Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov (; – ) was a Russian novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and journalist, who also wrote under the pseudonym M. Stebnitsky. Praised for his unique writing style and innovative experiments in form, and held in high esteem by Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky among others, Leskov is credited with creating a comprehensive picture of contemporary Russian society using mostly short literary forms.
Leskov received his formal education at the Oryol Lyceum. In 1847 Leskov joined the Oryol criminal court office, later transferring to Kiev, where he worked as a clerk, attended university lectures, mixed with local people, and took part in various student circles. In 1857 Leskov quit his job as a clerk and went to work for the private trading company Scott & Wilkins owned by Alexander Scott, his aunt's Scottish husband.
His literary career began in the early 1860s with the publication of his short story The Extinguished Flame (1862), and his novellas Musk-Ox (May 1863) and The Life of a Peasant Woman (September, 1863). His first novel No Way Out was published under the pseudonym M. Stebnitsky in 1864. From the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s Leskov published a wide range of works, including journalism, sketches, short stories, and novels. Leskov's major works, many of which continue to be published in modern versions, were written during this time. A number of his later works were banned because of their satirical treatment of the Russian Orthodox Church and its functionaries. Leskov died on 5 March 1895, aged 64, and was interred in the Volkovo Cemetery in Saint Petersburg, in the section reserved for literary figures.
Biography
Early life
Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov was born on 4 February 1831, in Gorokhovo, Oryol Gubernia, to Semyon Dmitrievich Leskov (1789–1848), a respected criminal investigator and local court official, and Maria Petrovna Leskova (née Alferyeva; 1813–1886), the daughter of an impoverished Moscow nobleman, who first met her future husband at a very young age, when he worked as a tutor in their house. Leskov's ancestors on his father's side were all clergymen in the village of Leska in Oryol Gubernia, hence the name Leskov. Semyon Dmitrievich was a well-educated man; friends referred to him as a "homegrown intellectual". One of Nikolai's aunts on his mother's side was married to a rich Oryol landlord named Strakhov who owned the village of Gorokhovo ("a beautiful, wealthy and well-groomed estate... where the hosts lived in luxury," according to Leskov). Another was the wife of an Englishman, the chief steward for several local estates and a large trade company owner. Leskov spent his first eight years in Gorokhovo, where his grandmother lived and where his mother was only an occasional guest. He acquired his early education in the house of Strakhov, who employed tutors from Germany and France for his own children. As the German teacher started to praise Leskov for his gifts, his life became difficult, due to the jealousy of his hosts. At his grandmother's request, his father took Nikolai back to Oryol where he settled in the family house at 3 Dvoryanskaya Street.
In August 1841 Leskov began his formal education at the Oryol Lyceum. In July of the same year Leskov's father died from cholera. In 1853 Leskov married Olga Smirnova; they had one son, Dmitry (who died after only a year), and a daughter, Vera.
In 1857 Leskov quit his job in the office and joined the private trading company Scott & Wilkins (Шкотт и Вилькенс) owned by Alexander Scott, his aunt Polly's Scottish husband. Later he wrote of this in one of his short autobiographical sketches: "Soon after the Crimean War I was infected with a then popular heresy, something I've been reproaching myself for since. I abandoned the state official career which seemed to be starting promisingly and joined one of the newly-born trade companies." While working for this company, which, in Leskov's words, "was eager to exploit whatever the region could provide," he derived valuable experience, making him an expert in numerous branches of industry and agriculture. The firm employed him as an agent envoy; while travelling through the remote regions of Russia, the young man learned local dialects and became keenly interested in the customs and ways of the different ethnic and regional groups of Russian peoples. Years later, when asked what the source of the endless stream of stories that seemed to pour out of him ceaselessly was, Leskov said, pointing at his forehead: "From this trunk. Here pictures from the six or seven years of my commercial career are being kept, from the times when I travelled across Russia on business trips. Those were the best years of my life. I saw a lot and life was easy for me." Up until 1860 Leskov resided with members of his family (and that of Alexander Scott) in Raisky, Penza Governorate. In the summer of 1860, when Scott & Wilkins closed, he returned to Kiev to work there as a journalist for a while, then in the end of the year moved to Saint Petersburg. and met Taras Shevchenko. For a short while he moved to Moscow and started to work for the Russkaya Retch newspaper, all the while contributing to Otechestvennye Zapiski. In December he left Russkaya Retch (for personal, rather than ideological reasons) and moved back to Saint Peterburg where in January 1862 he joined the staff of the Northern Bee (Severnaya ptchela), a liberal newspaper edited by Pavel Usov. There Leskov met journalist Arthur Benni, a Polish-born British citizen, with whom he forged a great friendship and later came to defend, as leftist radicals in Petersburg started to spread rumours about his being "an English spy" and having links with the 3rd Department. The author's suggestion that "firemen sent to the sites would do anything rather than idly stand by" angered Alexander II himself, who reportedly said: "This shouldn't have been allowed, this is a lie."
