Nikolay Leskov
Nikolay Semyonovich Leskov, pseudonym
Stebnitsky (b. Feb. 16 [Feb. 4, Old
Style], 1831, Gorokhovo, Russia—d. March
5 [Feb. 21], 1895, St. Petersburg),
novelist and short-story writer who has
been described as the greatest of
Russian storytellers.
As a child Leskov was taken to different
monasteries by his grandmother, and he
used those early memories of Russian
monastic life with good effect in his
most famous novel, Soboryane (1872;
Cathedral Folk, 1924). A junior clerk of
a criminal court in Orel and Kiev, he
later joined an English firm and
traveled all over Russia; it was during
these travels that he obtained the
material for most of his novels and
short stories. Leskov began his writing
career as a journalist. In 1865 he
published his best known story, Ledi
Makbet Mtsenskogo uezda (Lady Macbeth of
the Mtsensk District, 1961), the
passionate heroine of which lives and
dies by violence. His most popular tale,
however, remains Skaz o Tulskom kosom
Levshe i o stalnoy Blokhe (1881; “The
Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and
the Steel Flea”), a masterpiece of
Gogolesque comedy in which an illiterate
smith from Tula outwits the skill of the
most advanced British craftsman. Another
story, the picaresque Ocharovanny
strannik (1873; Enchanted Wanderer,
1961), was written after a visit to the
monastic islands on Lake Ladoga in 1872.
His early novels Nekuda (1864; “Nowhere
to Go”) and Na nozhakh (1870–71; “At
Daggers Drawn”) were violently attacked
by the Russian radicals as revealing an
attitude of uncompromising hostility
toward the Russian revolutionary
movement, an attitude Leskov later
modified. In 1969 W.B. Edgerton
translated into English, for the first
time, 13 of Leskov’s stories, with a new
translation of “The Steel Flea.”
