a good idea of the flavour of the book, and its author’s tone. This includes some bleakly comic moments: for instance, in what amounts to a running gag several characters try to argue that life in the country is not dull. “We kept saying to each other: Our young ladies are sure to settle at Pogorelka. It is very nice here in the summer; one can go mushrooming in the woods” – that’s from the local priest’s wife. A page or so later it’s echoed by a servant who claims: “If you are bored, you can go for a sledge drive and in the summer there’s mushrooming”. As if the obvious boredom could be simply dispelled by gathering mushrooms.
This boredom is what drives away Anninka and Lubinka, the two “young ladies” referred to above; they escape to become not very successful provincial actresses – “regarding it as a kind of deliverance from Egyptian captivity”, but soon discovering that their lives are far from glamorous. Of the two, only Anninka returns, becoming the focus of much of the later part of TGF, as both tormentor and companion to Iudushka. The family home, she finally realises, is “death itself, cruel greedy death, that is forever stalking a fresh victim”. And thus she is the last of the family to die, on the final page.
The translator of this edition was Natalie Duddington, who was (I’ve just learned from Wikipedia) the daughter of the Russian novelist Alexander Ertel. Where she got her surname from I’ve yet to discover, but apparently she was for a time “amanuensis” to Constance Garnett, the translator of much nineteenth-century Russian fiction early last century. Other Russian fiction translated by Natalie D includes Goncharov’s Oblomov, another novel about boredom.
Shchedrin is no Tolstoy or Turgenev, but I’m glad to have returned briefly to nineteenth-century Russia – for me at least a fascinating time and place. Next month, though, I’ll be reading about somewhere else.
Old geezer re-reading 