Frightened, Severnaya Ptchela sent its controversial author on a trip to Paris as a correspondent, making sure the mission was a long onе. After visiting Wilno, Grodno and Belostok, in November 1862 Leskov arrived in Prague where he met a group of Czech writers, notably Martin Brodsky, whose arabesque You Don't Cause Pain he translated. In December Leskov was in Paris, where he translated Božena Němcová's Twelve Months (A Slavic Fairytale), both translations were published by Severnaya ptchela in 1863. but proved to be a powerful debut in its own way. No Way Out, which satirized nihilist communes on the one hand and praised the virtues of the common people and the powers of Christian values on the other, scandalized critics of the radical left who discovered that for most of the characters real life prototypes could be found, and its central figure, Beloyartsev, was obviously a caricature of author and social activist Vasily Sleptsov. and The Islanders (1866), about the everyday life of Vasilyevsky Island's German community. It was in these years that Leskov debuted as a dramatist. The Spendthrift (Rastratchik), published by Literaturnaya biblioteka in May 1867, was staged first at the Alexandrinsky Theatre (as a benefit for actress E. Levkeeva), then in December at Moscow's Maly Theater (with E. Chumakovskaya in the lead). Leskov would later refer to the novel as a failure and blamed Katkov's incessant interference for it. "His was the publication in which literary qualities were being methodically repressed, destroyed, or applied to serve specific interests which had nothing to do with literature," he later insisted. Some of his colleagues (Dostoevsky among them) criticized the novel from the technical point of view, speaking of the stiltedness of the "adventure" plot and the improbability of some of its characters.
In 1873 The Sealed Angel came out, about a miracle which caused an Old Believer community to return to the Orthodox fold. The story, rather critical of the authorities, resonated in high places and was read, reportedly, at the Court. While all of Leskov's previous works were severely cut, this was the first one to be rejected outright; it had to be published in the odd October and November issues of the Russky mir newspaper . Years of confrontation with critics and many of his colleagues have taken their toll. "Men of letters seem to recognize my writing as a force, but find great pleasure in killing it; in fact they have all but succeeded in killing it off altogether. I write nothing – I just can't!", he wrote to Pyotr Schebalsky in January 1876. Most deceitful (according to critic B. Bukhstab) was the author's treatment of the character ataman Platov, whose actions, even as they are described in a grotesquely heroic manner by the simple-minded protagonist, are openly ridiculed by the author. Leskov's religious essays of the early 1880s continued the same line of sympathetically supporting poor clergymen and ridiculing the hypocrisy of the Russian Orthodoxy's higher ranks.
In August, November and December 1887 respectively, the first three volumes of the collection Novellas and Short Stories by N. S. Leskov were published. At the 1888 New Year party at Alexei Suvorin's, Leskov met Anton Chekhov for the first time. Soon Ilya Repin became Leskov's friend and illustrator. Several months later in a letter, asking Leskov to sit for him, Repin explained his motives: "Not only me but the whole of enlightened Russia loves you as an outstanding, distinguished writer and as a thinking man." The sittings early the next year were aborted: Leskov was unwilling to have his portrait seen at a forthcoming exhibition of Repin's works. The process of having his works published, which had always been difficult for Leskov, at this late stage became, in his own words, "quite unbearable".
In 1865 Ekaterina Bubnova (née Savitskaya), whom he met for the first time in July 1864, became Leskov's common-law wife. Bubnova had four children from her first marriage; one of whom, Vera (coincidentally the same name as Leskov's daughter by his own marriage) Bubnova, was officially adopted by Leskov, who took care that his stepdaughter got a good education; she embarked upon a career in music. In 1866 Bubnova gave birth to their son, Andrey (1866–1953).
