Foolsburg: The History of a Town
By Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin
(Vintage, 304 pages, $17)

In the spring of 2022, as Russian armored columns plunged into the Ukrainian heartland, and as 152 mm artillery shells and Iskander missiles rained down upon Ukrainian towns and cities, the Odesa-based artist Igor Gusev began a series of mixed media artworks entitled “Третя світова війна,” or “Third World War.”

Conceived of as a form of “rapid reaction art,” Gusev’s series responded to the brutal invasion primarily through the parodical transformation of famous Russian paintings, so that Vasily Perov’s Hunters at Rest becomes a depiction of “Special Military Operation” participants lounging in the grass, dreaming of looted kitchen appliances, and Aleksei Venetsianov’s Sleeping Peasant Boy is presented bound to a tree by (possibly illusory) white cords alongside the caption “We are Russians! We have Stockholm Syndrome!”

Other surrealistic images draw from Slavic folklore and Soviet history, like the memorable portrayal of Lenin’s Mausoleum striding forth on blood-soaked Baba Yaga chicken legs — “the Russians are coming” — thereby casting the Russian onslaught as a sort of moral monstrosity born out of the dark forces of mytho-history. (READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky: The Vatican–China Pact Has Proved to Be a Catastrophe)

Some of Gusev’s works are all the more poignant for being relatively understated, like his sketch of Odesa’s Duc de Richelieu Monument, shown encased in protective sandbags as a Russian missile streaks overhead. And then there is Gusev’s trompe-l’œil representation of a copy of an imaginary Russian book given the title War and Punishment, and authored by a certain “Tolstoyevsky,” a literary amalgamation that crops up elsewhere in contemporary Ukrainian art.

Around the same time that Gusev was churning out his “Third World War” paintings and drawings, the Kyiv-based digital artist Oleksiy Say produced his own print series that included Tolstoyevsky (2022), wherein the double-headed eagle of the Muscovite coat-of-arms is given the faces of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy, and the legs of a ballerina, with which the ghastly chimera undertakes a grand jeté over the smoking rubble of a Ukrainian city.

Igor Gusev’s War and Punishment and Oleksiy Say’s Tolstoyevsky both critique the cynical weaponization of so-called “great Russian culture,” which the Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Rafeyenko has acidly described as “a stillborn set of occasionally truly distinguished works of art that proved to be incapable of transforming biological beings into humans.”

Igor Gusev would certainly agree; his reworking of Vasily Perov’s portrait of Dostoyevsky, folded so as to eliminate the novelist’s eyes, is given the legend “A Society of Informationally Disabled People,” and it should be abundantly clear by now that the effect of Dostoyevsky’s Christianity or Tolstoy’s pacifism on those Russians launching cruise missiles at children’s hospitals, or dropping guided aerial bombs on nursing homes, or starving, torturing, and executing Ukrainian civilians and POWs, is essentially non-existent.

Mockery of the two-headed figure of “Tolstoyevsky” likewise serves to draw attention to the outside world’s superficial understanding of Russia’s literary legacy, given that to the extent that non-Russians are familiar with Russian literature, it is typically through the lens of the Tolstoyevskian realism of War and Peace and Crime and Punishment. 

David Brooks, in his 2015 essay “The Russia I Miss,” contrasted the cultural sclerosis of Putin’s Russia with the supposed “unmatched intensity,” the “depth of soul,” and the “vision of total spiritual commitment” of Old Russia as epitomized by Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, who in the Russian cultural Golden Age “addressed universal questions in their most extreme and illuminating forms.”

We will set aside for the time being the fact that any nostalgia for the Russia of Tolstoyevsky is nostalgia for a despotic Asiatic empire which partitioned Poland, introduced serfdom to Ukraine, committed outright genocide against the Circassians and other captive nations, and established the inhuman Siberian exile system. And we will ignore for the moment that non-Russian contemporaries of Tolstoyevsky — writers like Hugo, Flaubert, Fontane, Melville, Prus, Machado de Assis, &c. — were perfectly capable of addressing questions pertaining to the human condition in any number of enlightening ways. 

The cult of Tolstoyevsky blinds its adherents to the grotesqueries of Russian history, and all too often represents a misguided form of ethno-narcissism (first-hand or vicarious), but it also has the unfortunate tendency to leave deserving Russian language writers languishing in obscurity.

With Tolstoyevsky and perhaps Pushkin firmly atop the league table of Russian literary history, and with Gogol (Hohol), Turgenev, and Chekhov trailing in their wake, far too many brilliant Russian Golden Age writers — Goncharov, Leskov, Khvoshchinskaya, Pavlova, and others — remain buried in the cultural relegation zone.

