The Gentlemen Golovlyovs

The novel The Gentlemen Golovlyovs was worked on by Saltykov-Shchedrin for a whole five years – from 1875 to 1880, and the result of such persistent labor was one of the most significant works in Russian prose of the 19th century, where satire is combined with psychological realism. The success of this novel about the slow decline and destruction of the family of sluggish and narrow-minded provincial landowners, in which the writer invested much of his memories of his own joyless childhood, was immense. It is enough to say that the name of the brightest and most odious of his characters, Iudushka, instantly became a household name in Russia and remains so to this day.