A Family of Noblemen
New York: Boni & Liveright, Inc., 1917. Presumed First Edition, First printing thus. Hardcover. Format is approximately 5.5 inches by 7.5 inches. [10], 422 pages. Blue cloth stamped in gilt. Cover has some wear and soiling. This was one the very first books to bear the Boni & Liveright imprint and is exceedingly scarce. Bookplate of Harriet Borland inside front cover!!! Borland is know for her study of the Soviet Union's First Five Year Plan from 1928-1932 where an intensive effort was made to mobilize literature for use as propaganda. It looked at how the writer became a professional worker with duties determined by political, social, and economic considerations. Mikhail Yevgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin (27 January [O.S. 15 January] 1826 – 10 May [O.S. 28 April] 1889), born Mikhail Yevgrafovich Saltykov and known during his lifetime by the pen name Nikolai Shchedrin, was a major Russian writer and satirist of the 19th century. He spent most of his life working as a civil servant in various capacities. After the death of poet Nikolay Nekrasov, he acted as editor of a Russian literary magazine Otechestvenniye Zapiski until the Tsarist government banned it in 1884. In his works Saltykov mastered both stark realism and satirical grotesque merged with fantasy. His most famous works, the family chronicle novel The Golovlyov Family (1880) and the political novel The History of a Town (1870) became important works of 19th-century fiction, and Saltykov is regarded as a major figure of Russian literary Realism. Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin is regarded to be the most prominent satirist in the history of the Russian literature. According to critic and biographer Maria Goryachkina, he's managed to compile "the satirical encyclopedia" of contemporary Russian life, targeting first serfdom with its degrading effect upon the society, then, after its abolition, - corruption, bureaucratic inefficiency, opportunistic tendencies in intelligentsia, greed and amorality of those at power, but also - apathy, meekness and social immobility of the common people of Russia. His major work The Golovlyov Family, is widely regarded as his masterpiece. The Golovlyov Family (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. The Golovlyov Family is regarded as a classic of Russian literature. According to D. S. Mirsky, it is "the gloomiest book in all Russian literature", and "this one book" places the author "in the very front line of Russian realistic novelists and secures him a permanent place among the national classics". The principal characters of the novel are based on the members of Saltykov's family. Saltykov's mother is closely portrayed in Arina Petrovna, while Porphyry has many features of Saltykov's older brother Dmitry. N. Belogolovy, Saltykov's friend and doctor, described the family as "savage and ill-tempered" and relations by its members as "marked by an animal cruelty, devoid of any warm familial aspects". In 1875 Saltykov started a series of satirical short stories The Well-Meant Speeches for the magazine Otechestvennye zapiski, which initially contained several stories about the Golovlyovs. 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. In 1880 Shchedrin wrote the final chapter of the novel and reworked all of them to publish the novel as a separate book. 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. And that those very principles for the sake of which freedoms have been granted, were not respected as principles any more, even by those who seemed to hold them." The novel focuses on the institution of the family as cornerstone of society: unlike the conservatives, who portray the traditional family in positive tones, Saltykov gives an image of a dysfunctional family. Unlike his other works, in which Saltykov condemns the serfdom for its cruelty caused to the serfs, in The Golovlyov Family he condemns is for what it did to the masters, whom he shows to have been its moral victims. In contrast to the "gentry nests" depicted by Ivan Turgenev (Home of the Gentry) and Leo Tolstoy, Golovlyovo becomes a symbolical source of the family's malaise. Condition: Good / No dust jacket present.
Keywords: Harriet Borland, Nikolai Shchedrin, Golovlyov, Mikhail Yevgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin, Russian Literary Realism, Arina Petrovna, Porphyry, Belogolovy, Satire, Land-based Gentry, Family
[Book #84907]
Price: $650.00