Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin

Reading notes

• The Man in a Case §9 Shchedrin

  The Russian satirical novelist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, named alongside Turgenev as part of the town's teachers' liberal education.

• The Summer Girl §50 Shchedrin

  Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, Russia's leading satirist, whose famously biting and allusive style the husband dismisses as merely "obscure" -- proof he cannot follow satire aimed at men like himself.

• The Name-Day Party §83 Shchedrin type

  Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826-1889), Russia's leading social satirist, whose novels and sketches catalogued precisely the kind of petty provincial tyrant and upstart official uncle Nikolai Nikolaich accuses Pyotr Dmitrich of resembling; invoking 'a Shchedrin type' places Pyotr Dmitrich among Shchedrin's rogues' gallery.

• The Alarm Clock's Calendar §154 Shchedrin

  Pen name of Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, the major Russian satirical novelist of the period and an implicit model for Chekhov's own early satire.

• Unpublished. An Unfinished Novel §8 Mr. Shchedrin

  Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, the major satirical novelist who in fact edited Notes of the Fatherland; addressed directly here as the journal's presumed guiding hand.

• To A. N. Pleshcheyev, 15 September 1888. Moscow. §6 Щедрину и Щеглову

  Two distinct real writers praised (with light irony) for their prolific output: Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, the satirist, and Ivan Leontyev, writing under the pen name Shcheglov -- both third parties, not the letter's addressee Pleshcheyev.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 4 May 1889. Sumy. §13 he took Tolstoy and Saltykov to the next world

  DISAMBIGUATION, paired with the note above. "Saltykov" here is Mikhail Yevgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin, the satirist, who had GENUINELY died on 28 April 1889 -- six days before this letter (4 May 1889) -- unlike the false Tolstoy rumor named alongside him. Readers should not conflate the two: one name in this sentence refers to a real, recent death; the other, immediately adjacent, refers to a rumor that turned out to be false. Both are aimed at by Chekhov's larger point in \S13 about people who welcome a hated public figure's death, regardless of whether the death is real.

• Speech and Strap §2 Shchedrin

  Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, the major satirical novelist of the day; reading him was itself a coded sign of oppositional, 'liberal' leanings under a censorious superior.

• Advertisements and Notices §4 Shchedrin

  Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, the era's foremost satirical novelist and, at the time, editor of Notes of the Fatherland -- a favorite target of the young Chekhov's parodies of pompous literary polemic.