Spiegel's list of the greatest German language books of the last 100 years

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

The Castle, Franz Kafka

B. Traven, The Death Ship

Klaus Mann, The Pious Dance

Arthur Schnitzler, Dream Story

Arnold Zweig, The Case of Sergeant Grischa

Hans Henny Jahnn, Perrudja (?)

Alfred Döblin, Berling Alexanderplatz

Vicki Baum, Grand Hotel

Edlef Köppen, Heeresbericht (?)

Joseph Roth, Job

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers

Irmgard Keun, The Artificial Silk Girl

Friedrich Glauser, In Matto's Realm

Ödön von Horváth, The Age of the Fish

Anna Seghers, Transit

Ludwig Hohl, Notes, or: On Non-Premature Reconciliation

Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone (Alone in Berlin)

Ilse Aichinger, The Greater Hope

Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900

Gabriele Tergit, Effingers (?)

Heimito von Doderer, The Strudlhof Steps

Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Judge and His Hangman

Wolfgang Koeppen, The Hothouse

Heinrich Böll, Murke's Collected Silences

Martin Walser, Ehen in Philippsburg

Arno Schmidt, KAFF auch Mare Crisium (?)

Carl Merz/Helmut Qualtinger, Der Herr Karl

Ingeborg Bachmann, The Thirtieth Year

Marlen Haushofer, The Wall

Ernst Weiss, The Eyewitness

Fritz Rudolf Fries, Der Weg nach Oobliadooh (?)

Hubert Fichte, Die Palette (?)

Jurek Becker, Jakob the Liar

Kurt Kusenberg, Gesammelte Erzählungen (?)

Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries

Walter Kempowski, An Ordinary Youth

Pater Handke, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

Ulrich Plenzdorf, The New Sorrows of Young W.

Brigitte Reimann, Franziska Linkerhand (?)

Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance

Elias Canetti, The Tongue Set Free

Bernward Vesper, Die Reise (?)

Maxie Wander, Guten Morgen, Du Schöne (?)

Hermann Lenz, Tagebuch vom Überleben und Leben (?)

Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor

Christa Wolf, No Place on Earth

Günter Grass, The Meeting at Telgte

Max Frisch, Man in the Holocene

Ronald M. Schernikau, Kleinstadtnovelle (?)

Alfred Andersch, The Father of a Murderer

Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Marbot (?)

Botho Strauss, Couples, Passersby

Franz Fühmann, Vor Feuerschlünden (?)

Rainald Goetz, Insane

Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher

Thomas Bernhard, The Woodcutters

Jörg Fauser, Raw Material

Volker Braun, Hinze-Kunze-Roman (?)

Werner Steinberg, Die Mördergrube (?)

Christoph Ransmayr, The Last World

Veza Canetti, Yellow Street

Ruth Klüger, Still Alive

Heiner Müller, Krieg ohne Schlacht (?)

Christian Kracht, Fraserland (?)

Marcel Beyer, The Karnau Tapes

Feridun Zaimoğlu, Kanak Sprak (?)

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz

Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde (?)

Uwe Timm, In My Brother's Shadow

Terézia Mora, Day In Day Out

Alexander Kluge, Chronik der Gefühle (?)

Christoph Hein, Settlement

Kathrin Röggla, wir schlafen nicht (?)

Ulrich Peltzer, Part of the Solution

Karen Duve, Taxi (?)

Herta Müller, The Hunger Angel

Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands

Friederike Mayröcker, ich bin in der Anstalt (?)

Sibylle Lewitscharoff, Blumenberg

Olga Grjasnowa, All Russians Love Birch Trees

Jonas Lüscher, Frühling der Barbaren (?)

Wolfgang Herrndorf, Arbeit und Struktur (?)

Ulrike Edschmid, Das Verschwinden des Philip S. (?)

Lutz Seiler, Kruso 

Katja Petrowskaja, Maybe Esther

Nino Haratischwili, The Eighth Life (for Brilka)

Clemens J. Setz, Die Stunde zwischen Frau und Gitarre (?)

Barbara Honigmann, Chronik meiner Straße (?)

Raoul Schrott, Erste Erde Epos (?)

Philipp Weiss, Am Weltenrand sitzen die Menschen und lachen (?)

Saša Stanišić, Where You Come From

Dorothee Elmiger, Out of the Sugar Factory

Leif Randt, Allegro Pastell (?)

