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Birth of Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov, Russian Writer, Publicist, Literary Critic
Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov was born on February 4 (16), 1831 in the village of Gorokhovo, Oryol Governorate (now the village of Staroye Gorokhovo, Sverdlovsk District, Oryol Region). His father was Semyon Dmitrievich Leskov (1789-1848), a native of the spiritual environment, assessor of the Oryol Criminal Chamber; mother – Yelizaveta Petrovna Leskova (nee Alferyeva) (1813-1886), hereditary noblewoman, daughter of an impoverished Moscow nobleman.
Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov spent his childhood in Oryol Governorate. In 1841-1846, he studied at the Oryol Provincial Gymnasium, which he did not graduate from. In June 1847, he entered the service of the Oryol Criminal Court Office. In July 1848, when Nikolai Leskov was 16 years old, his father died of cholera. In 1850, he moved to Kiev to his uncle S. P. Alferyev, and held various positions in the Kiev Treasury Chamber until 1857. During this period, he also attended lectures at the St. Vladimir Imperial University, participated in religious and philosophical student circles, studied iconography. In 1857, Nikolai Leskov joined the commercial company of his aunt’s husband, Englishman A. Y. Scott, and traveled almost the entire European part of Russia on company business.
The beginning of Nikolai Semyonovich’s literary activity dates back to 1859-1860, when he began to collaborate with St. Petersburg newspapers and magazines (Sankt-Peterburgskye Vedomosti, Otechestvennye Zapiski, Russkaya Retch, Severnaya Pchela) publishing articles of a liberal orientation about abuses and social vices in modern Russia. In 1861, he moved to St. Petersburg. From 1862, Nikolai Leskov was a permanent employee of the liberal newspaper Severnaya Pchela. In his journalism, he was an adherent of gradual, evolutionary changes, criticizing the revolutionary ideas of the writers of the Sovremennik magazine and considering the anti-government sentiments of the radical democratic intelligentsia harmful to society. In 1864, under the pseudonym of M. Stebnitsky published the novel No Way Out, in which he satirically depicted the leaders of nihilistic circles, basing them on the real images of writers of the radical democratic direction V. A. Sleptsov and A. I. Levitov. The novel caused a scandal, and Leskov was accused of executing a direct order of the police department.
Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov’s first experience of publishing fiction prose dates back to 1862. These are the stories The Extinguished Case (in the revised edition – Drought), The Robber and In the Tarantas, which were based on the scenes from folk life. Already in the first works of Nikolai Leskov, the features that were characteristic of subsequent creativity were identified: documentalism (the stories told are presented as real events) and the objectivity of the narrative (the absence of author’s moral assessments), which referred Leskov’s works to the genre of the so-called variegated democratic literature of the 1860s.
Arguing with democratic writers such as N. V. Uspensky, A. I. Levitov, P. I. Yakushkin, and others, Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov accused them of ignorance of people’s life and misunderstanding of a common Russian man. The inconsistency of the people’s soul, the combination of kindness and evil, righteousness and sinfulness in the character of a Russian man, the incomprehensibility of the behavior of a simple person from the point of view of reason were the main themes of Nikolai Leskov's art throughout his life. The works that brought Leskov literary fame include the short story Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1865), the novels The Cathedral Folk (1872), A Decayed Family (1874), the stories The Enchanted Wanderer (1873), The Sealed Angel (1873), Lefty (1881), etc.
Since the mid-1880s, Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov became close to Leo Tolstoy (who called Leskov “the most Russian of our writers”), spoke sharply about the Orthodox Church, criticized modern public institutions, norms and values. The stories and novellas of this period were of a sharp satirical nature and hardly passed censorship (the stories Winter Day (1894), Hare Remise (1894, published in 1917), etc.).
Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov died on February 21 (March 5), 1895 in St. Petersburg. He was buried at the Volkovo Cemetery.
The creativity of Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov, his style discoveries, his skillful storytelling technique anticipated numerous experiments in Russian literature of the 20th century, such as the works of A. M. Remizov, Y. I. Zamyatin, I. E. Babel, early L. M. Leonov, Ilf and Petrov, M. M. Zoshchenko, etc.
Lit.: Кучерская М. Лесков: Прозёванный гений. М., 2021; Лесков А. Н. Жизнь Николая Лескова. По его личным, семейным и несемейным записям и памятям: В 2 т. М., 1984; Н. С. Лесков: библиографический указатель, 1996–2006. Петрозаводск, 2006; Ранчин А. М. Лесков Николай Семёнович // Большая российская энциклопедия.
Based on the Presidential Library’s materials: