Mikhail Saltykov-Schedrin

Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin
Portrait of Shchedrin by Ivan Kramskoi
Born	(1826-01-27)27 January 1826 Spas-Ugol village, Tver Governorate, Russian Empire
Died	10 May 1889(1889-05-10) (aged 63) Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire
Pen name	Shchedrin
Occupation	writer, civil administrator, magazine editor
Nationality	Russian
Period	1850s-1880s
Genre	Satirical Fiction
Subject	Social issues
Notable works	Provincial Sketches The Golovlyov Family
Spouse	Elizaveta Boltova
Relatives	Saltykov family
Signature

Mikhail Yevgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin (Russian: Михаи́л Евгра́фович Салтыко́в-Щедри́н, born Saltykov, pseudonym Nikolai Shchedrin; 27 January [O.S. 15 January] 1826 – 10 May [O.S. 28 April] 1889), 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 (variously translated as "Annals of the Fatherland", "Patriotic Notes", "Notes of the Fatherland", etc.), until the government banned it in 1884. His best-known work, the novel The Golovlyov Family, appeared in 1876.

Mikhail Saltykov was born on 27 January 1826, in the village of Spas-Ugol, Tver Governorate. He was one of eight children (five brothers, three sisters) in the large family of Yevgraf Vasilievich Saltykov, a member of the ancient Saltykov family, and Olga Mikhaylovna Zabelina, heir to a rich merchant family. At the time of Mikhail's birth, Yevgraf was fifty years old, and Olga twenty five. Mikhail spent his early years on his parents' large estate in Spasskoye on the border of the Tver and Yaroslavl governorates, in the Poshekhonye region.

"In my childhood and teenage years I witnessed serfdom at its worst. It saturated all strata of social life, not just the landlords and the enslaved masses, degrading all classes, privileged or otherwise, with its atmosphere of a total lack of rights, when fraud and trickery were the order of the day, and there was an all-pervading fear of being crushed and destroyed at any moment," he remembered, speaking through one of the characters of his later work Old Years in Poshekhonye. Life in the Saltykov family was equally difficult. Dominating the weak, religious father was despotic mother whose intimidating persona horrified the servants and her own children. This atmosphere was later recreated in Shchedrin's novel The Golovlyov Family, and the idea of "the devastating effect of legalized slavery upon the human psyche" would become one of the prominent motifs of his prose. Olga Mikhaylovna, though, was a woman of many talents; having perceived some in Mikhail, she treated him as her favorite.