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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} by Prominent : Nikolay Leskov. Leskov was born in a village in the Oryol Region of Central . His father was an official of the criminal court chamber who had earned a hereditary nobility title despite the fact he originated from a line of clerics. His mother was a noblewoman. Leskov spent his childhood in Oryol, on his parents’ estates in the region. He also spent several years in the house of his mothers’ rich relatives, as his parents had no money to pay for his home education. The relatives had him tutored by Russian, German and French teachers. He studied together with his cousins, showing much greater capabilities, which resulted in his being sent back home. When he was ten, he entered the Oryol gymnasium, but failed to graduate. When he was sixteen, his father died, and all the family belongings were lost in a fire. Leskov went to work as a clerk in the Oryol criminal court chamber. He later used his experience in the office in many of his works. In 1849 Leskov left his post and moved to Kiev, invited by his mother’s brother. There, he worked as deputy head of a recruiting department and attended university lectures and began studying the Polish language and the Slavic culture. Leskov showed interest in religion, mixing not only with Christians, but also with Old Believers and cult followers. He was also interested in old Kiev art and architecture. All of this helped him become an expert in ancient Russian art. A year later, he married the daughter of a Kiev merchant. It was a hasty marriage, not favored by their relatives. Their first son, whom they named Mitya, died early, cooling their relations, which hadn’t been too warm in the first place. In 1866, their second son Andrey was born, who later wrote his father’s first biography. In 1853 Leskov was promoted to collegial registrar, and later became the head of the department. In 1856 he became the provincial secretary. A year later he retired and went to work for a private trade company which re-settled peasants to uncultivated lands. In service of the company, he traveled across all of European Russia. The beginning of his literary career was in 1860, when he first acted as a progressive publicist, collaborating with Kiev and St. Petersburg periodicals and writing short articles and essays. That same year he started working for the police, but had to leave service after he wrote an article revealing the abuse of power by police physicians. In 1861 his family moved to St. Petersburg. Leskov continued working with periodicals and started writing for the “Native Notes” (“”) literary magazine. The same year he had his first big work published, the “Notes on the Distillation Industry” (“Ocherki Vinokurennoy Promyshlennosti”). In 1862 he went abroad to work for the “Northern Bee” (“Severanaya Pchela”) newspaper. He went to Poland, Western Ukraine and the Czech Republic to learn the life, art and poetry of the Western Slavic peoples, of whom he was very fond. His trip ended with a visit to Paris, and in 1863 he returned to Russia. This year was the official start of his writing career. He published his stories “The Life of One Woman” (“Zhitie odnoy baby”), “The Musk Ox” (“Ovtsebyk”) and started work on the novel “” (“Nekuda”). The controversial novel, denying the revolutionary nihilistic ideas popular at the time, made many writers turn their backs on him, including the publisher of “Native Notes.” He then started publishing his works in the “Russian Messenger” (“Russkiy vestnik”, one of the most influential literary and political magazines of the second half of the 19th century, under the name of M. Stebnitsky. In 1865 he wrote “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” (“Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo Uezda”), one of his best-known works. Two years later his play “The Spendthrift” (“Rastochitel”) was staged in the Aleksandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. He knew well the life of the province, its needs, its people, the details of their way of life, and never accepted the ideas of theorists detached from the “Russian roots.” He deals with this theme in “The Musk Ox” and in his novels “No Way Out” and “At Daggers Drawn” (“Na Nozhakh”). These works a Russia unprepared for a revolution and describe the tragic fate of those who put their hopes in it. “At Daggers Drawn” triggered political accusations against Leskov. In 1873 his stories “The Enchanted Wanderer” (“Ocharovannyi Strannik”) and “The Sealed Angel” (“Zapechatlennyi Angel”) were published. Leskov’s gradually worsening relations with the “Russian Messenger” threatened to leave his family without means of support. A year later he was forced to take a position in the Ministry of Popular Education’s special department on “examination of books published for the people” to make ends meet. In 1875 Leskov went abroad for a second time. He was utterly disappointed in his religious beliefs, and upon his return he wrote a number of satiric short stories about the clergy. Two years later, his novel “The Cathedral Folk” (“Soboryane”) had plausible reception from the Empress Maria Aleksandrovna. Leskov immediately became a member of the education department in the Ministry of Government Property. In 1881 he wrote one of his most famous works, “The Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea” (“Skaz o tulskom kosom Levshe i o stalnoy blokhe”). Two years later he retired from government service. In 1887 he met Leo Tolstoy, who had great influence on Leskov’s late works. In his late prose, he criticized the entire Russian political system. Since his fallout with the “Russian Messenger” he had to publish his works in provincial leaflets, newspapers and magazines. He often signed his works with pseudonyms, though he didn’t have a permanent one. The best known of his pen names are V. Peresvetov, Nikolai Ponukalov, priest Petr Kastorskiy, Psalomshik (Psalm-reader), A Man from the Crowd (Chelovek iz tolpy) and Watch-lover (Lyubitel chasov). Nikolay Leskov died in St. Petersburg after an episode of asthma, which had tortured him during the last five years of his life. He is buried in the Volkovskoe Cemetery. Nikolai Leskov (1831 - 1895)

Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov (Russian: Никола́й Семёнович Леско́в) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, playwright, and journalist who also wrote under the pseudonym M. Stebnitskiy (or 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 (1865) (which was later made into an opera by Shostakovich), The Cathedral Clergy (1872), The Enchanted Wanderer (1873), and The Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea (1881). From Herzen to Leskov, and back again. I’ve been re-reading Nikolai Leskov’s Cathedral Clergy ( Soboriane ) in the excellent recent translation by Margaret Winchell (Slavica, 2010) for a new undergraduate course I’m starting to teach in the Autumn, Identities in nineteenth-century Russian literature . The first part of the course – and in many ways the most interesting for me in terms of preparing new teaching material – is devoted to social estates ( sosloviia ). The three main texts I’ve chosen are Sergei Aksakov’s Family Chronicle ( Semeinaia khronika , also translated as A Russian Gentleman ), to focus on the nobility, ’s The Storm ( Groza ), on the merchant class, and the aforementioned Leskov text, on the clergy. I think this is going to be quite challenging for the students, as these texts present such an unfamiliar view of Russia, by comparison with the Europeanized space and perspective that tend to dominate in the nineteenth-century works we more usually teach (I would include Tolstoy and Chekhov in that, even when they’re writing about peasants or merchants). But they are terrific and very lively works, and that alone (I hope) should persuade the students that they deserve to be read and studied. In many ways it is precisely their expression of the tension between “tradition” and “progress,” the past and the future, Russia and Europe that makes these texts so interesting. They’re animated by the same binaries that exercised the Slavophiles (Sergei Aksakov was, of course, very much that way inclined himself, and spawned one of the best known, if least intellectually convincing, of the Slavophiles), but their dramatization brings the issues to life in a way that the rather inconsistent philosophical texts of the Slavophiles seldom manage. So I think this topic will be particularly enlightening for those students taking my Russian Thought course as well (where we’ll be looking at the Slavophiles at roughly the same time), and I’ll be using the two to feed off each other, which I hope will benefit both courses. A large part of the plot of Leskov’s chronicle revolves around the clash between the clergy and the “free-thinking” school teacher Varnava Prepotensky, a caricature nihilist whose mania for the natural sciences leads to an idiotic tug-of-war with the local priests over a human skeleton he is intent on studying. But, probably because the events I described in my previous post were still fresh in my mind, I was particularly struck by a different aspect of this opposition of the old and new faces of Russia: a couple of references to Herzen’s newspaper The Bell ( Kolokol ). The novel was published in 1872, but Archpriest Tuberozov’s journal, which takes up a significant chunk of part 1, covers the period from 1831 to 1864 (the present day of the novel, and the year in which – significantly for the skeleton plot – the Russian translation of Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in full). The journal sketches the pre-history of the events that occur in the novel, including their ideological precursors, and includes the following: Kolokol issue 1 (1 June 1857) May 20th [1857] . While visiting the police chief, I read for the first time Mister Iskander’s Russian newspaper the Bell , which is printed abroad. The discourse was lively and highly stylistic, but unaccustomed as I am to boldness, I found it wild. ( The Cathedral Clergy: A Chronicle , p. 61) As the notes to the translation point out, the date given does not correspond with the reality, because Kolokol first appeared on 1 June 1857. Nevertheless, the reference indicates the significance of the newspaper from its earliest editions, while the source of the copy the Archpriest reads – the new chief of police Ignacy Czemernicki – is notable. The latter point is reinforced in the second reference, from an entry dated towards the end of the same year: December 20th . I am utterly perplexed. The sacristan’s widow unthinkingly sent her son a one-ruble banknote not by registered mail, as required by law but in a plain envelope; at the post office the envelope was unsealed and, after the widow’s crime was uncovered, her missive was confiscated and she was subjected to a fine. It is no news to anyone that letters are opened and read at the post office; but just how is it that they intercept the widow’s banknote but not the Bell , which I get from the police chief? What is this – simplemindedness or theft? (p. 62) This is interesting for two reasons. The first relates to a question I was asked several times at the unveiling of the plaque commemorating the Free Russian Press: how did Herzen manage to smuggle so many copies of Kolokol into Russia? Given the context we