Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin

• 1. Introduction

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  Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin was the kind of writer whose very name became a language. By the end of his life, critics spoke of a prose style so distinctive they called it 'saltykovian.' A man who spent decades as a government official, who was exiled by one tsar and tolerated grudgingly by another, who edited Russia's most important literary magazine until censors shut it down in 1884 - he somehow produced a body of satirical work that Karl Marx read, that Lenin quoted to wound his enemies, and that critic D.S. Mirsky called the gloomiest novel in all of Russian literature. His pen name, Nikolai Shchedrin, became famous before most readers knew his real name. Who was the man behind the mask? How did a child who grew up watching serfdom devour everything around him turn that horror into art? And why, more than a century after his death in Saint Petersburg, does the character he called 'Little Judas' still serve as shorthand for a certain kind of hollow, self-destroying hypocrisy?

• 2. Roots in Serfdom

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  Mikhail Saltykov was born on the 27th of January 1826 in the village of Spas-Ugol, in what is now the Taldomsky District of Moscow Oblast, the sixth of eight children in a noble family whose lineage stretched back to a boyar named Mikhail Ignatievich Morozov, nicknamed Saltyk from an Old Church Slavonic word meaning 'one's own way.' His father's family had given Russia a tsaritsa, Praskovia Saltykova, and her daughter, the Empress Anna Ioannovna. His mother's side traced to a Moscow merchant of the first guild who received hereditary nobility for donating to the army in 1812. At the time of Mikhail's birth, his father Yevgraf was fifty years old and his mother Olga was twenty-five.

  The estate at Spasskoye sat on the border of the Tver and Yaroslavl governorates, and it was there that Mikhail witnessed what he later described through a character in his novel Old Years in Poshekhonye: serfdom saturating every layer of social life, degrading the privileged and enslaved alike, with fraud and trickery the order of the day and an all-pervading fear of being crushed at any moment. His mother Olga was despotic, her intimidating persona horrifying servants and children alike. His father was religious and weak.

  The children were rarely allowed outside, knowing their animals and birds, as Saltykov later put it, 'only as boiled and fried.' That enforced separation from the natural world left a permanent mark. Descriptions of nature are strikingly absent from his mature prose. Despite the bleakness, his mother perceived talent in Mikhail and treated him as her favorite, though the household gave its children neither love nor care. The 'devastating effect of legalized slavery upon the human psyche' would become one of the central motifs of his writing life, reaching its fullest expression in The Golovlyov Family, where the atmosphere of his childhood home was recreated in fiction.

• 3. The Making of a Satirist

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  By the age of six, Saltykov spoke French and German fluently. He learned to read and write Russian from a serf painter named Pavel Sokolov and a local clergyman, and he read the Gospel at age eight, citing it later as a major influence. A childhood friend named Sergey Yuriev, son of a neighboring landlord, would go on to edit the magazines Russkaya Mysl and Beseda. In 1834, when his elder sister Nadezhda graduated from the Moscow Ekaterininsky college, her friend Avdotya Vasilevskaya came to the house as a governess and took over Mikhail's education.

  At ten, Saltykov joined the Moscow Institute for sons of the nobility at its third class, skipping the first two. He transferred to the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum in Saint Petersburg in 1838, where he spent the next six years. One of his schoolfellows was Prince Aleksey Lobanov-Rostovsky, later the Minister of Foreign Affairs. The education there was poor by Saltykov's own account. He wrote in his Letters to Auntie that what was taught was 'scant, sporadic and all but meaningless,' less an education than a badge of class: above are you and me, beneath just one word, muzhik.

  He began writing poetry at the lyceum, translating Lord Byron and Heinrich Heine, and was proclaimed the course's 'heir to Pushkin.' His first poem, 'The Lyre,' a hymn to the great Russian poet, appeared in Biblioteka Dlya Chteniya in 1841. Eight more of his verses ran in Sovremennik in 1844-45. He attended Mikhail Yazykov's literary circle, which Vissarion Belinsky occasionally visited, and Belinsky's essays made a deep impression. When Saltykov graduated in 1844 as one of the best students, he was sent directly to the chancellery of the Ministry of Defense, ending his dream of attending Saint Petersburg University. That same year he began reviewing children's literature and textbooks for Otechestvennye zapiski and Sovremennik, his criticism sharp and Belinsky's influence visible. He gravitated toward French socialism, toward Saint-Simon, Fourier, and George Sand, and grew close to the circle around Mikhail Petrashevsky, whom he would later call 'a dear, unforgettable friend and teacher.'

