To what extent can a person make concessions to prove his good intentions and support for the authority? To what degree will his shame affect him?This is one of Shchedrin''s forgotten masterpieces. Shchedrin wrote his novel during the escalation of the revolutionary movement against the tsarist regime. In addition to the political and social issues addressed in the novel, Shchedrin presented in this work an innovative form for the Russian novel in the second half of the nineteenth century. The horizons of comedy and sarcasm in the novel reach the limits of fantasy, and even exceed them, and the world of truth and imagination mix in satirical political scenes that are considered among the best scenes written in the entire literature of the nineteenth century. "But if the history of modernity describes me in one line, I would like it not to be about my person, but rather about my novel." This is amazing". Saltykov-Shchedrin
