Short answers, pulled from the story.
Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin was a major 19th-century Russian writer and satirist, regarded as the most prominent satirist in the history of Russian literature. He is best known for The Golovlyov Family (1880) and The History of a Town (1870), both considered masterpieces of Russian literary Realism. His prose style became so distinctive that critics coined the term 'saltykovian' to describe it.
Tsar Nicholas I signed an order on the 26th of April 1848 for Saltykov's arrest and deportation to Vyatka. The exile was apparently triggered by his novella Contradictions and appears to have been an overreaction by authorities alarmed by the French Revolution of 1848. He remained in Vyatka until 1855, when the death of Tsar Nicholas I allowed the political climate to shift.
The Golovlyov Family (1880) traces the moral and physical collapse of three generations of a Russian gentry household, centered on the character Porfiry 'Little Judas' Golovlyov, whose compulsive hypocrisy and meaningless speech embodied mindless self-destruction. Critic D.S. Mirsky called it the gloomiest book in all Russian literature, praising it for achieving its effect 'by the simplest means without any theatrical, melodramatic, or atmospheric effects.'
Saltykov joined Otechestvennye Zapiski as head of the journalistic department in September 1868 and effectively carried the publication until censors shut it down in 1884. Between 1874 and 1879 the magazine suffered eighteen censorial sanctions, nearly all connected to Saltykov's work. Its closure was, by his own account, a blow worse than any previous censorship: 'The possibility to talk with my readers has been taken away from me.'
Aesopian language was Saltykov's own term for his technique of sustained circumlocution, using indirect, allegorical, and fantastical framing to smuggle radical political ideas past censors. He used it because direct criticism of the tsarist government was dangerous, and it allowed him to take 'most radical ideas to print,' which he considered a matter of pride. Critic D.S. Mirsky described the style as 'one continuous circumlocution because of censorship' that required a 'constant reading commentary.'
Yes. Karl Marx, who knew Russian, read several of Saltykov's books including Mon Repos Haven, The Gentlemen from Tashkent, and Diary of a Provincial in St. Petersburg, ranking him alongside Pushkin and Gogol among the Russian authors he particularly valued. Lenin regularly quoted Saltykov's characters in political argument, using the name Iudushka to label adversaries including his own associate Trotsky.