In his will, Leskov wrote: “I know there was much bad in me; I deserve no praise and no pity. As for those who want to blame me, they should know that I have already done so myself.” But it is impossible to fulfill such wishes when it is a question of such a remarkable man. Therefore I will conform myself to the spirit rather than the letter of this will, and allow myself to express in a few words what I think of the person of the dead man and of his work.
What was striking above all in Nikolai Semyonovich was his passionate nature; at an advanced age, and though seemingly inactive, he was still prey to a constant seething of the soul. He needed a quite uncommon spiritual force to keep his ardent character within bounds. Besides, in his works one felt a passionate and restless attitude towards the things he described, which, if his talent had been less, might have turned into an obvious partiality. But in Leskov, as in every great writer, that passion is tempered and betrays itself only secretly, though here and there in his writings there still remains some trace of ideological engagement …
It is likely that Leskov’s compositions will elicit critical judgments as serious as they are profound; and then, despite what is written in his will, the late writer will become the object of much praise and much blame. But they will all certainly acknowledge in him the brilliance and extraordinary originality of a talent that never remained buried, like the keen yearning for the truth that ruled his being and his work.
II
In 1889–90 the first collected edition of Leskov’s works was published in ten volumes, seen through the press by the author himself. An eleventh volume was added in 1893, and a twelfth in 1896, posthumous but prepared by Leskov. This edition was reprinted twice, with the addition of an interesting, somewhat hagiographic preface by Rostislav Sementkovsky. In 1902–03 a thirty-six-volume Complete Collected Works (also not complete) was published and became the standard edition. Twenty years later the formalist critic Boris Eikhenbaum (1886–1959) finally accorded Leskov his rightful place in Russian literature, looking at his writing in itself rather than in its ideological context, and showing that the attempt to set his work beside that of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev was mistaken, because he equaled them not by resembling them, but by being totally unlike them. In a tribute published in 1945, on the fiftieth anniversary of Leskov’s death, Eikhenbaum wrote:
Without him our literature of the nineteenth century would have been incomplete, first and foremost because it would not have captured to an adequate degree the depths of Russia with its “enchanted wanderers,” it would not have revealed with sufficient fullness the souls and fates of the Russian people with their daring, their scope, their passions and misfortunes … Neither Turgenev, nor Tolstoy, nor Dostoevsky could have accomplished this as Leskov did.‖
Here Eikhenbaum was looking back at Leskov in his own time. In 1924, looking at the present and the writers of the early twentieth century, in an article entitled “In Search of a Genre,” Eikhenbaum wrote: “The influence of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky has been replaced in an unexpected way by the influence of Leskov, as much in stylistic tendency as in that of genre.” By way of example, he cites the “memoirs and autobiographical stories” of Maxim Gorky, who declared himself Leskov’s disciple, then the major figures of the new Russian prose—Alexei Remizov, Andrei Bely, Evgeny Zamyatin, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Boris Pilnyak, Isaac Babel, and others. (Incidentally, in 1926 Evgeny Zamyatin made a stage version of what may be Leskov’s most famous story, “Lefty,” entitling it “The Flea.”) Their work showed the influence of Leskov’s art in two seemingly contradictory things: an “ornamentalism” of style, giving value to words, wordplay, puns, popular etymology; and a return to the primitive sources of storytelling, to speech, the voice of the storyteller, the act of telling. “We often forget,” Eikhenbaum wrote, “that the word in itself has nothing to do with the printed letter, that it is a living, moving activity, formed by the voice, articulation, intonation, joined with gestures and mimicry.”
Tolstoy once remarked cryptically, “Leskov is a writer for the future, and his life in literature is profoundly instructive.” Eikhenbaum shows that Leskov’s storytelling was indeed not a return to the past, a nostalgic imitation of old ways, but a new joining of past and future, a synthesis and interpenetration of old and new. In his preface to the critical anthology Russian Prose (1926), he refers to this fusion of archaism and innovation as “the dynamic of traditions”: “We must become aware of the historical dynamic of traditions. We have forgotten far too many things and have blindly accepted far too many things. We have need of culture.”
This third discovery of Leskov, by the modernist writers and then by the new criticism, also reached beyond the borders of Russia. We feel the same sense of excitement in Walter Benjamin’s well-known essay, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” published in 1936, and in the fine chapter on Leskov in D. S. Mirsky’s History of Russian Literature, written in English and first published in 1926, the same year as Russian Prose. Mirsky ends with an admonition to his readers:
The Anglo-Saxon public have made up their mind as to what they want from a Russian writer, and Leskov does not fit in to this idea. But those who really want to know more about Russia must sooner or later recognize that Russia is not all contained in Dostoevsky and Chekhov, and that if you want to know a thing, you must first be free of prejudice and on your guard against hasty generalizations. Then they will perhaps come nearer to Leskov, who is generally recognized by Russians as the most Russian of Russian writers and the one who had the deepest and widest knowledge of the Russian people as it actually is.a
It is true that we meet people, see places, and witness events in Leskov’s work that we do not find anywhere else in Russian literature. It is also true that, fantastic as they may often seem, they are almost always grounded in reality. In an open letter to his friend P. K. Shchebalsky, editor of the Warsaw Journal, dated December 10, 1884, Leskov wrote:
In the articles in your newspaper it is said that I have mainly copied living persons and recounted actual incidents. Whoever the author of those articles is—he is perfectly right. I have a gift for observation and perhaps a certain aptitude for analyzing feelings and motives, but I have little fantasy. I invent painfully and with difficulty, and therefore I have always needed living persons whose spiritual content interested me. They would take possession of me, and I would try to incarnate them in stories, which I also quite often based on real events.
In 1862, during his stay in Paris, away from the troubles that had overwhelmed him in Petersburg, Leskov wrote “The Musk-ox.” He dated it very precisely on the final page: “Paris, November 28, 1862,” as if he were marking an important moment in his life. In it for the first time he found his way as an artist; that is, he found his own manner of constructing and narrating a story, “perching it,” as Hugh McLean has written, “neither solidly in the realm of reality nor in that of fiction, even realistic fiction, but in the no-man’s-land between them.”b The story portrays people from Leskov’s own past (his maternal grandmother appears here for the first time and under her real name; the hero is modeled on a school friend from Orel); it includes seemingly irrelevant digressions, and is told in the first person by a narrator who may or may not be the author.