Word: saltykov
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...meaning could be made intelligible to Stalin, or to anyone else, was only a comforting illusion. Stalin, like all Russia's other tyrants, held an attitude toward the arts that was best summed up by a bureaucrat in a story by the 19th century satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin: "What I do not understand is dangerous for the state...
...precisely a Slavic lack of restraint and a brooding sense of evil's presence in the world that give the great Russian novelists their widely remarked dramatic powers, and place them ahead of everyone else in a less remarked achievement: the creation of unforgettably grotesque characters. From Mikhail Saltykov's hypocritical Yudushka ("Little Judas") Golovlev, to Ivan Goncharov's chaise-longue lizard, Ilya Oblomov, whose lumpish name has become a Russian household word for will-less sloth, Russian writing throbs with the howls and sneers of a whole menagerie of literary monsters...
Where once Russia was noted for the novels of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky; the drama of Anton Chekov; the satires of Michael Saltykov; and the sketches of Gleb Uspensky, Russia today, stifled by the evils of uniformity, has no writer of first rank...
Something New. Russia, long before the Bolsheviks, developed the sinister side of the policeman's role much farther than any democracy has to this day. The reason has an important bearing on Beria. The 19th Century Russian satirist, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, noted: "In every other country little boys wear trousers, but not our boys . . . everywhere else reason rules, but here only the whistle of the lash. . . . [In Russia] no independent form of social order [has] yet developed...
...Saltykov tired of his imperial conquest, but soon Catherine had another lover, Poniatowski. Husband Peter connived at this intrigue even more openly. When Poniatowski was recalled to his native Poland, Catherine solaced herself with a muscular Guards lieutenant named Orlov. But meantime she was making herself as popular as Peter, with his anti-Russian fads, was making himself disliked. When the old Empress finally died Catherine and Peter were at open enmity. A successful coup d'état upped Catherine to the imperial throne. Her lover's brother murdered the miserable Peter-without her knowledge or consent, says...