Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin
Mikhail Yevgrafovich, Count Saltykov,
pseudonym N. Shchedrin (b. Jan. 27 [Jan.
15, old style], 1826, Spas-Ugol,
Russia—d. May 10 [April 28, O.S.], 1889,
St. Petersburg), novelist of radical
sympathies and one of greatest of all
Russian satirists.
A sensitive boy, he was deeply shocked
by his mother’s cruel treatment of
peasants, which he later described in
one of his most important works,
Poshekhonskaya starina (1887–89; “Old
Times in Poshekhona”). In 1838 he was
sent to the Imperial Lycée at Tsarskoye
Selo (now Pushkin), Russia’s training
ground for high officers of state, where
he began to compose and publish verses.
Reacting violently against its
bureaucratic regime, he joined the
revolutionary circles in St. Petersburg
and met the critic Vissarion Belinsky.
In 1847 he began his literary career as
a reviewer in the radical periodicals
Sovremennik (“The Contemporary”) and
Otechestvennye zapiski (“Notes of the
Fatherland”). As a result of the
sympathy he expressed for French utopian
socialists in his story Zaputannoye delo
(1848; “A Complicated Affair”), he was
exiled to Vyatka (now Kirov), where he
worked in the provincial governor’s
office. After he returned to St.
Petersburg in 1855, he published his
first successful book, Gubernskiye
ocherki (1856–57; selections in English
translation, Tchinovnicks. Sketches of
Provincial Life, 1861), in which he
satirized Vyatka officials. In 1857 he
wrote his only comedy, Smert Pazukhina
(performed 1893; The Death of Pazukhin,
1924), about Russian merchants.
From 1858 he served as a provincial vice
governor of Ryazan and then Tver and as
president of the taxation boards at
Penza, Tula, and Ryazan, successively.
In 1862 Saltykov retired from government
service and devoted himself to
literature. He was editor of Sovremennik
and then joined the radical poet Nikolay
Nekrasov as co-editor of Otechestvennye
zapiski, becoming editor after
Nekrasov’s death (1878). His major works
include Istoriya odnogo goroda (written
1869–70; “History of One Town”) and
Pompadury i pompadurshi (written between
1863 and 1874; “Pompadours and
Pompadouresses”), two biting satires on
the highest Russian officials. His last
works include a novel that traces the
falling fortunes of a family of landed
gentry, Gospoda Golovlyovy (1876; The
Golovlyov Family, 1955); and Skazki
(1880–85; Fables, 1931), a trenchant
commentary on society.