Helga Schubert, Vom Aufstehen (?)

Antje Rávik Strubel, Blaue Frau (?)

Fatma Aydemir, Dschinns (?)

Raphaela Edelbauer, Die Inkommen­surablen (?)

Clemens Meyer, Die Projektoren (?)

x

An excerpt from the preface to Giordano Bruno's "The Heroic Frenzies"

An excerpt from the preface to Giordano Bruno's "The Heroic Frenzies". The preface is addressed to Sir Philip Sidney

(this is quoted in Ingrid Rowland's biography of Giordano Bruno)

___________________________________

It is truly, O most generous Sir, the work of a low, filthy animal nature to have made oneself the constant admirer, and to have fixed a solicitous attachment upon or around the beauty of a woman’s body. Good God! What more vile and ignoble vision can present itself to a clear-sighted eye than a man, brooding, afflicted, tormented, sorry, melancholy; who waxes now cold, now hot, now boiling, now trembling, now pale, now blushing, now in a pose of perplexity, now in the act of decisiveness, a man who spends the best season and the choicest fruits of his life distilling the elixir of his brain toward putting into thought and writ and sealing in public monuments those endless tortures, those grave torments, those reasoned arguments, those laborious thoughts and those bitter desires addressed to the tyranny of an unworthy, imbecilic, foolish and sordid smut?

What tragicomedy, what act, I say, more deserving of pity and laughter could be produced in this theater of the world, on this stage of our perceptions, than these many subjugated men, rendered pensive, contemplative, constant, steadfast, faithful, lovers, devotees, adorers, and slaves of a thing without faith, bereft of all constancy, destitute of intelligence, empty of all merit, void of any acknowledgment or gratitude, where no more sense, intellect, or goodness is to be obtained than might be found in a statue or a painting on a wall? And where there abound more disdain, arrogance, effrontery, vainglory, rage, scorn, perfidy, lust, greed, ingratitude, and other mortal vices than the poisons and instruments of death that could have issued forth from Pandora’s box, all to have, alas, such expansive accommodation within the brain of such a monster? Behold, inscribed on paper, enclosed in books, set before the eyes, and intoned in the ears, a noise, a commotion, a clash of devices, of emblems, of mottoes, of epistles, of sonnets, of epigrams, of books, of chattering scribbles, of terminal sweats, of lives consumed, of cries that deafen the stars, laments that make hell’s caverns reverberate, aches that strike the living dumb, sights that exhaust the pity of the gods, for those eyes, for those cheeks, for that bosom, for that white, for that crimson, for that tongue, for that tooth, for that lip, for that hair, that dress, that mantle, that glove, that slipper, that high heel, that avarice, that giggle, that scorn, that empty window, that eclipse of the sun, that throbbing, that disgust, that stench, that sepulchre, that cesspit, that menstruation, that carrion, that malaria, that uttermost insult and lapse of nature, that with a surface, a shadow, a phantasm, a dream, an enchantment of Circe plied in the service of reproduction, should deceive in the matter of beauty; which simultaneously comes and goes, issues and dies, flowers and rots, and is somewhat beautiful on the outside, but truly and fixedly contains within a shipyard, a workshop, a customhouse, a marketplace of every foulness, toxin, and poison that our stepmother Nature has managed to produce: and once the seed she requires has been paid out, she often repays it with a morass, a remorse, a sadness, a flaccidity, a headache, a lassitude, this and that distemper that are known to all the world, so that every place aches bitterly where it itched so sweetly before.

_____________________________________

Here's an excerpt from another of his works, a dialogue called "Cause, Principle, and Unity"

Poliinnio: As I was studying in my little sanctuary of the Muses, I came upon that passage in Aristotle, at the beginning of the Physics, in which, when he wishes to expound upon what the primal matter may be, he takes as its mirror the feminine sex, that sex, I say, which is wayward, fragile, inconstant, soft, feeble, unlucky, ignoble, vile, abject, despicable, unworthy, reprobate, sinister, detestable, frigid, deformed, empty, vain, indiscreet, insane, perfidious, sluggish, affected, filthy, ungrateful, lacking, maimed, imperfect, inchoate, insufficient, cut short, attenuated, that rust, that caterpillar, that chaff, plague, disease, death.

Among us placed by nature at God’s will

To be a burden and a bitter pill.

