Editing Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (section)

====''Sovremennik''====
[[File:Saltykov 1870.jpg|thumb|200px|Mikhail Saltykov c. 1870]]
In 1862 Saltykov retired from the government service and came to Moscow with the view of founding his own magazine there. The Ministry of Education's Special committee under the chairmanship of Prince D.A.Obolensky gave him no such permission.<ref name="kriv"/> In the early 1863 Saltykov moved to Saint Petersburg to join Nekrasov's ''Sovremennik'', greatly undermined by the death of Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky's arrest. In this magazine he published first sketches of the ''Pompadours'' cycle and got involved with ''Svistok'' (The Whistle), a satirical supplement, using pseudonyms N.Shchedrin, K.Turin and Mikhail Zmiev-Mladentsev.<ref name="kriv"/>

The series of articles entitled ''Our Social Life'' (1863–1864), examining “new tendencies in Russian [[nihilism]],” caused a raw with equally radical ''[[Russkoye Slovo]]''. First Saltykov ridiculed [[Dmitry Pisarev]]'s unexpected call for Russian [[intelligentsia]] to pay more attention to natural sciences. 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". The latter's reply contained accusations in isolationism and [[elitism]]. All this (along with heated discussion of Chernyshevsky's novel ''[[What Is to Be Done? (novel)|What Is to Be Done?]]'') was termed "[[raskol]] in Russian nihilism" by [[Fyodor Dostoyevsky]].<ref name="raskol_nih">{{cite web | author = Dostoyevsky, F.М.| year = 1864| url = http://az.lib.ru/d/dostoewskij_f_m/text_0660.shtml|title = Mister Shchedrin or a Nihilism Schism (Gospodin Shchedrin ili raskol v nigilistakh)| publisher = Epoch magazine /az.lib.ru| access-date = 2012-03-01}}</ref>

On the other front, Saltykov waged a war against the Dostoyevsky brothers’ ''Grazhdanin'' magazine. 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 [[pochvennik]]s 'reactionaries'. Finally, the rift between him and [[Maxim Antonovich]] (supported by [[Grigory Eliseev]]) made Saltykov-Schedrin quit the journal.<ref name="dic_1990"/> Only a small part of stories and sketches that Saltykov wrote at the time has made its way into his later books (''Innocent Stories'', ''Sign of the Time'', ''Pompadours'').

Being dependent on his ''Sovremennik''{{'}}s meagre salaries, Saltykov was looking for work on the side and quarreled with Nekrasov a lot, promising to quit literature. According to [[Avdotya Panayeva]]'s memoirs, "those were the times when his moods darkened, and I noticed a new habit of his developing - this jerky movement of neck, as if he was trying to free himself from some unseen tie, the habit which stayed with him for the rest of his life."<ref name="kriv"/> Finally, pecuniary difficulties compelled Saltykov to re-enter the governmental service and in November 1864 he was appointed the head of the [[treasury]] department in [[Penza]]. Two years later he moved to take the same post in Tula, then Ryazan. Supported by his lyceum friend Mikhail Reitern, now the Minister of Finance, Saltykov adopted rather aggressive finance revision policies, making many enemies in the administrative circles of Tula, Ryazan and Penza. According to [[Alexander Skabichevsky]] (who had conversations with provincial officials working under Saltykov's supervision) "he was a rare kind of boss. Even though his frightful barking was making people wince, nobody feared him and everybody loved him - mostly for his caring for his subordinates' needs and also the tendency to overlook people's minor weaknesses and faults when those were not interfering with work."<ref name="kriv"/>

Finally the governor of Ryazan made an informal complaint which was accounted for by [[Pyotr Andreyevich Shuvalov|Count Shuvalov]], the Chief of Staff of the [[Special Corps of Gendarmes]], who issued a note stating that Saltykov, as a senior state official "promoted ideas contradicting the needs of maintaining law and order" and was "always in conflict with people of local governments, criticizing and even sabotaging their orders."<ref name="dic_1990"/> On July 14, 1868, Saltykov retired: thus the career of "one of the strangest officials in Russian history" ended. Years later, speaking to the historian M.Semevsky, Saltykov confessed he was trying to erase from memory years spent as a government official. But when his vis-a-vis argued that "only his thorough knowledge of every possible stage of the Russian bureaucratic hierarchy made him what he was," the writer had to agree.<ref>М.Е.Saltykov-Shchedrin Remembered by Contemporaries. Vol.1 P. 184</ref>