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.