• 4. Exile and the Vyatka Years

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  In 1847 Saltykov published his first novella, Contradictions, under the pseudonym M. Nepanov. Its follow-up, A Complicated Affair in 1848, drew praise from Nikolai Dobrolyubov, who wrote that it was 'full of heartfelt sympathy for destitute men,' and from Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who called it a book 'that has created a stir.' But the authorities, apparently alarmed by the French Revolution of 1848, moved against Saltykov. On the 26th of April 1848, Tsar Nicholas I signed the order for his arrest and deportation to Vyatka.

  His first months in exile were spent copying official documents. He was later made a special envoy of the Vyatka governor, investigating brawls, minor bribery, embezzlement, and police misconduct. Each request to leave received the same reply: 'would be premature.' The very thought of spending his life there, he wrote to his brother, made his hair bristle. Yet the local elite treated him warmly. He was a welcome guest in many respectable houses, including that of vice-governor Boltin, whose daughter Elizaveta Apollonovna would become his wife.

  In Vyatka he also threw himself into a project that had nothing to do with fiction: convinced that Russia had no decent history textbooks for young women, he wrote one himself. Called A Brief History of Russia, it ran to forty handwritten pages compiled from numerous sources and was published in serial form. In 1850 he became a councillor, traveling through the Vyatka, Perm, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, and Yaroslavl governorates. That same year he organized the Vyatka agricultural exhibition, one of the largest in the country. All of it, the bureaucrats, the peasants, the provincial hypocrisies, stored up as material for satires he had not yet written. The death of Tsar Nicholas I in 1855 changed everything. In November of that year, Saltykov received permission to leave, with the new governor Lanskoy rumored to have been the key force behind it.

• 5. Provincial Sketches and Rise to Fame

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  In January 1856 Saltykov returned to Saint Petersburg, and in August of that year Mikhail Katkov's The Russian Messenger began publishing Provincial Sketches under the name N. Shchedrin. The book, a series of narratives about a fictitious town called Krutogorsk treated as a symbol of Russian serfdom, became an instant success. Ivan Turgenev had been unimpressed when he read the early drafts, and following his advice Nikolai Nekrasov had refused to publish the work in Sovremennik. Once The Russian Messenger ran it, though, critics and colleagues called Saltykov the heir to Nikolai Gogol. The Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko wrote in his diary: 'I'm in awe... Oh immortal Gogol, you must now be a happy man to see such a genius emerging as your follower.'

  Saltykov married Elizaveta Boltina, the Vyatka vice-governor's daughter, in 1856, finding at the same time that his mother's financial support had been curtailed. He continued working in the Ministry of Internal Affairs until 1858, then was appointed deputy governor of Ryazan, where he earned the nickname 'the vice-Robespierre.' He arrived on the 15th of April 1858 in an ordinary road carriage, which astonished local society that already knew him as the author of Provincial Sketches. His primary goal was teaching local minor officials basic grammar; he spent many late evenings rewriting their incongruous reports. In 1862 he was transferred to Tver, where he personally sued several landowners for cruel treatment of peasants.

  Left-wing radicals tried to claim him as one of their own, insisting his work aimed at 'undermining the Empire's foundations.' Saltykov rejected this reading. His belief was that 'all honest men should help the government in defeating serfdom apologists still clinging to their rights,' a position that frustrated radicals but freed him to work across the official system and the literary world at once.

• 6. Otechestvennye Zapiski and the Great Novels

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  After a chaotic period at Sovremennik marked by a public feud with Dmitry Pisarev and an ongoing war against the Dostoyevsky brothers' magazine Grazhdanin, Saltykov retired from government service on the 14th of July 1868. Two months earlier, Nekrasov had 'rented' the magazine Otechestvennye Zapiski from publisher Andrey Krayevsky. In September 1868 Saltykov joined as head of the journalistic department. Nekrasov would later write to Pavel Annenkov that Saltykov 'carried it all manly and bravely.' Saltykov himself wrote to Annenkov on the 28th of May 1884 that Otechestvennye Zapiski was 'the only magazine that had its own face' and that in it 'stupid things were never published.'

  In 1870 The History of a Town appeared, a grotesque novel narrating the tragicomic history of a fictitious place called Foolsville, its sequence of monstrous rulers tormenting hapless subjects serving as a vague caricature of the Russian Empire. The novel ended with a deadly 'it' sweeping everything away and 'making the history stop,' which many read as a call for radical change. Critic Alexey Suvorin accused Saltykov of distorting Russian history and insulting the Russian people. Saltykov replied that by showing how people live under the yoke of madness he hoped 'to invoke in a reader not mirth but most bitter feelings.'

