Leskov wrote other important stories during the sixties, among them his first real masterpiece, “The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” which in its single focus and sustained objectivity is unique among his works. But he gave most of his time to writing three long and more conventional novels, No Way Out (1864), The Bypassed (1865), and At Daggers Drawn (1870–71). All three were anti-nihilist and entered into the polemics that had begun with the editorial of 1862, so that while they are by far the longest of Leskov’s works, they are also the most limited—“hasty, journalistic jobs,” as he acknowledged later. Leskov’s genius was not suited to the genre of the novel and he knew it, or he came to know it after At Daggers Drawn. While he was writing this last novel, he was already at work on something very different, a “novelistic chronicle,” as he first called it, entitled Cathedral Folk, which was published in 1872. After Cathedral Folk, Leskov went on steadily producing works in his own genre, or genres, for the rest of his life.
The form of the chronicle appealed to Leskov because of its freedom from the artificial restrictions of plot, its seemingly unselective inclusiveness, its way of unrolling like a ribbon or a scroll. In a letter to the philologist and art historian Fyodor Buslaev, on June 1, 1877, he spoke of this “expanded view of the memoir form as a fictional work of art. To tell the truth, this form seems very convenient to me: it is more alive, or, better, more earnest than depicting scenes, in the grouping of which, even in such great masters as Walter Scott, the forcing is obvious—which is what simple people mean when they say, ‘It happened just like in a novel.’ ”
The free form of the chronicle allowed Leskov to bring all sorts of materials into Cathedral Folk, including the notes of one of the book’s heroes, the elderly archpriest Father Savely Tuberozov, written in his own churchly, slightly old-fashioned, but forceful style. In one passage, Father Savely “involuntarily” recalls reading The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, by “the very witty pastor Sterne,” and jots down his conclusion that, “as our patented nihilism is coming to an end among us, Shandyism is now beginning …” (“Shandyism,” as Sterne himself defined it, is “the incapacity for fixing the mind on a serious object for two minutes together.”) Laurence Sterne was one of Leskov’s favorite writers, and the narrative form of many of his works besides Cathedral Folk is indebted to Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey. At the end of his life, discussing his last story in a letter to Stasyulevich (January 8, 1895), he says: “I’ve written this piece in a whimsical manner, like the narrations of Hoffmann and Sterne, with digressions and ricochets.”
The form of the journey as a narrative structure is embodied most fully in “The Enchanted Wanderer,” which Leskov began in 1872, after journeying himself around Lake Ladoga, an area of ancient monasteries, fishing villages, and isolated peasant communities north of Petersburg. The full title in its first magazine publication in 1873 was “The Enchanted Wanderer: His Life, Experiences, Opinions, and Adventures,” which clearly echoes the titles of works in the picaresque tradition, but in its “opinions” also gives a nod to Tristram Shandy. