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,"[6] he remembered, speaking through one of the characters of his later novel Old Years in Poshekhonye.

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.

Another thing Saltykov later regretted was his having been completely shut out from nature in his early years: the children lived in the main house and were rarely allowed to go out, knowing their "animals and birds only as boiled and fried."

[10] Among his childhood friends was Sergey Yuriev, the son of a neighbouring landlord and later a prominent literary figure, editor and publisher of the magazines Russkaya Mysl and Beseda.

"The information taught to us was scant, sporadic and all but meaningless… It was not so much an education as such, but a part of social privilege, the one that draws the line through life: above are you and me, people of leisure and power, beneath – just one single word: muzhik," Saltykov wrote in his Letters to Auntie.

"Brought up by Belinsky's articles, I naturally drifted towards the Westernizers' camp, but not to the major trend of it which was dominant in Russian literature at the time, promoting German philosophy, but to this tiny circle that felt instinctively drawn towards France - the country of Saint-Simon, Fourier... and, in particular, George Sand...

"[14] In 1847 Saltykov debuted with his first novella Contradictions (under the pseudonym M.Nepanov), the title referring to the piece's main motif: the contrast between one's noble ideals and the horrors of real life.

Then he was made a special envoy of the Vyatka governor; his major duty in this capacity was making inquiries concerning brawls, cases of minor bribery, embezzlement and police misdoings.

Ivan Turgenev who happened to read them first was unimpressed and, following his advice (and bearing in mind still fierce censorship) Nikolai Nekrasov refused to publish the work in Sovremennik.

[17] Contrary to left radicals' attempt to draw Saltykov closer to their camp, "undermining the Empire's foundations" was not his aim at all and on his return to Saint Petersburg he was soon promoted to administrative posts of considerable importance.

Saltykov's primary goal was to teach local minor officials elementary grammar and he spent many late evenings proof-reading and re-writing their incongruous reports.

Then in 1864 Pisarev responded by "Flowers of Innocent Humor" article published by Russkoye Slovo implying that Saltykov was cultivating "laughter for good digestion's sake".

When Fyodor Dostoyevsky came out with the suggestion that with Dobrolyubov's death and Chernyshevsky's imprisonment the radical movement in Russia became lifeless and dogmatic, Saltykov labeled him and his fellow pochvenniks 'reactionaries'.

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.

[11] 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.

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.

[21] Central to it was the figure of Porfiry 'Little Judas' Golovlyov, a character whose nickname (Iudushka, in Russian transcription) became synonymous with mindless hypocrisy and self-destructive egotism, leading to moral degradation and disintegration of personality.

[10] Stories vaguely describing this experience later made it into the novel Mon Repos Haven (Убежище Монрепо, 1879) and the collection of sketches All the Year Round (Круглый год), both books attacking the very roots of Russian capitalism.

[9] In 1883, now critically ill, Saltykov published Modern Idyll (Современная идиллия), the novel he started in 1877–1878, targeting those of intelligentsia who were eager to prove their loyalty to the authorities.

The Poshekhonye Stories (Пошехонские рассказы, 1883), Motley Letters (Пёстрые письма, 1884) and Unfinished Talks (Недоконченные беседы, 1886) followed, but by this time Otechestvennye Zapiski were under increasing pressure from the censors, Shchedrin's prose being the latter's main target.

According to critic and biographer Maria Goryachkina, he managed to compile "the satirical encyclopedia" of contemporary Russian life, targeting first serfdom with its degrading effect upon the society, then, after its abolition, - corruption, bureaucratic inefficiency, opportunistic tendencies in intelligentsia, greed and amorality of those at power, but also - apathy, meekness and social immobility of the common people of Russia.

[26]Saltykov-Shchedrin has been lavishly praised by Soviet critics as "the true revolutionary", but his mindset (as far as they were concerned) was not without a "fault", for he, according to Goryachkina, "failed to recognize the historically progressive role of capitalism and never understood the importance of the emerging proletariat".

[23] According to D.S.Mirsky, the greater part of Saltykov's work is a rather nondescript kind of satirical journalism, generally with little or no narrative structure, and intermediate in form between the classical "character" and the contemporary feuilleton.

"The most remarkable character of this novel is Porfiry Golovlyov, nicknamed 'Little Judas', 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 wrote.

"[31] Many other critics (Goryachkina among them) disagreed, praising the author's lively, rich language and the way he mastered both stark realism (The Golovlyov Family, Old Times in Poshekhonye) and satirical grotesque merged with fantasy.

[11] Of the writer's stylistic peculiarities biographer Sergey Krivenko (of the Narodnik movement, the one which Saltykov has always been in opposition to) wrote: "It is difficult to assess his works using the established criteria.

[10] "There are not many writers in Rus whose very name would give that much to one's mind and heart, and who'd leave such a vast literary heritage, rich and diverse both in essence and in form, written in a very special language which even in his lifetime became known as 'saltykovian'," wrote Krivenko in 1895.

Admittedly, he was always more concerned with things general and typical, gauging social tendencies, collective urges and what he termed 'herd instincts in a modern man', often resorting to schemes and caricatures.

In 1885–1886, Vladimir Lenin's brother Alexander and sister Anna were members of one of the numerous student's delegations that came home to visit the ailing Schedrin, latter referring to him as "the revolutionary youth's favourite writer".

Saltykov-Shedrin was a personal favourite of Lenin himself, who often namechecked the writer's characters to prove his point – Iudushka, in particular, served well to label many of his adversaries: Russian old landlords and emerging capitalists, Tzarist government members and, notably, his own associate Trotzky.