Gervasio: You humanists, who call yourselves professors of good literature, when you grow so full of your great ideas that you can’t contain yourselves anymore, you have nothing better to do than dump them on the poor women, just as, when another kind of frenzy takes you, you vent it on the first of your wretched students who passes by.

Hobbledehoy

An excerpt from Anthony Trollope's The Small House at Allington:

I have said that John Eames had been petted by none but his mother, but I would not have it supposed, on this account, that John Eames had no friends. There is a class of young men who never get petted, though they may not be the less esteemed, or perhaps loved. They do not come forth to the world as Apollos, nor shine at all, keeping what light they may have for inward purposes. Such young men are often awkward, ungainly, and not yet formed in their gait; they straggle with their limbs, and are shy; words do not come to them with ease, when words are required, among any but their accustomed associates. Social meetings are periods of penance to them, and any appearance in public will unnerve them. They go much about alone, and blush when women speak to them. In truth, they are not as yet men, whatever the number may be of their years; and, as they are no longer boys, the world has found for them the ungraceful name of hobbledehoy.

Such observations, however, as I have been enabled to make on this matter have led me to believe that the hobbledehoy is by no means the least valuable species of the human race. When I compare the hobbledehoy of one or two and twenty to some finished Apollo of the same age, I regard the former as unripe fruit, and the latter as fruit that is ripe. Then comes the question as to the two fruits. Which is the better fruit, that which ripens early—which is, perhaps, favoured with some little forcing apparatus, or which, at least, is backed by the warmth of a southern wall; or that fruit of slower growth, as to which nature works without assistance, on which the sun operates in its own time,—or perhaps never operates if some ungenial shade has been allowed to interpose itself? The world, no doubt, is in favour of the forcing apparatus or of the southern wall. The fruit comes certainly, and at an assured period. It is spotless, speckless, and of a certain quality by no means despicable. The owner has it when he wants it, and it serves its turn. But, nevertheless, according to my thinking, the fullest flavour of the sun is given to that other fruit,—is given in the sun's own good time, if so be that no ungenial shade has interposed itself. I like the smack of the natural growth, and like it, perhaps, the better because that which has been obtained has been obtained without favour.

But the hobbledehoy, though he blushes when women address him, and is uneasy even when he is near them, though he is not master of his limbs in a ball-room, and is hardly master of his tongue at any time, is the most eloquent of beings, and especially eloquent among beautiful women. He enjoys all the triumphs of a Don Juan, without any of Don Juan's heartlessness, and is able to conquer in all encounters, through the force of his wit and the sweetness of his voice. But this eloquence is heard only by his own inner ears, and these triumphs are the triumphs of his imagination.

The true hobbledehoy is much alone, not being greatly given to social intercourse even with other hobbledehoys—a trait in his character which I think has hardly been sufficiently observed by the world at large. He has probably become a hobbledehoy instead of an Apollo, because circumstances have not afforded him much social intercourse; and, therefore, he wanders about in solitude, taking long walks, in which he dreams of those successes which are so far removed from his powers of achievement. Out in the fields, with his stick in his hand, he is very eloquent, cutting off the heads of the springing summer weeds, as he practises his oratory with energy. And thus he feeds an imagination for which those who know him give him but scanty credit, and unconsciously prepares himself for that latter ripening, if only the ungenial shade will some day cease to interpose itself.

Such hobbledehoys receive but little petting, unless it be from a mother; and such a hobbledehoy was John Eames when he was sent away from Guestwick to begin his life in the big room of a public office in London. 

An excerpt from Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose

“But now tell me,” William was saying, “why? Why did you want to shield this book more than so many others? Why did you hide—though not at the price of crime—treatises on necromancy, pages that may have blasphemed against the name of God, while for these pages you damned your brothers and have damned yourself? There are many other books that speak of comedy, many others that praise laughter. Why did this one fill you with such fear?”

