In his off-hours, a seemingly dutiful government servant in Czar Nicholas I's Ministry of Finance would pass the time jotting down little aphorisms. Some were obscure in meaning: "Not every general is stout by nature." Or, "If you have a fountain, plug it up. Let the fountain too have a rest." Others mocked the state for which the official, a heavy-browed and dimple-chinned man named Kozma Prutkov, worked. "Our land is rich; there is just no order in it," he wrote of Russia under Nicholas, a reactionary authoritarian who personally censored the poet Aleksandr Pushkin and whose education minister came up with the dubious motto of "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality." Prutkov's very existence -- a doltish, maudlin bureaucrat in a state overflowing with them -- was itself an admonition to the regime.
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