page_title: Nikolai Leskov
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Nikolai Leskov / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Марка СССР
context_page_description: 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. His major works include Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, The Cathedral Clergy, The Enchanted Wanderer, and The Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea.
  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 English husband.
  His literary career began in the early 1860s with the publication of his short story The Extinguished Flame, and his novellas Musk-Ox and The Life of a Peasant Woman.
context_section_description: Nikolai Leskov, now widely regarded as a classic of Russian literature, had an extremely difficult literary career, marred by scandals which resulted in boycotts and ostracism. Describing the Russian literary scene at the time Leskov entered it, D. S. Mirsky wrote: 
  It was a time of intense party strife, when no writer could hope to be well received by all critics and only those who identified themselves with a definite party could hope for even partial recognition. Leskov had never identified himself with any party and had to take the consequences. His success with the reading public was considerable but the critics continued to neglect him. Leskov's case is a striking instance of the failure of Russian criticism to do its duty.
  After his 1862 article on the "great fires" and the 1864 novel No Way Out, Leskov found himself in total isolation which in the 1870s and 1880s was only partially relieved. Apollon Grigoriev, the only critic who valued him and approved of his work, died in 1864 and, according to Mirsky, "Leskov owed his latter popularity to the good taste of that segment of the reading public who were beyond the scope of the 'directing' influences". In the 1870s things improved but, according to Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, "Leskov's position in his last 12 to 15 years was ambivalent, old friends distrusting him, new ones being still wary. For all his big name, he wasn't a centerpiece literary figure and critics all but ignored him. This didn't prevent the huge success of the Complete Leskov." After the 10th volume of this collection was published, critic Mikhail Protopopov came up with 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-Pechesky 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.
  In 1897 The Adolf Marks publishing house re-issued the 1889–1893 12-volume series and in 1902–1903 released the 36-volume version of it, expanded with essays, articles and letters. 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. "He is a brilliant author, an insightful scholar of our ways of life, and still he's not being given enough credit", Maxim Gorky wrote in 1928, deploring the fact that after the 1917 Revolution Leskov was still failing to gain ground in his homeland as a major classic.
  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
caption: The 125th Leskov Anniversary stamp
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