“Because it was by the Philosopher. Every book by that man has destroyed a part of the learning that Christianity had accumulated over the centuries. The fathers had said everything that needed to be known about the power of the Word, but then Boethius had only to gloss the Philosopher and the divine mystery of the Word was transformed into a human parody of categories and syllogism. The book of Genesis says what has to be known about the composition of the cosmos, but it sufficed to rediscover the Physics of the Philosopher to have the universe reconceived in terms of dull and slimy matter, and the Arab Averroës almost convinced everyone of the eternity of the world. We knew everything about the divine names, and the Dominican buried by Abo—seduced by the Philosopher—renamed them, following the proud paths of natural reason. And so the cosmos, which for the Areopagite revealed itself to those who knew how to look up at the luminous cascade of the exemplary first cause, has become a preserve of terrestrial evidence for which they refer to an abstract agent. Before, we used to look to heaven, deigning only a frowning glance at the mire of matter; now we look at the earth, and we believe in the heavens because of earthly testimony. Every word of the Philosopher, by whom now even saints and prophets swear, has overturned the image of the world. But he had not succeeded in overturning the image of God. If this book were to become an object for open interpretation, we would have crossed the last boundary.”

“But what frightened you in this discussion of laughter? You cannot eliminate laughter by eliminating the book.”

“No, to be sure. But laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh. It is the peasant’s entertainment, the drunkard’s license; even the church in her wisdom has granted the moment of feast, carnival, fair, this diurnal pollution that releases humors and distracts from other desires and other ambitions. . . . Still, laughter remains base, a defense for the simple, a mystery desecrated for the plebeians. The apostle also said as much: it is better to marry than to burn. Rather than rebel against God’s established order, laugh and enjoy your foul parodies of order, at the end of the meal, after you have drained jugs and flasks. Elect the king of fools, lose yourselves in the liturgy of the ass and the pig, play at performing your saturnalia head down. . . . But here, here”—now Jorge struck the table with his finger, near the book William was holding open—“here the function of laughter is reversed, it is elevated to art, the doors of the world of the learned are opened to it, it becomes the object of philosophy, and of perfidious theology. . . . You saw yesterday how the simple can conceive and carry out the most lurid heresies, disavowing the laws of God and the laws of nature. But the church can deal with the heresy of the simple, who condemn themselves on their own, destroyed by their ignorance. The ignorant madness of Dolcino and his like will never cause a crisis in the divine order. He will preach violence and will die of violence, will leave no trace, will be consumed as carnival is consumed, and it does not matter whether during the feast the epiphany of the world upside down will be produced on earth for a brief time. Provided the act is not transformed into plan, provided this vulgar tongue does not find a Latin that translates it. Laughter frees the villein from fear of the Devil, because in the feast of fools the Devil also appears poor and foolish, and therefore controllable. But this book could teach that freeing oneself of the fear of the Devil is wisdom. When he laughs, as the wine gurgles in his throat, the villein feels he is master, because he has overturned his position with respect to his lord; but this book could teach learned men the clever and, from that moment, illustrious artifices that could legitimatize the reversal. Then what in the villein is still, fortunately, an operation of the belly would be transformed into an operation of the brain. That laughter is proper to man is a sign of our limitation, sinners that we are. But from this book many corrupt minds like yours would draw the extreme syllogism, whereby laughter is man’s end! Laughter, for a few moments, distracts the villein from fear. But law is imposed by fear, whose true name is fear of God. This book could strike the Luciferine spark that would set a new fire to the whole world, and laughter would be defined as the new art, unknown even to Prometheus, for canceling fear. To the villein who laughs, at that moment, dying does not matter: but then, when the license is past, the liturgy again imposes on him, according to the divine plan, the fear of death. And from this book there could be born the new destructive aim to destroy death through redemption from fear. And what would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear, perhaps the most foresighted, the most loving of the divine gifts? For centuries the doctors and the fathers have spread perfumed essences of holy learning to redeem, through the thought of that which is lofty, the wretchedness and temptation of that which is base. And this book—considering comedy a wondrous medicine, with its satire and mime, which would produce the purification of the passions through the enactment of defect, fault, weakness—would induce false scholars to try to redeem the lofty with a diabolical reversal: through the acceptance of the base. This book could prompt the idea that man can wish to have on earth (as your Bacon suggested with regard to natural magic) the abundance of the land of Cockaigne. But this is what we cannot and must not have. Look at the young monks who shamelessly read the parodizing buffoonery of the Coena Cypriani. What a diabolical transfiguration of the Holy Scripture! And yet as they read it they know it is evil. But on the day when the Philosopher’s word would justify the marginal jests of the debauched imagination, or when what has been marginal would leap to the center, every trace of the center would be lost. The people of God would be transformed into an assembly of monsters belched forth from the abysses of the terra incognita, and at that moment the edge of the known world would become the heart of the Christian empire, the Arimaspi on the throne of Peter, Blemmyes in the monasteries, dwarfs with huge bellies and immense heads in charge of the library! Servants laying down the law, we (but you, too, then) obeying, in the absence of any law. A Greek philosopher (whom your Aristotle quotes here, an accomplice and foul auctoritas) said that the seriousness of opponents must be dispelled with laughter, and laughter opposed with seriousness. The prudence of our fathers made its choice: if laughter is the delight of the plebeians, the license of the plebeians must be restrained and humiliated, and intimidated by sternness. And the plebeians have no weapons for refining their laughter until they have made it an instrument against the seriousness of the spiritual shepherds who must lead them to eternal life and rescue them from the seductions of belly, pudenda, food, their sordid desires. But if one day somebody, brandishing the words of the Philosopher and therefore speaking as a philosopher, were to raise the weapon of laughter to the condition of subtle weapon, if the rhetoric of conviction were replaced by the rhetoric of mockery, if the topics of the patient construction of the images of redemption were to be replaced by the topics of the impatient dismantling and upsetting of every holy and venerable image—oh, that day even you, William, and all your knowledge, would be swept away!”

