page_title: Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin
section_title: Otechestvennye Zapiski
hierarchical_section_title: Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin / Biography / Literary career / Otechestvennye Zapiski
caption_attribution_description: Ге Николай Николаевич. Портрет писателя Михаила Евграфовича Салтыкова-Щедрина (1826-1889). 1872. Русский музей
context_page_description: Mikhail Yevgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin, was a major Russian satirist of the 19th century. He spent most of his life working as a civil servant in various capacities. After the death of poet Nikolay Nekrasov he acted as editor of the well-known Russian magazine, Otechestvenniye Zapiski, until the government banned it in 1884. His best-known work, the novel The Golovlyov Family, appeared in 1876.
context_section_description: On July 1, 1866, Sovremennik was closed. In the autumn Nekrasov approached the publisher Andrey Krayevsky and 'rented' Otechestvennye Zapiski. In September 1868 Saltykov joined the re-vamped team of the magazine as a head of the journalistic department. As in December 1874 Saltykov's health problems (triggered by severe cold he's caught at his mother's funeral) made him travel abroad for treatment, Nekrasov confessed in his April 1875 letter to Pavel Annenkov: "This journalism thing has always been tough for us and now it lies in tatters. Saltykov carried it all manly and bravely and we all tried our best to follow suit." "This was the only magazine that had its own face… Most talented people were coming to Otechestvennye Zapiski as if it were their home. They trusted my taste and my common sense never to begrudge my editorial cuts. In "OZ" there were published weak things, but stupid things - never," he wrote in a letter to Pavel Annenkov on May 28, 1884. In 1869 Saltykov's Signs of the Times and Letters About the Province came out, their general idea being that the reforms have failed and Russia remained the same country of absolute monarchy where peasant had no rights. "The bars have fallen but Russia's heart gave not a single twitch. Serfdom has been abolished, but landlords rejoiced," he wrote.
  In 1870 The History of a Town came out - a grotesque, politically risky novel relating the tragicomic history of the fictitious Foolsville, a vague caricature upon the Russian Empire, with its sequence of monstrous rulers, tormenting their hapless vassals. The book was a satire on the whole institution of Russian statehood and the way of life itself, plagued by routine mismanagement, needless oppression, pointless tyranny and sufferers’ apathy. The novel ended with the deadly tornado sweeping the whole thing away, "making the history stop" which was construed by many as a call for radical political change. A series called Messieurs et Mesdames Pompadours (also known as Pompadours and Pompadouresses, 1863–1874) looked like a satellite to the History of a Town, a set of real life illustrations to the fantastic chronicles. The History of a Town caused much controversy. Alexey Suvorin accused the author of deliberately distorting Russian history and insulting the Russian people. "By showing how people live under the yoke of madness I was hoping to invoke in a reader not mirth but most bitter feelings... It is not the history of the state as a whole that I make fun of, but a certain state of things," Saltykov explained.
  In 1873 came out The Tashkenters Clique (Gospoda Tashkentsy: Tashkent’ers was a generic term invented by Shchedrin for administrators sent to tame riots in the remote regions of the Russian Empire), a snipe at right-wingers who advocated cruel suppression of peasants' riots, and an experiment in the new form of social novel. 1877 saw the publication of In the Spheres of Temperance and Accuracy, a set of satirical sketches, featuring characters from the classical Russian literature (books by Fonvizin, Griboyedov, Gogol and others) in the contemporary political context.
caption: Mikhail Saltykov's portrait by Nikolai Ge, 1872.
exif: {}