  From The Well-Meant Speeches, published in 1876, Saltykov extracted a cluster of stories about one family and built them into his most celebrated novel. The Golovlyov Family, published in 1880, traced the moral and physical collapse of three generations of a Russian gentry household. At its center stood Porfiry Golovlyov, nicknamed 'Little Judas' or Iudushka, whose mindless hypocrisy and compulsive, meaningless speech became, in D.S. Mirsky's words, 'the empty and mechanical hypocrite who cannot stop talking unctuous and meaningless humbug, not for any inner need or outer profit, but because his tongue is in need of constant exercise.' Mirsky called The Golovlyov Family the gloomiest book in all Russian literature, and praised it for achieving that effect 'by the simplest means without any theatrical, melodramatic, or atmospheric effects.'

• 7. Censorship, Silence, and Last Works

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  Between 1874 and 1879, Otechestvennye Zapiski suffered eighteen censorial sanctions, nearly all connected to Shchedrin's work. The May 1874 issue containing The Well-Meant Speeches was destroyed outright. Multiple releases were postponed so that his pieces could be excised. Letters to Auntie, many of his fables, and substantial portions of his other work were banned. 'It is despicable times that we are living through,' Saltykov wrote, 'and it takes a lot of strength not to give up.'

  To navigate the censors, Saltykov developed what he himself called Aesopian language, a style of sustained circumlocution that smuggled radical ideas into print. The mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya, writing in Swedish in 1889, remarked: 'It is unbelievable, how well we've learned to read between the lines in Russia.' She argued that this same quality was one reason Saltykov never achieved in the West the recognition that Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy won; his satire was 'tightly bound to its own national soil' and each nation, she wrote, 'laughs in its own way.'

  The closure of Otechestvennye Zapiski in 1884 hit Saltykov harder than any censorial sanction. 'The possibility to talk with my readers has been taken away from me and this pain is stronger than any other,' he wrote. His final works appeared in Vestnik Evropy and Russkie Vedomosti, including the collection of fables known as Fairy Tales for Children of a Fair Age and the sketches Small Things in Life, mini-dramas about ordinary people destroyed by daily routine. His last publication, the semi-autobiographical Old Years in Poshekhonye, ran in Vestnik Evropy from 1887 to 1889. He had planned one more piece, Forgotten Words, and wrote to Nikolai Mikhailovsky shortly before his death: 'There were, you know, words in Russian: honour, fatherland, humanity... They are worth of being reminded about.' He never started it. Saltykov-Shchedrin died of a stroke in Saint Petersburg and was buried in the Volkovo Cemetery, next to Turgenev, as he had wished.

• 8. A Legacy Written in Laughter

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  Maxim Gorky wrote in 1909 that the importance of Saltykov's satire was 'immense, first for its almost clairvoyant vision of the path the Russian society had to travel from 1860s to nowadays.' Karl Marx, who knew Russian and read several of Saltykov's books including The Gentlemen from Tashkent and Diary of a Provincial in St. Petersburg, ranked him alongside Pushkin and Gogol among the Russian authors he particularly valued. Lenin quoted Saltykov's characters regularly, using Iudushka to label adversaries ranging from old landlords to his own associate Trotsky. In 1885-1886, Lenin's brother Alexander and sister Anna were among the student delegations that visited the ailing Saltykov, who referred to himself as 'the revolutionary youth's favourite writer.'

  Critic Maria Goryachkina argued that Saltykov compiled a 'satirical encyclopedia' of Russian life, moving from serfdom to corruption to bureaucratic inefficiency to the opportunism of the intelligentsia to the apathy of common people. Critic James Wood placed him in a literary lineage running from Dostoyevsky through Shchedrin and on to Knut Hamsun, arguing that the character of Porfiry Golovlyov is a modernist prototype: the character who lacks an audience, the alienated actor, the hypocrite who does not know he is one. Soviet critics claimed him as 'the true revolutionary' while noting with dissatisfaction that he 'failed to recognize the historically progressive role of capitalism.' D.S. Mirsky acknowledged that much of his journalistic satire had dated badly, its targets simply gone from the world. But Ivan Turgenev's words to Saltykov in 1882, when the writer felt crushed by criticism, still stand as the most accurate assessment: 'The writer who is most hated is most loved, too. You are Saltykov-Schedrin, a writer who happened to draw a distinctive line in our literature.' Biographer Sergey Krivenko coined the word 'saltykovian' in 1895 to describe a prose style so particular it had become its own category, a language built from the wreckage of official speech turned back against the officials who invented it.