Two excerpts from Orlando Furioso

Couple of excerpts from Orlando Furioso (tr. Barbara Reynolds) which depict poet's views on gender. 

This first excerpt is from the opening of Canto V.

1

No creatures on the earth, no matter whether
Of peaceful disposition, mild and kind,
Or fierce and merciless as wintry weather,
Are hostile to the females of their kind.
The she-bear and her mate in sport together,
The lion and the lioness, we find;
The she-wolf and the wolf at peace appear;
The heifer from the bull has naught to fear.

2

What dreadful plague, what fury of despair
In our tormented bosoms now holds sway,
That wives and husbands constantly we hear
Wounding each other with the things they say?
With scratching, bruising, tearing out of hair,
Assault and battery, in bitter fray
They drench with scalding tears the marriage-bed,
And not tears only; sometimes blood is shed.

3

Not only a great wrong, but in God’s sight
An outrage against Nature he commits
Who with his gentle helpmeet stoops to fight,
Or in her face a lovely woman hits,
Or harms a hair upon her head; but quite
Inhuman is the man who her throat slits,
Or chokes or poisons her; he, in my eyes,
Is not a man, but fiend in human guise.

**************

Another excerpt from earlier in the poem, the canto IV, depicts Rinaldo's outrage at the unequal and unjust laws governing sexuality. Ginevra is a Scottish princess who is rescued by Rinaldo. Her name is Italianised version of Guinevere and her story in the poem has parallels with that of the namesake queen in the Arthurian tales.

63

Rinaldo thought a while and then he said:

‘A damsel is condemned to death because

She gave her lover solace in her bed

Who with desire for her tormented was?

A curse upon the legislator’s head!

And cursed be all who tolerate such laws!

Death rather to such damsels as refuse,

But not to her who loves and life renews.

64

‘And in my view it makes no difference

If the report is false or if it’s true,

For this does not affect her innocence

(I’d praise her anyway, if no one knew).

I know just what to say in her defence.

So now a trusty guide I ask of you

To lead me to the accuser. I’ll not waver,

For, as God is my help, I hope to save her.

65

‘I will not say she did not do this deed.

Lest I am wrong, it would be ill-advised;

But I will say that even if she did,

She does not merit to be thus chastised.

And I will say that mad and bad indeed

He was who first this evil law devised,

Which from the statute-book should be erased

And by a wiser measure be replaced.

66

‘If the same ardour, if an equal fire

Draws and compels two people ever more

To the sweet consummation of desire

(Which many ignoramuses deplore),

Why should a woman by a fate so dire

Be punished who has done what men a score

Of times will do and never will be blamed,

Nay, rather, will be praised for it and famed?

67

‘This inequality in law much wrong

Has done to women. With God’s help, I mean

To show that to have suffered it so long

The greatest of iniquities has been.’

Rinaldo’s logic carried them along.

The ancient forefathers were justly seen

To be unjust to have consented to it;

Also the king, who could and should undo it.

