Rational Scribbling: Bureaucratic Mythologies in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s »The Golovlevs«

Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s novel »The Golovlevs« (1880) not only critiques the Russian gentry family, but also the shift from an agrarian economy to an urban bureaucracy in the period before and during the Great Reforms. Drawing on his experiences in the civil service and adopting Slavic folklore as a mirror, Saltykov-Shchedrin identifies the ways in which excessive administrative documentation snowballs into a governmental network of Heideggerian idle talk that produces social myths and arbitrary material power. In the post-Great Reforms era bureaucracy, Saltykov-Shchedrin contends that problems of irrationality and arbitrary authority persist, undermining the reforms by producing only emptiness.