La Pensée russe
In January 1890 the publication of the novel "The Devil Dolls" (with Tsar Nikolai I and Karl Bryullov as the prototypes for the two main characters) started in "Russkaya Mysl", but was stopped by censors. In 1891 "Polunochniki" (Night Owls), a thinly veiled satire on the Orthodox Church in general and Ioann Kronshtadsky in particular, was published in "Severny vestnik" and caused an uproar. The 1894 novella "The Rabbit Warren" about a clergyman who'd been honoured for reporting people to the authorities and driving a police official into madness by his zealousness (one of "his most remarkable works and his greatest achievement in concentrated satire," according to Mirsky) was also banned and came out only in 1917 (in "Niva" magazine). 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".