Nikolai Leskov

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov died on the 5th of March 1895, and his funeral was held in silence. He had written the instruction into his will in December 1892: no speeches over his body. "I know I have many bad things in me and do not deserve to be praised or pitied," he explained. It was a fitting exit for a man who spent his entire literary life outside every camp, trusted by no faction, boycotted by major journals, and yet read by enormous numbers of ordinary Russians. He was praised by Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, and Maxim Gorky. He outlasted every attempt to silence him. And still, by the time he died, he had almost no friends left in literary circles. How does a writer revered by the greatest names of his era end up so isolated? And what is it about Leskov's voice, his skaz style, his eye for the bizarre and the saintly, that makes him so hard to categorize? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Roots and Road Years

  ›

  Nikolai Leskov was born on the 4th of February 1831, in the village of Gorokhovo in Oryol Gubernia. His father Semyon Dmitrievich, a respected criminal investigator, had worked as a tutor before marrying into the family that would become Nikolai's mother's side. The ancestral name Leskov itself came from the village of Leska, where the father's family had served as clergymen for generations. Nikolai spent his first eight years on a wealthy estate owned by his mother's relatives, the Strakhovs, where tutors from Germany and France educated the landlord's own children. When his gifts attracted praise from the German tutor, the jealousy of his hosts made life difficult, and his grandmother arranged for him to be returned to his father in Oryol.

  In August 1841 Leskov entered the Oryol Lyceum, but five years of formal schooling produced only a two-year graduation certificate. Scholar B. Bukhstab later compared his failures there to those of Nikolay Nekrasov, attributing both to "the lack of a guiding hand" and a shared "loathing for the tiresome cramming routine." A fire in May 1848 destroyed the family's property; two months later, in July, his father died from cholera. In December 1849 Leskov transferred to Kiev, settling with his maternal uncle, a professor of medicine, and auditing lectures at the university while studying Polish, Ukrainian, and icon-painting.

  The decisive break from office work came in 1857, when Leskov quit his government post and joined the private trading company Scott and Wilkins, owned by Alexander Scott, the Scottish husband of his aunt Polly. The firm sent him across remote regions of Russia as an agent envoy. He learned local dialects and observed the customs of ethnic and regional groups he would never have encountered from a Petersburg desk. Years later he pointed to his forehead and told an interviewer: "From this trunk. Here pictures from the six or seven years of my commercial career are being kept. Those were the best years of my life. I saw a lot and life was easy for me."

• 3. The Journalist Who Made Enemies

  ›

  Scott and Wilkins closed in the summer of 1860, and Leskov returned first to Kiev as a journalist, then moved to Saint Petersburg at the end of the year. His long essay "Sketches on Wine Industry Issues," written in 1860 about the 1859 anti-alcohol riots, appeared first in a local Odessa newspaper, then in Otechestvennye Zapiski in April 1861. He considered it his proper literary debut. In January 1861 Leskov arrived in Saint Petersburg, staying initially with Professor Ivan Vernadsky alongside Zemlya i volya member Andrey Nechiporenko, and meeting the poet Taras Shevchenko.

  In January 1862 Leskov joined the staff of the Northern Bee, a liberal newspaper edited by Pavel Usov, writing under the pseudonym M. Stebnitsky. There he became head of the domestic affairs department, producing sketches on everyday life and critical pieces targeting nihilism. On the 30th of May 1862, Severnaya Ptchela published his article on fires that had begun on the 24th of May, burning for six days and destroying large sections of the Apraksin and Schukin quarters of Saint Petersburg. Popular rumour blamed revolutionary students and Poles. Leskov demanded that authorities either confirm or deny the allegations. The radical press accused him of inciting the public against students. The authorities were equally unhappy; Tsar Alexander II himself reportedly said of the author's suggestion about idle firemen: "This shouldn't have been allowed, this is a lie."

  Frightened, the newspaper dispatched its controversial correspondent to Paris. He passed through Wilno, Grodno, and Belostok, reaching Prague in November 1862, where he met Czech writers and translated a piece by Martin Brodsky. In December he was in Paris, translating Božena Němcová's Twelve Months. The exile gave him time and distance, but the damage to his reputation in the Russian press was already done.

• 4. Works That Could Not Be Ignored

  ›

  Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was written in Kiev in November 1864 and published in Dostoevsky's Epoch magazine in January 1865. Contemporary critics ignored it. Decades later it was recognized as a masterpiece. In 1934, Dmitry Shostakovich completed his opera based on it, which caused a furore both inside Russia and abroad before being denounced in Pravda in 1936. The Cathedral Folk, published in 1872, marked what Maxim Gorky described as a turning point: after his "evil novel" At Daggers Drawn, Gorky wrote, Leskov's "craft became more of a literary icon-painting: he began to create a gallery of saints for the Russian iconostases."

  The Enchanted Wanderer, published in 1873 and inspired by Leskov's 1872 journey to Lake Ladoga, was the first of his major works to be rejected outright rather than merely cut by a magazine; it had to appear in the odd October and November issues of the Russky mir newspaper. Contemporary critic Nikolay Mikhaylovsky complained of its "general formlessness: details stringed together like beads, totally interchangeable." Decades later, scholars compared the central figure Ivan Flyagin to the legendary Ilya Muromets, reading the story as a portrait of "the physical and moral duress of the Russian man in times of trouble."