Zola and The Golovlev Family

Prof. Kate Holland's essay "The Russian Rougon-Macquart: Degeneration and biological determinism in The Golovlev Family" provides some fascinating details about reception of Zola's works in Russia and the discourse of degeneration and debates around the concept of biological determinism that took place there in the later decades of the 19th century. In this sense, Russia was not really much different from western European countries where writers and intellectuals were participating in similar debates during the same time period. The original trigger was the popularisation of the ideas of Charles Darwin, more than the actual ideas in The Origin of Species it was the interpretations of those ideas and the sociological and historical implications of those interpretations that triggered these debates. In France it was the defeat in the Franco-Prussian war that gave these debates an added edge. The high point of this European debate was probably the publishing of the polemical book of the same name by the Austrian-Jewish writer Max Nordau. Nordau's book was extremely popular in the whole of western Europe and in Russia as well. But as Prof Holland says in the essay, the degenenation discourse in Russia predated Nordau's book and the debate there mostly centered around novels: 

"the degeneration theme proliferates in Russian literature of the 1870s, well before the publication of Nordau’s treatise, and indeed it was the novel, rather than scientific tracts, which brought degeneration discourse to Russia in this period. French naturalist writer Emile Zola’s works served as a central source of early degeneration discourse." 

As anyone who has read about Zola's life would know, in the early 70s, much before the eventual commercial success he achieved with L'Assommoir, he wrote a regular column called Letters from Paris for the liberal Russian magazine "The European Messenger." His columns mainly focused on the dispatches from the world of arts and letters in Paris. He had got this gig based on a recommendation from Turgenev. His early novels in the Rougon-Macquart series were also serialized in the magazine, most of them almost contemporaneously with their French publication. In fact the translation of the the fifth Rougon-Macquart novel La Faute de l'abbé Mouret was actually published before the publication of the original in France. But as his novels became more and more controversial and his literary doctrines, if not the actual novels, became more and more strident, his popularity in Russia declined. Eventually his novel Nana, with its controversial erotic subject matter, proved to be the last straw for his relationship with the magazine. 

In the essay Prof Holland says that Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin read and followed Zola's work closely and was one of the first Russians to adopt degeneration discourse and consciously use it to structure a work of fiction:

In his 1875–1880 novel-chronicle, The Golovlev Family, he represented a family afflicted by hereditary degeneracy, in which the older generation’s defects were reproduced in the younger, as each subsequent generation exhibited more telltale “stigmata of degeneracy” such as alcoholism, suicide, and prostitution. Upon first serialization The Golovlev Family was immediately recognized by critics as a “Russian Rougon-Macquart,” a work heavily influenced by Zola’s depictions of hereditary degeneracy. Yet though degeneration discourse shapes the overall conception of The Golovlev Family, it is tempered by a strong ideological and moral narrative voice, which insists on the continuing possibility of human moral potentiality and individual agency. This narrative perspective, coupled with the novel’s parodic recreation of earlier models of the Russian noble family novel, reveals a distinctly Russian degeneration discourse, in which biological factors compete with social and historical circumstances as explanations for human behavior. In this regard, The Golovlev Family reflects an increasingly self-confident Russian critical discourse that defends the national realist tradition against the predations of French naturalism. (emphasis mine)

I had forgotten some of the details from the novel but reading the essay brought back some of the memories of the book. The descriptions of the alcoholism, the relentless physical decline of the main characters mercilessly documented, regression across generations, the curse of inherited degeneracy, all point to the argument mentioned in the excerpt above that Saltykov-Schedrin was very consciously participating in the degeneration discourse through his novel. What I have emphasized in the passage above is the main thrust of the argument in Prof Holland's essay. It describes how Saltykov-Schedrin's rejected pure biological determinism and how he adopted a more "hybrid" mode of explanation with lots of examples from the novel. As a conclusion:

Working against the structures of degeneration and impulse of biological determinism throughout the novel is the voice of the narrator, who upholds the values of morality and irony and who reveals the novel’s characters’ culpability in their own fates, thus avoiding the tragic conclusions implicit in pure biological determinism. (emphasis mine)

