> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://theparnassian.com/en/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Trial of 13-year-old Fyodor Reshetnikov over a lost packet containing a manifesto
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/kak-poteria-pochtovogo-otpravleniia-privela-budushchego-pisatelia-v-sud/
- Published: 2023-06-19T08:52:22.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T18:55:52.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archive, Books, Mores, People

How a Lost Piece of Post Brought a Future Writer before the Court.

The biography of the writer [F](https://ruskline.ru/images/Portraits/%D0%A0%D0%B5%D1%88%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%A4%D0%9C18.jpg?ref=theparnassian.com)yodor Mikhailovich Reshetnikov (1841-1871) began in a most unusual fashion: with a long and complicated trial in which he stood as a mere child. Reshetnikov was brought before the court at the age of 13\. The case dragged on for some two years and ended in a guilty verdict.

Of what was the young Fyodor Reshetnikov accused? In essence, the boy was accused of losing an official packet containing the manifesto on the death of Nicholas I and the accession of Alexander II. Formally, the case was opened for carrying packets, newspapers and journals out of the post office.

It all came about in the following way. Fyodor Mikhailovich was brought up by his own paternal uncle, Vasily Vasilyevich, who was a senior sorter at the Perm post office. At the post office in those days it was considered perfectly normal for staff to take interesting newspapers and illustrated periodicals from the mail in order to read them, to lend them to friends and acquaintances, and not always to return them; in that case the item was recorded as lost. It was not only the press that was taken, of course, but private letters too. It is interesting, after all! It would have surprised no one that at the post office letters were cheerfully opened, read, then sealed up again and sent on to their addressees.

Little Fedya did the same. He himself recalled that he sometimes took this or that envelope because he liked its shape or the handwriting. One of the writer's biographers makes particular mention of calligraphy: Reshetnikov wanted to learn to write well for his future profession, and so he took an interest in specimens of fine penmanship and kept them to copy out. The boy, however, had no habit of returning what he had taken from the post office; when the correspondence was of no further use to him, he simply threw it away.

And had the case brought against Reshetnikov concerned only letters and newspapers, the postmaster would have settled it himself. It would simply have been written off as a loss in transit. But one day Fyodor made off from the office with an envelope containing the manifesto on the accession of the new emperor. He read it and threw it into a cesspit. The envelope never reached its destination, the Dedyukhin salt works; the manifesto was not read out there in public, which gave the impression that the chief of the mining works did not recognise the new reign, for which he was dismissed.

The affair became a noisy one. From the Post Office Department it passed to the district court, and from there to the provincial chamber of criminal and civil justice. The initially lenient decision to “subject him to domestic corrective punishment at the discretion of his guardian” was shifted onto the criminal plane and reviewed, and it was ordered that Reshetnikov be confined in a monastery for three months. After serving his sentence Fyodor returned to his former life, but he was already a different person: the protracted litigation, the interrogations and inquiries, the time spent within monastery walls and the expulsion from the gymnasium could not but break a child's character