  In October 1881 Rus magazine began publishing "The Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea," now regarded as Leskov's finest piece of work. Publicly premiered in March 1882 at a literary and musical evening of the Pushkin Circle, it came out in book form on the 16th of April. The story was attacked from both flanks: the left accused Leskov of propagating jingoistic ideas; the right found the depiction of common people's existence too gloomy. Critic B. Bukhstab later identified the most subtle move in the story as Leskov's treatment of the character ataman Platov, whose grotesquely heroic actions are quietly ridiculed by the author even as the simple-minded protagonist describes them with admiration.

• 5. The Church and the Censor

  ›

  By the early 1880s, the Russian Orthodox Church had become the main target of Leskov's satire, and the resulting friction with authorities was sustained and damaging. In February 1883, Istorichesky vestnik published his essay "Leap-frog in Church and Local Parish Whimsies," based on a documented episode involving a drunken pastor and deacon in a provincial town church. The essay cost him his position at the Ministry of Education's Scholarly Committee, where he had worked since January 1874, reviewing literature for Russian libraries at a wage of one thousand rubles per year. When Minister Delyanov suggested Leskov sign a retirement paper, Leskov refused. "What do you need such a firing for?" the Minister reportedly asked. "For a decent obituary," Leskov answered.

  In a letter from 1883, Leskov reflected on The Cathedral Folk: "These days I wouldn't do them, I'd rather have written Notes of a Defrocked Priest... to show how all of the Crucified One's commandments are being corrupted and falsified." He was moving toward what he identified as "new Christianity," a position he associated with Leo Tolstoy. On the 18th of April 1887 he wrote to Tolstoy asking to visit him in Moscow. They met on the 25th of April. "What a bright and original man," Tolstoy wrote afterward to Chertkov. Leskov spent January 1890 with Chertkov and Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana.

  The censors grew more aggressive as Leskov's satire sharpened. A special censorship order issued in the summer of 1884 demanded the withdrawal of 125 books from Russian libraries, including Leskov's collection Trifles from the Life of Archbishops. In November 1884, Nov magazine began publishing his novel The Unseen Trail; it was banned after chapter 26 and was never completed. In November 1888 his novella Zenon the Goldsmith was banned immediately upon submission. "The process of having his works published," Leskov wrote, had become "quite unbearable."

• 6. Voice and Form

  ›

  Anton Chekhov named Leskov and Turgenev as his two "tutors in literature." He marveled at Leskov's ability to make a reader share his views without imposing them, using subtle irony as an instrument. Leskov was, according to Bukhstab, the first of the major Russian authors to notice Chekhov's debut and predict his future rise. Leo Tolstoy, in a letter dated the 3rd of December 1890 about the short story "The Hour of God's Will," wrote: "This fairytale is excellent, but it would have been much better if not for this overabundance of talent."

  Leskov was unrepentant about his extravagance. "To write in a simple manner as Lev Nikolayevich does, is beyond me," he wrote to Chertkov in 1888. "My clergymen talk like clergymen do, and my muzhiks talk like muzhiks talk in real life... this folkish, vulgar and intricate language is not of my invention, I've listened for years to Russian people talking." His signature technique, the skaz style, was a folk-inflected manner of writing in which the narrator's voice and the character's voice existed in lively interplay, rich in word play and original neologisms. Gorky described Leskov's particular gift as "weaving a nervous fabric of lively Russian common talk," and said "in this art had no equals."

  Leskov rejected the orthodox novel as an artificial form. "Things pass by us and I'm not going to diminish or boost their respective significance; I won't be forced into doing so by the unnatural, man-made format of the novel," he wrote. He preferred the chronicle, the cycle of sketches, the loosely linked anecdote. Critic Semyon Vengerov noted that some of Leskov's five-to-six page stories were packed with plotlines that could have filled volumes. Near the end of his life, Leskov predicted that future readers would value his ideas over his style. D. S. Mirsky, writing in 1926, called this "an exceptionally ill-judged forecast."

• 7. Legacy Reclaimed

  ›

  At the time of his death in 1895, Leskov had, in Mirsky's phrase, "few friends in literary circles but a great many readers all over Russia." The Adolf Marks publishing house re-issued the 12-volume Complete Leskov in 1897 and released a 36-volume version in 1902-1903, expanded with essays, articles, and letters. A 1923 Berlin edition of selected works featured a preface by Maxim Gorky, who called Leskov "the wizard of wording"; the volume was re-issued in the USSR in early 1941.

  Soviet literary politics made the relationship with Leskov's legacy uncomfortable. The 1932 Soviet Literary Encyclopedia concluded that his relevancy "naturally wanes" in an era focused on socialist construction. Works that cut too deep remained suppressed: his anti-nihilistic novel At Daggers Drawn was missing from the 11-volume 1956-1958 Complete Leskov. In 1989 Ogonyok re-issued a 12-volume collection in which At Daggers Drawn appeared in the USSR for the first time.

  Leskov's son Andrey, born in 1866 and living until 1953, made himself the authoritative keeper of his father's legacy. Andrey served as a Soviet Army staff officer on the North-Western frontier from 1919 to 1931, retiring as a Lieutenant-General. He wrote a comprehensive memoir about his father's life; the manuscript was destroyed by a bomb during the 1942 Siege of Leningrad, and the author, then over eighty years old, reconstructed it from scratch. The finished biography was published by Goslitizdat in Moscow in 1954. By 1981, on the 150th anniversary of Leskov's birth, critic Lev Anninsky recorded that Leskov was regarded as a first-rank Russian classic, with academic essays on him placed in Moscow University's new course between those on Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.