"[3] In May 1857 Leskov moved with his family to Raiskoye village in Penza Governorate where the Scotts were based, and later that month embarked upon his first business trip, involving the transportation of the Oryol-based serfs of Count Perovsky to the Southern Russian steppes, not entirely successfully, as he later described in his autobiographical short story "The Product of Nature".

[15] Leskov considered his long essay "Sketches on Wine Industry Issues", written in 1860 about the 1859 anti-alcohol riots and first published in a local Odessa newspaper, then in Otechestvennye Zapiski (April 1861), to be his proper literary debut.

[8] In May 1860 he returned with his family to Kiev, and in the summer started to write for both the Sankt-Peterburgskye Vedomosty newspaper and the Kiev-based Sovremennaya Meditsina (where he published his article "On the Working Class", and several essays on medical issues) and the Ukazatel Ekonomitchesky (Economic Guide).

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.

"[2] On 30 May 1862, Severnaya Ptchela published an article by Nikolaj Leskov on the issue of the fires that started on 24 May, lasting for six days and destroying a large part of the Apraksin and Schukin quarters of the Russian capital,[3] which popular rumour imputed to a group of "revolutionary students and Poles" that stood behind the "Young Russia" proclamation.

[10] 1862 saw the launch of Leskov's literary career, with the publication of "The Extinguished Flame" (later re-issued as "The Drought") in the March issue of Vek magazine, edited by Grigory Eliseev,[1] followed by the short novels Musk-Ox (May 1863) and The Life of a Peasant Woman (September, 1863).

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.

[10] Leskov's novel, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (written in Kiev in November 1864 and published in Dostoevsky's Epoch magazine in January 1865) and his novella The Amazon (Otechestvennye zapiski, No.7, 1866), both "pictures of almost unrelieved wickedness and passion",[2] were ignored by contemporary critics but were praised decades later as masterpieces, containing powerful depictions of highly expressive female characters from different classes and walks of life.

"[10] Leskov's miscellaneous sketches on the lives and tribulations of the Russian small-scale priesthood and rural nobility gradually gravitated (according to critic V. Korovin) into a cohesive, albeit frameless tapestry of a battlefield where "good men" (Tuberozov, Desnitsyn, Benefaktov, all of them priests) were fighting off a bunch of crooks and scoundrels; nihilists and officials.

[10] Soboryane, published by The Russian Messenger in 1872, had for its major theme the intrinsic, unbridgeable gap between the "down to earth", Christianity of the people and the official, state-sponsored corrupt version; it riled both the state and church authorities, was widely debated and had great resonance.

[8] At the same time, Leskov was working on two of his "Stargorod Chronicles", later regarded as part of a trilogy, along with The Cathedral Folk, Old Years in Plodomasovo (1869) and A Decayed Family (1873), each featuring a strong female character: virtuous, courageous, noble and "reasonably humane".

[7] Inspired by his 1872 journey to Lake Ladoga,[8] The Enchanted Wanderer (1873) was an amorphous, loosely structured piece of work, with several plotlines intertwined – the form Leskov thought the traditional novel was destined to be superseded by.

Decades later scholars praised the story, comparing the character of Ivan Flyagin to that of Ilya Muromets, as symbolizing "the physical and moral duress of the Russian man in times of trouble,"[10] but the response of contemporary critics was lukewarm, Nikolay Mikhaylovsky complaining of its general formlessness: "details stringed together like beads, totally interchangeable.

This was relieved to an extent by his invitation in January 1874 to join the Scholarly Committee of the Ministry of Education (for this he owed much to the Empress consort Maria Alexandrovna who was known to have read The Cathedral Folk and spoke warmly to it),[3] where his duty was to choose literature for Russian libraries and atheneums for a meager wage of one thousand rubles per year.

It was during the publication of this work that the author made a comment which was later seen as his artistic manifesto: "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.

[8] In October 1881 Rus magazine started publishing "The Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea", which is seen in retrospect as Leskov's finest piece of work, bringing out the best in him as an ingenious storyteller and stylistic virtuoso whose skaz style is rich in word play and full of original neologisms, each carrying not only humorous but satirical messages.

[7] What would later come to be seen as one of the gems of Russian literature was fiercely attacked both from the left (who accused Leskov of propagating jingoistic ideas) and the right, who found the general picture of the common people's existence as depicted in the story a bit too gloomy for their taste.

By this time a large Russian Antics cycle began to take shape, in which Leskov implemented, as he saw it, Nikolai Gogol's idea (formulated in the Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends) of "extoling modest working men."

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)[2] was also banned and came out only in 1917 (in Niva magazine).

[8] Due to Leskov's purportedly difficult nature (he has been described as despotic, vindictive, quick-tempered and prone to didacticism), he spent the last years of his life alone, his biological daughter Vera (from his first marriage) living far away and never visiting; his son Andrey residing in the capital but avoiding his father.

[36] "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.

According to D. S. Mirsky, Leskov was "one of those Russian writers whose knowledge of life was not founded on the possession of serfs, to be later modified by university theories of French or German origin, like Turgenev's and Tolstoy's, but on practical and independent experience.

"[2] Some modern scholars argue that, contrary to what his contemporary detractors said, Leskov had not held "reactionary" or even "conservative" sensibilities and his outlook was basically that of a democratic enlightener, who placed great hopes upon the 1861 social reform and became deeply disillusioned soon afterwards.

"[7] According to Bukhstab, it was Leskov whose works Chekhov used as a template for mastering his technique of constructing short stories, marveling at their density and concentration, but also at their author's ability to make a reader share his views without imposing them, using subtle irony as an instrument.

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.

"[51] 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.

[53] 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")[33] and, at the same time, developed "deep insight into the life of the existing classes and social groups of Russia... something none of his greater contemporaries like Tolstoy or Turgenev, could ever do".

[1] Enchanted by the ways of life, customs and habits of different, often obscure, ethnic and social groups in Russia, but (unlike Chekhov and Pisemsky who were interested in tendencies) focusing on the bizarre and strange elements of it,[1] Leskov was helped by the unique linguistic memory he'd been endowed with.