It is for this reason that the recent publication of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s English language translation of Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s satirical 1870 novel Foolsburg: The History of a Town is so welcome. Whereas the profoundly antisemitic and xenophobic Dostoyevsky grandiosely envisaged Russia’s historical mission as one of ushering in a state of universal brotherhood through the diffusion of the spirit of Christian love, despite the fact that precious few nations on earth are less suited to such a task, the satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin more accurately treated Russian history instead as a deeply troubling object lesson.

The works of Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826-1889), a civil servant-turned-satirist who found himself arrested and exiled to Vyatka during the reign of Czar Nicholas I, are sadly seldom read today. Gary Saul Morson, in his heartfelt but flawed meditation on Russian literary history, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (2023), mentions him three times and only very much in passing.

Naturally he is somewhat better remembered inside Russia, mainly for The Golovlyovs (1880), which the literary historian D. S. Mirsky called “the gloomiest [book] in all Russian literature,” a tremendous triumph given all the competition, and for his innumerable aphorisms, which are still in common use in the Russian-speaking world, including 

Российская власть должна держать свой народ в состоянии постоянного изумления.

[The Russian government must keep its people in a state of constant amazement.]

and

Строгость российских законов смягчается необязательностью их исполнения.

[The severity of Russian laws is mitigated by the non-binding nature of their implementation.]

and, perhaps most famously,

Многие склонны путать два понятия: «Отечество» и «Ваше превосходительство».

[Many people seem to confuse the two concepts: “Fatherland” and “Your Excellency.”]

In Istoriya odnogo goroda, or The History of a Town, Saltykov-Shchedrin served up a madcap, burlesque fictional chronicle of public and private life in the provincial town of Glupov (the Russian word for “stupid” being глупый, glupyy) from medieval times to the mid-nineteenth century. It was arguably his finest work of satire. Ivan Turgenev, in his 1871 review of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s masterpiece, declared that the author of The History of a Town “knows his own country better than any man living,” adding that

There is something of Swift in Saltykoff [sic]; that serious and grim comedy, that realism — prosaic in its lucidity amidst the wildest play of fancy — and, above all, that constant good sense — I may even say that moderation — kept up in spite of so much violence and exaggeration of form.

I have seen audiences thrown into convulsions of laughter by the recital of some of Saltykoff’s sketches. There was something almost terrible in that laughter, the public, even while laughing, feeling itself under the lash.

I repeat that the History of a Town could not be translated as it stands, but I think that a selection might be made out of the different forms of its Governors which pass before the reader’s eyes, sufficient of give an idea to foreigners of the interest excited in Russia by a strange and striking book — one which, under a form necessarily allegorical, offers a picture of Russian history which is, alas! too true.

That The History of a Town, however bizarre its flights of fancy, is at all times rooted in Russian facts on the ground surely stands as one of the great indictments of that country’s sordid history.

In the town of Glupov we find the residents engaging in the widespread, infamous, and unfortunately very real practice of snokhachestvo, in which the Russian paterfamilias would systematically sexually prey upon his daughter-in-law (snokha). We find the authorities congratulating themselves on “having killed and drowned a lot of people, [so that] they had reason to conclude that now there was not a whit of sedition left in Foolsburg.”

We find a government that at every stage in its history has been inclined “to build an edifice on sand today, and tomorrow, when it collapses, to start erecting another edifice on the same sand.” And at all times we find a herd-like populace completely passive in the face of every official indignity imaginable. Under the influence of Gogol, Saltykov-Shchedrin engaged in absurdist satire in order to make his political points. (READ MORE: A Sacred Peace: The Promise and Perils of Localism)

One of Glupov’s mayors, Dementy Brudasty, for example, has a special mechanical device, a sort of music box, installed in his skull to replace his brain. It becomes a running gag that Brudasty and his fellow mayors tend to meet increasingly outlandish untimely ends. Amadei Manuilovich Klementy has his nostrils torn out and is sent into exile. Foty Petrovich Ferapontov, who was “such a lover of spectacles that he did not allow any floggings unless he himself was present,” was “torn to pieces by dogs in the forest.” One mayor is found “in his bed bitten to death by bedbugs.” Another dies “from strain, trying to comprehend a certain Senate decree.” 

