"The
peasant Sidorov possesses two horses, three cows, nine sheep, one
calf, and thirty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-seven bees."
Unfortunately he was betrayed by the police inspector.

Saltykov's satire deals entirely with the middle class, the high
officials, the average official, and the minor public servants; and
his best-known work, and one that has not aged any more than Swift has
aged, is his _History of a City according to the original documents_.

In this he tells of the city of _Glupov_, _Fool-City_, where the
people were such fools that they were not content until they found
some one to rule them who was stupider than they were themselves. The
various phases Russia had gone through are touched off; the mania for
regulations, the formalism, the official red-tape, the persecution of
independent thought, and the oppression of original thinkers and
writers; the ultimate ideal is that introduced by the last ruler of
Glupov (the history lasts from 1731 to 1826), of turning the country
into barracks and reducing every one and everything to one level--in
which the regime of the period of Nicholas I is satirized; until in
the final picture, as fine in its way as Pope's close of the
_Dunciad_, the stream rises, and refusing to be stopped by the dam,
carries everything away. The style parodies that of the ancient
chroniclers; and its chief intent lies not in the satirizing of any
particular events or person, but in the shafts of light, sometimes
bitter, and sometimes inexpressibly droll, it throws on the Russian
system of administration and on the Russian character.

In his _Pompaduri_, Saltykov dissects and vivisects the higher
official,--the big-wig,--and in his sketches from the "Domain of
Moderation and Accuracy," he writes, in little, the epic of the minor
public servant--the man who is never heard of, who is included in the
term of "the rest," but who, nevertheless, is a cogwheel in the
machinery, without which the big-wigs cannot act or execute. No more
supreme piece of art than this piece of satire exists. The typical
minor official is drawn in all the variations of his miserable and
pitiable species, and in all the phases of his ignoble and sometimes
tragical career, with a pen dipped in scorn and stinging malice, not
unblent with a grave pity, which always exists in the work of the
greatest satirists--"Peace to all such, but there was one ..." for
instance--and wielded with terrible certainty of to