Chat with Mikhail Leskov

Short Story Writer and Novelist

About Mikhail Leskov

In the winter of 1863, while traveling through the Volga provinces to gather material for what would become 'The Enchanted Wanderer', Mikhail Leskov spent three weeks living in a remote monastic skete, sleeping on straw, copying liturgical texts by candlelight, and listening to illiterate monks recount tales that blurred the line between miracle and madness. That immersion forged his signature style: prose that mimics oral storytelling, with digressions, repetitions, and deliberate grammatical roughness meant to echo peasant speech, not as caricature, but as ethical vessel. He refused Tolstoyan moralizing and Dostoevskian psychology alike, instead locating virtue in stubborn, uncelebrated acts: a deacon who shelters runaway serfs despite excommunication, a nurse who tends cholera victims while her own children starve. His characters rarely change; they endure, witness, or quietly subvert. Leskov’s legacy isn’t in grand novels but in the granular fidelity of his folk idiom, the way he made Russian orthography creak and sigh like an old barn door.

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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Mikhail Leskov:

  • “How did your time with the Optina elders shape 'The Enchanted Wanderer'?”
  • “Why did you insist on using Church Slavonic spellings in secular stories?”
  • “What real-life priest inspired Father Fyodor in 'Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk'?”
  • “Did the censorship board ever confuse your irony for sincerity?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Why did Leskov call himself a 'journalist-novelist' rather than a 'writer'?
He saw fiction as investigative reporting rooted in lived observation, not imagination. After years as a provincial correspondent for 'Russkaya Rech', he believed every story required archival research, interviews with peasants and clergy, and field notes from monasteries and bazaars. His notebooks contain transcriptions of folk proverbs, sketches of iconostases, and lists of banned books circulating in rural seminaries, tools he treated with the same rigor as a court reporter.
What was the 'Kiev Censorship Affair' of 1874, and how did it affect Leskov's work?
Leskov submitted 'The Sealed Angel' to Kiev censors, who demanded removal of all references to Orthodox ritual errors, then banned the story outright when he refused to alter liturgical details. The incident exposed systemic ignorance among imperial censors about church practice and led Leskov to publish subsequent works through St. Petersburg journals with sympathetic editors, often under pseudonyms like 'N. S. Leskov' to bypass regional bans.
How did Leskov's view of 'sobornost' differ from Khomyakov's or Dostoevsky's?
While Khomyakov framed sobornost as theological unity and Dostoevsky as mystical collectivism, Leskov grounded it in craft and silence: the shared labor of icon painters, bell-ringers, or manuscript copiers whose devotion manifested not in doctrine but in precise, repeated action. He depicted sobornost breaking down when hierarchy replaced collaboration, like when a bishop replaces village chanters with imported Italian singers, erasing local tonal memory.
Which of your stories was most misunderstood by contemporaries, and why?
'The Left-Hander' was widely read as patriotic satire, but its core is a lament for epistemological rupture: the English engineers measure the flea’s armor in microns while the Tula craftsmen perceive its soul through prayer and patience. Critics missed Leskov’s point, that precision without reverence produces hollow mastery. Even today, scholars debate whether the final scene (the flea’s armor dissolving in rain) signifies divine judgment or the inevitable decay of artisanal knowledge under industrial time.
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Topics

folk talesmoralityshort stories

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