In November 1883 Varya Dolina (daughter of E.A. Cook, Leskov's maidservant and ethnic Finn) joined Leskov and his son, first as a pupil and protege, soon becoming another of Leskov's adopted daughters. By this time he had become an authority on his father's legacy, praised by Maxim Gorky among many others and regularly consulted by specialists. Andrey Leskov's The Life of Nikolai Leskov, a comprehensive book of memoirs (which had its own dramatic story: destroyed in the 1942 Siege of Leningrad by a bomb, it was reconstructed from scratch by the 80-plus year old author after the War, and finished in 1948). After the 10th volume of this collection was published, critic Mikhail Protopopov authored an essay called "The Sick Talent". Crediting Leskov as a superb psychologist and a master of "reproducing domestic scenes," he rated him equal to Melnikov-Pechersky and Mikhail Avdeev. What prevented Leskov from getting any higher, the critic argued, were "his love of hyperbole" and what he termed "an overload of spices." At the time of his death in 1895 Leskov "had few friends in literary circles but a great many readers all over Russia," according to Mirsky. This, along with Anatoly Faresov's memoirs, Against the Grain (1904), caused a new wave of interest in Leskov's legacy. In 1923 three volumes of Nikolai Leskov's selected works came out in Berlin, featuring an often-quoted rapturous preface by Maxim Gorky (who called Leskov "the wizard of wording"), and was re-issued in the USSR in early 1941.
For decades after his death the attitude of critics toward Leskov and his legacy varied. Despite the fact that some of his sharpest satires could be published only after the 1917 Revolution, Soviet literary propaganda found little of use in Leskov's legacy, often labeling the author a "reactionary" who had "denied the possibility of social revolution," placing too much attention on saintly religious types. For highlighting the author's 'progressive' inclinations "Leftie" (a "glorification of Russian inventiveness and talent") and "The Toupee Artist" (a "denunciation of the repressive nature of Tsarist Russia") were invariably chosen.
thumb|left|150px|The 125th Leskov Anniversary stamp
The inability of the new literary ideologists to counterbalance demands of propaganda with attempts at objectivity was evidenced in the 1932 Soviet Literary Encyclopedia entry, which said: "In our times when the problem-highlighting type of novel has gained prominence, opening up new horizons for socialism and construction, Leskov's relevancy as a writer, totally foreign to the major tendencies of our Soviet literature, naturally wanes. The author of 'Lefty', though, retains some significance as a chronicler of his social environment and one of the best masters of Russian prose." Nevertheless, by 1934 Dmitry Shostakovich had finished his opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which caused a furore at home and abroad (to be eventually denounced in 1936 by Pravda). Before that, in 1929, Ivan Shyshov's opera The Toupee Artist (after Leskov's story of the same name) had been published and successfully staged.
In the post-World War II USSR the interest in Leskov's legacy was continually on the rise, never going, though, beyond certain censorship-set limits. Several scholarly essays came out, and then an extensive biography by the writer's son Andrey Leskov was published in 1954. In 1953 the Complete Gorky series featured his 1923 essay on Leskov, which became the object of lively academic discussion.
In 1996 the Terra publishing house in Russia started a 30-volume Leskov series, declaring the intention to include every single work or letter by the author, but by 2007 only 10 volumes of it had come out. The Literaturnoye nasledstvo publishers started the Unpublished Leskov series: book one (fiction) came out in 1991, book two (letters and articles) – in 2000; both were incomplete, and the volume six material, which had been banned a century ago and proved to be too tough for the Soviet censors, was again neglected. All 36 volumes of the 1902 Marks Complete Leskov were re-issued in 2002 and Moshkov's On-line Library gathered a significant part of Leskov's legacy, including his most controversial novels and essays.
Social and religious stance
thumb|right|200px|"I could never understand this idea of 'studying' the life of the common people, for I felt it would be more natural for a writer to 'live' this kind of life, rather than 'study' it." Nikolai Leskov in 1860
In retrospect, the majority of Leskov's legacy, documentary in essence, could be seen as part of the 19th century raznochintsy literature which relied upon the 'real life sketch' as a founding genre. But, while Gleb Uspensky, Vasily Sleptsov and Fyodor Reshetnikov were preaching "the urgent need to study the real life of the common people," Leskov was caustic in his scorn: "Never could I understand this popular idea among our publicists of 'studying' the life of the common people, for I felt it would be more natural for a writer to 'live' this kind of life, rather than 'study' it," he remarked.
Like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Leskov saw the Gospel as the moral codex for humanity, the guiding light of its development and an ideological basis for any progress. His "saintly" gallery of characters propagated the same idea of "multiplying what was good all over the land."
As D.S. Mirsky pointed out, Leskov's Christianity, like that of Tolstoy, was "anti-clerical, undenominational and purely ethical." But there, the critic argued, the similarities ended. "The dominant ethical note is different. It is the cult not of moral purity and of reason, but of humility and charity. "Spiritual pride", self-conscious righteousness is for Leskov the greatest of crimes. Active charity is for him the principal virtue, and he attaches very little value to moral purity, still less to physical purity... [The] feeling of sin as the necessary soil for sanctity and the condemnation of self-righteous pride as a sin against the Holy Ghost is intimately akin to the moral sense of the Russian people and of the Eastern church, and very different from Tolstoy's proud Protestant and Luciferian ideas of perfection", Mirsky wrote. Leo Tolstoy (while still expressing reservations as to the "overabundance of colours") called Leskov "a writer for the future."
Maxim Gorky was another great admirer of Leskov's prose, seeing him as one of the few figures in 19th century Russian literature who had both ideas of their own and the courage to speak them out loud. Gorky linked Leskov to the elite of Russian literary thinkers (Dostoyevsky, Pisemsky, Goncharov and Turgenev) who "formed more or less firm and distinct views on the history of Russia and developed their own way of working within its culture." 20th century critics credited Leskov with being an innovator who used the art of wording in a totally new and different manner, increasing the functional scope of phrasing, making it a precision instrument for drawing the nuances of human character. According to Gorky, unlike Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgenev or Goncharov who created "portraits set in landscapes," Leskov painted his backgrounds unobtrusively by "simply telling his stories," being a true master of "weaving a nervous fabric of lively Russian common talk," and "in this art had no equals."
Gorky saw Leskov as a true artist whose place "beside masters like L. Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgenev and Goncharov is well-deserved". He was greatly intrigued by the way Leskov managed to secure himself total independence in the community where no such thing seemed possible ("he was neither Narodnik nor Slavophile, neither Westernizer, nor liberal or conservative") later explaining: "Leskov was... the only Russian author to have succeeded in separating the whole generation of his countrymen into a new set of sub-classes, each belonging to a different epoch." Gorky mentioned Leskov among authors that had helped him form his own style and outlook. "It was partly under Leskov's influence that I decided to go out and see how real people lived," he wrote. "Leskov influenced me enormously, with his knowledge of the Russian language and its richness," Gorky remarked in another letter.
Leskov was continuously experimenting with forms, his most favourable being "the chronicle" which he saw as a healthy alternative to orthodox novel. "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 which demands the rounding up of fabulas and the drawing together of plotlines to one central course. That's not how life is. Human life runs on in its own way and that's how I'm going to treat the roll of events in my works," he once wrote. Leskov was unrepentant. "To write in a simple manner as Lev Nikolayevich does, is beyond me. Such a gift is not mine... take me as I am, for I've gotten used to polishing my stuff and simply cannot work in any other way," he wrote to Chertkov in one of his 1888 letters. "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... and I can say that in my books they talk like they do in real life, not in literary fashion," he insisted later, speaking to biographer Anatoly Faresov. adding: "A man shows his character best in the smallest things." This had to do more with his own concept of literature as a branch of history, in other words, being an intrinsically documentary art form. He attributed great social importance to history, seeing it as a major factor in healthy social development. Most of Leskov's characters had real life prototypes, while some of them bore the names of real persons ("Cadet Monastery", "A Man at the Guard", "Vladyka's Judgment", "Penniless Engineers", etc.) "The Russian people acknowledge Leskov as the Most Russian of all Russian writers; a man who knew the Russian people better and more deeply than anybody else," Mirsky maintained.