1826–1889
○ Stroke
19th-century Russia's greatest satirist, who mercilessly ridiculed autocracy and serfdom
In 1885–86, among the student delegations visiting the ailing Shchedrin were Lenin's brother Alexander and sister Anna; Anna Ulyanova-Elizarova recalled him as 'our most beloved writer.'
Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, 19th-century Russia's greatest satirist, exposed the corruption of autocracy, bureaucracy, and serfdom in landmark works including The History of a Town (1870) and The Golovlyov Family (1880). Born into the nobility, he embraced French utopian socialism (Fourier, Saint-Simon) and joined the Petrashevsky Circle; exiled to Vyatka in 1848 for his novella A Complicated Affair, he spent seven years as a provincial official witnessing Russia's contradictions firsthand, and later, after Nekrasov's death, edited Otechestvennye Zapiski as a leading voice of radical journalism. Lenin called him 'the revolutionary youth's favourite writer'; Zinoviev declared that 'his work undermined the foundations of Tsarism more truly than any organization of the then active revolutionaries'; Marx and Engels studied his satires with close political attention.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1844–1848Official at the War Ministry chancellery
- 1848–1855Exiled to Vyatka; provincial official
- 1858–1860Vice-governor of Ryazan
- 1860–1862Vice-governor of Tver
- 1863–1864Contributor to Sovremennik
- 1864–1868Treasury dept. head in Penza, Tula, Ryazan
- 1868–1884Editor of Otechestvennye Zapiski
Editing Otechestvennye Zapiski and satirical journalism
In 1868 Saltykov-Shchedrin joined Otechestvennye Zapiski, the journal Nikolay Nekrasov had reorganized, and headed its journalism department. After Nekrasov's death in 1878, Saltykov-Shchedrin led its editorial work; the authorities shut the journal down in 1884. Alongside editing a leading radical literary magazine, he used fiction and criticism to address bureaucratic corruption and peasants' lack of rights after the abolition of serfdom. His 1869 Signs of the Times and Letters About the Province argued that absolutist rule and landlords' power persisted after the reforms. In 1870 he published The History of a Town, a chronicle of incompetent and despotic mayors ruling the fictional town of Glupov. Through them, the novel satirized bureaucratic misrule and oppression in state government. Readers took it as a satire on Russian statehood; Alexey Suvorin accused Saltykov-Shchedrin of distorting Russian history and insulting the Russian people. Saltykov-Shchedrin replied that his target was not the history of the state as a whole, but a particular state of affairs.
Otechestvennye Zapiski also faced sustained censorship. From 1874 to 1879 it received 18 sanctions over Saltykov-Shchedrin's writing, and the May 1874 issue containing The Well-Meant Speeches was destroyed. The Well-Meant Speeches appeared as a book in 1876; some of its stories were later separated and developed into The Golovlyov Family (1880). After the journal's closure, he wrote that he had been deprived of the possibility of speaking with his readers. His later works appeared in Vestnik Evropy and Russkiye Vedomosti.