Just as the allied fleets of England and France were bombing the façade of the empire of Nicholas I at Sebastopol and smashing the military power of the “gendarme de l'Europe” so that the weakness of Nicholas's Russia appeared to European eyes, the great Russian satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin opened his literary career on a large scale. In 1856, he began to publish his Provincial Sketches.

At that critical moment the whole of Russia had been awakened and was rising to a new life. The bankruptcy of the regime of Nicholas I was universally apparent, and the necessity of broad, deep, consistent, and systematic reforms was accepted even by bureaucrats and conservative officials. The despair provoked by the ineptitude and the corruption of Russian civilian and military authority which had led Russia to the Crimean catastrophe gave place to an enthusiastic wish and will to liquidate the evil past and to create, as quickly as possible, a new future, a “new order” based on wisdom and justice. Never perhaps had Bakunin's aphorism, “Die Lust amzerstören ist auch eine schaffendeLust,” a better application than at that moment.