I had some bones to pick with this argument. Not about the interpretation of The Golovlev Family but of Zola's novels. Zola in a way is to be blamed himself for this because apart from writing novels he also propounded doctrines, which naturally forced his readers to read his novels in a pre-structured, pre-defined way i.e. through the lens of his own literary principles. In my opinion it is doing a disservice to his novels. My own view is that Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels are also "hybrid" in almost exactly the same way Prof Holland is describing The Golovlev Family to be. It is not just about biological determinism - there is also ethical and social critique in them. A consistent and recurring theme in many of his novels is the excesses of the second empire society. It was the the pomp, the baseness, the constant falsity that sapped the spirit of the nation, he says, which finally came to fruition in the defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. The novels like Germinal, The Ladies' Paradise, The Kill, The Belly of Paris - all of them have stinging critique of the process and institutions of a high-capitalist society in an imperial metropole. In the novel La Joie de vivre (one of my personal favourites) he actually criticizes the pessimism associated with the degeneration discourse. Even in La Terre, his most "extreme" and pessimistic novel, the most susceptible among his novels to the charge of blind or pure biological determinism, the main character Jean is portrayed as someone who is not implicated and who serves the same purpose as what Prof Holland says the narrator serves in The Golovlev Family. Incidentally Jean again plays a similar role in La Debacle, where his sturdiness is contrasted with the city-bred Maurice who is prone to pessimism and hysterical collapse associated with degeneracy and this contrast is then used to offer an ethical critique. It is also worth noting that Zola in his later life became a vocal opponent of decadence and degeneration, to the point of railing against celibacy and contraception!

I mean it is obvious that Zola's conception of man as a biological being first of all, subject to the laws of nature and the cycle of life (at least as understood in the 19th century by him and his ilk), is markedly different from that of in the traditional Russian realist novel which presents man as an autonomous agent, grappling with ethical and existential concerns and choices. But to reduce this "naturalistic" view of man to a crude form of biological determinism is do Zola an injustice. I wish Zola had not written "The Experimental Novel" or at least the critics would ignore it and focus more on his novels instead.

Overall I really loved reading the essay. It is very informative and immensely thought provoking. This essay is collected in the volume "Russian Writers and fin de siècle: The Twilight of Realism." It is edited by Katharine Bowers and Ani Kokobobo. Other essays also look very interesting but I am yet to read them.  

An excerpt from "Mimesis"

An excerpt from Eric Auerbach's Mimesis, Chapter 5 "Roland against Ganelon"

It appears to me that the first elevated style of the European Middle Ages arose at the moment when the single event is filled with life. That is why this style is so rich in individual scenes of great effectiveness, scenes in which only a very few characters confront one another, in which the gestures and speeches of a brief occurrence come out in sharp relief. The characters, facing one another at close quarters, without much room for movement, nevertheless stand there as individuals clearly set off from one another. What is said of them never degenerates into mere talk; it always remains a solemn statement in which every address, every phrase, and indeed every word, has a value of its own, separate and emphatic, with no trace of softness and no relaxed flow. Confronting the reality of life, this style is neither able nor willing to deal with its breadths or depths. It is limited in time, place, and social milieu. It simplifies the events of the past by stylizing and idealizing them. The feeling it seeks to arouse in its auditor is admiration and amazement for a distant world, whose instincts and ideals, though they certainly remain his own, yet evolve in such uncompromising purity and freedom, in comparison with the friction and resistance of real life, as his practical existence could not possibly attain. Human movements and great, towering exemplary figures appear with striking effect; his own life is not there at all. To be sure, in the very tone of the Chanson de Roland there is a great deal of contemporaneity. It does not begin with an announcement which removes the events to a distant past (“Long ago it came to pass … Of olden days I will sing …”) but with a strongly immediate note, as though Charles, our great Emperor, were almost still a living man. The naive transfer of events three centuries past into the ethos of feudal society of the early crusading period, the exploitation of the subject matter in the interest of ecclesiastic and feudal propaganda, give the poem a quality of living presentness. Something like a nascent national consciousness is even perceptible in it. When we read—to choose a simple illustration—the line in which Roland tries to organize the imminent attack of the Frankish knights (1165):

Seignurs barons, suef, le pas tenant!

we hear the echo of a common scene of contemporary feudal cavalry maneuvers. But these are isolated instances. Class limitation, idealization, simplification, and the shimmering veil of legend prevail.

The style of the French heroic epic is an elevated style in which the structural concept of reality is still extremely rigid and which succeeds in representing only a narrow portion of objective life circumscribed by distance in time, simplification of perspective, and class limitations. I shall be saying nothing new, but merely reformulating what I have said many times, if I add that in this style the separation of the realm of the heroic and sublime from that of the practical and everyday is a matter of course.