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 régime 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 touch. This epic of the _Molchalins_ of life--the typical officials who cease to be men--was the story of a great part of the Russian population; and in its essence, a great deal of it remains true to-day, while all of it remains artistically enjoyable.