see in Cathedral Clergy , where nihilists and local officials are apparently cut from the same cloth (both representing different facets of Europeanized, modern Russia), and the fact that in reality Kolokol was read in the highest echelons of government, the only possible answer appears to be: with a degree of official complicity that renders the notion of illegality, and even of government and opposition, weirdly compromised. That’s not to imply that the opposition represented by Herzen was anything less than real, or that the banning of publications such as Kolokol was in any way a facade. One is accustomed (and not solely in Russia) to the existence of a gap between the law and what happens in practice, but this does suggest very contradictory behaviour and aims amongst officials at that time. If anyone can advise what best to read on that subject, I’d be very grateful. The second question is about the boundaries between reality (or history) and literature, and the feeling that such references to a cultural phenomenon in a fiction work paradoxically seem a more significant sign of its importance than discussions in memoirs or even historical studies, precisely because they are mentioned only in passing. They are, of course, a loose part of the same satirical framework that subsequently develops around the emerging generation of radicals, but at the same time the brevity of the references to Kolokol limits the development of the satirical dimension, which in any case is directed here at the town authorities rather than the newspaper. This suggests that the situation described by the Archpriest must have been meaningful to contemporary readers, as it acts as a shorthand for the political context as a whole. And this adds another dimension to the relationship between literature and the real world it reflects (for want of a better phrase) that I seem to keep coming up against in different ways, from the fact/fiction confluence in Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales and its relationship to LEF’s concept of factography (the subject of an article appearing any day now in Slavonica ), to the role of real places in Crime and Punishment and other Petersburg texts (see Mapping St Petersburg), and references in The Idiot to criminal cases that happened while Dostoevsky was writing the novel (of significance to my first book) … Somehow I’ve only recently noticed that this is a preoccupation that runs through different areas of my research, but I need to think more about how such elements are incorporated as well. About: Лесков, Николай Семёнович.

Никола́й Семёнович Леско́в (4 [16] февраля 1831, село Горохово, Орловская губерния — 21 февраля [5 марта] 1895, Санкт- Петербург) — русский писатель, публицист, литературный критик. Долгое время публиковался под псевдонимом Стебни́ цкий. В отличие от других крупных русских писателей своего времени, не принадлежал к столбовому дворянству; в сфере его интересов находились иные сословия. В лесковской прозе отразились традиции как духовенства (житийные мотивы, церковная книжность), так и мещанства (авантюрные сюжеты, лубочная культура). Часто работая в технике сказа, придавал большое значение нюансам интонации, установке на непридуманность рассказанного, избегал простановки однозначных оценок. В своих произведениях создал обширную галерею праведников из народа. Склонность Лескова к неожиданным р. Nikolai Leskov : biography. In 1870 Leskov published the novel At Daggers Drawn , another attack aimed at the nihilist movement which, as the author saw it, was quickly merging with the Russian criminal community. Leskov’s "political" novels (according to Mirsky) were not among his masterpieces, but they were enough to turn him into "a bogey figure for all the radicals in literature and made it impossible for any of the influential critics to treat him with even a modicum of objectivity". Later Leskov referred 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.The Works of N.S. Leskov in 11 volumes. Khudozhestvennaya Literatura Publishers. . 1956-1958. Vol 10, P. 433 Some of his colleagues (Dostoyevsky 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. The short novel Laughter and Grief ( Sovremennaya letopis , March–May, 1871), a strong social critique focusing on the fantastic disorganization and incivility of Russian life and commenting on the sufferings of individuals in a repressive society proved to be his last; from then on Leskov avoided the genre of the orthodox novel. In November 1872, though, he adapted ’s Toilers of the Sea for children. Five years later Jozef Ignacy Kraszewski’s The Favourites of King August came out, translated from the Polish and edited by Leskov. The Cathedral Clergy ( Soboryane ), published in 1872, is a compilation of stories and sketches which form an intricate tapestry of thinly drawn plotlines. It was seen as a turning point in the author’s career; a departure from political negativism. According to Maxim Gorky, after Daggers , his "evil novel", Leskov’s "craft became more of a literary icon-painting: he began to create a gallery of saints for the Russian iconostases". 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. Soboryane , published by Russky vestnik 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. In the summer of 1872 Leskov travelled to Karelia and visited the Valaam monastery in Lake Ladoga; the result of this trip was his Monastic Isles cycle of essays published in Russky mir in 1873. In October 1872 another collection, Small Belle-lettres Works by Leskov-Stebnitsky came out. These were the months of his short-lived friendship with Aleksey Pisemsky; Leskov greatly praised his novel In the Vortex and in August 1872 visited Pisemsky in Moscow.