Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin

Mikhail Yevgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin was a Russian writer, one of the most renowned satirists of the 19th century, a journalist, and a statesman. He served as vice governor of Ryazan and Tver.

He was born on January 15 (27) in the village of Spas-Ugol, Kalязin Uyezd, Tver Governorate, into an old noble family; from an early age he observed the savagery of serf-owning customs. At the age of ten he entered the Moscow Noble Institute, then, as one of the best pupils, was transferred to the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum and admitted at state expense. He completed the course in 1844. At the Lyceum, under the influence of still-fresh traditions of the Pushkin era, each class had its own poet—and Saltykov played this role. Several of his poems, filled with youthful sadness and melancholy (among acquaintances of the time he was known as the “gloomy lyceum student”), were published in Biblioteka dlya Chteniya in 1841 and 1842 and in Sovremennik in 1844 and 1845. However, he soon realized that he had no calling for poetry and stopped writing verse.

In August 1844 he was entered into service in the Chancellery of the Minister of War, but literature occupied him far more. He read extensively and absorbed the newest ideas of the French socialists (Fourier, Saint-Simon) and supporters of all kinds of “emancipation” (George Sand and others)—a picture of this enthusiasm was drawn by him thirty years later in the fourth chapter of Abroad. He owed such interests in large measure to his closeness with the circle of radical freethinkers led by M. V. Petrashevsky. He began to write—first short book reviews in Otechestvennye Zapiski, then novellas: Contradictions (1847) and A Complicated Affair (1848). Even in the reviews one can discern the mature author’s outlook—an aversion to routine, to platitud