And through it all the good people of Foolsburg, “exhausted, maligned, and annihilated,” try to survive as best they can, rioting only “in the name of potatoes,” a reference to the mass rebellions in 1834 and 1840 that resulted from the forced introduction of potato cultivation to the Russian countryside, and the curious peasant belief that “potatoes are a rebirth of that cherished apple, for which the original man lost his bliss, and that when it was with curses thrown on the earth, then potatoes were born from it and, therefore, this seed is the Antichrist’s.”

If the truth is stranger than fiction, life in Russia can be stranger than even the most vicious satire. Another case in point: Saltykov-Shchedrin’s chronicle builds to a crescendo with the arrival of the last governor of Glupov, a certain Ugryum-Burcheev, “in whose face,” wrote Turgenev, “every one has recognised the sinister and repulsive features of Arakcheeff, the all-powerful favourite of Alexander I during the last years of his reign.”

Yet Ugryum-Burcheev’s totalitarian reign, in which war is waged on nature itself, pales in comparison to that of the later Soviets, who murdered tens of millions and waged not just war but total war on nature, seeking to reverse the south-to-north flow of Siberian rivers, and leaving behind a noxious legacy of desertification and pollution, all predicated on the communist slogan “We can’t wait for charity from nature, we must conquer it.”

“If I were to fall asleep and wake up in a hundred years,” Saltykov-Shchedrin once wrote, “and they were to ask me what was happening in Russia right now, I will answer: drinking and stealing [p’yut i voruyut].” The author of Foolsburg: The History of a Town would hardly be surprised at the current state of the Russian Federation. In the last few days alone we see reports of Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine being punished in various kinds of “correctional pits,” including “wet pits” that are open to the raging elements, and “phone booth pits” that have limited internet access.

Those who do not wish to serve their time in the pits are sentenced to “nullification” in the form of physical abuse or inclusion in suicidal “meat assaults” against Ukrainian positions. Meanwhile, back on the home front, we see a deadly shoot-out at the headquarters of Wildberries (Russia’s equivalent to Amazon), with gunfire exchanged between Wildberries security and forces loyal to Vladislav Bakalchuk, ex-husband of current Wildberries CEO Tatiana Bakalchuk.

It is said that Vladislav has sought the backing of the Chechen gangster-warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, while Tatiana is supported by Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office Anton Vaino and the oligarch Suleiman Kerimov.

Somehow none of this nonsense would look one bit out of place in the pages of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s only seemingly outlandish satirical chronicle of Glupov.

Thanks to the assiduous work of the husband-and-wife literary translating team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, this long-lost masterpiece of Russian literature is finally available to a wider international audience. By venturing beyond the confines of the Tolstoyevsky complex, and beyond the well-thumbed pages of what the painter Igor Gusev calls War and Punishment, readers can benefit from the wisdom of a writer who knew his country better than any man living, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy included, and understood that behind its “enormous” and “all-vanquishing force” was all too often “nothing but boundless idiocy.”

Saltykov-Shchedrin ended his chronicle of Foolsburg with the town being destroyed by a mysterious force he dubbed “It,” which caused the sun to darken and the earth to tremble and history to “cease its course” entirely.

His contemporaries, discomfited by the satire’s razor sharp edge, chose to ignore its lessons, and the book promptly fell into obscurity, Turgenev’s fulsome praise for it notwithstanding. The Soviet authorities, imagining themselves to have been the “It” that brought an end to Russian history, briefly resuscitated it, only to realize that the story of Foolsburg, and Ugryum-Burcheev in particular, was hardly an endorsement of utopian socialism, and indeed served as a timeless indictment of Soviet as well as of czarist tyranny, and so the book was once again consigned to the cultural dustbin.

Having survived its years in the shadows, Foolsburg: The History of a Town now reappears in the western world as an important literary document, bridging as it does the gap between the Voltairean and Swiftian satires of the Enlightenment and the twentieth century dystopias of Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell.

More importantly, it reminds us that Putin’s regime is part of a continuum of folly that stretches back centuries. In another one of his celebrated aphorisms, Saltykov-Shchedrin noted that “idiots are generally very dangerous, and not even because they are necessarily evil, but because they are alien to any considerations, and always go straight ahead, as if the road on which they find themselves belongs to them alone [Идиоты вообще очень опасны, и даже не потому, что они непременно злы, а потому, что они чужды всяким соображениям и всегда идут напролом, как будто дорога, на которой они очутились, принадлежит им одним].”

As Putin and his junta continue down that very road, the rest of us are fortunate to have a handy roadmap in the form of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s bloody and burlesque (and decidedly un-Tolstoyevskian) chronicle of the hapless Russian town of Glupov/Foolsburg.