About Pushkin edition thirteen. Book review: Dmitrenko S.F. Saltykov (Shchedrin): the general with no medals. Moscow, Molodaya Gvardiya Publ., 2022. 505 p

The book under review “Saltykov (Shchedrin): The General with No Medals” by Sergey Fyodorovich Dmitrenko was published in the series “Lives of Remarkable People”. This is not the first time that the famous series has turned its attention to the person of M.E. Saltykov, but it is the first time (not only in that series, but in scholarship in general) that such a complete, profound, and all-encompassing biography of this classical writer has appeared and that his artistic legacy has received such a multi-facetted treatment from so many perspectives. It is precisely the fullness, depth, and appropriate interest to the author’s life and writing that distinguishes Dmitrenko’s book among the various sorts of biographies of great people (whether in book form, movies, or museum exhibitions) so popular nowadays. The book’s author insists on an individual method for creating the bibliography of a great man, based on facts of his life unearthed and repeatedly checked in different sources (from memoirs to research) in order to create, not a fictionalized tale, but a psychologically accurate picture of what once happened, and through this to understand the actions of people of a past era in the context both of the age and the vagaries of life. The book under review with complete justification allows the reader to conclude that Saltykov the bureaucrat and Shchedrin the writer have found a worthy biographer and interpreter who relates with due respect to the facts of his subject and approaches his artistic legacy with the understanding of a literary scholar, and above all is capable of putting into words this knowledge and understanding of the life and creativity of Saltykov (Schchedrin).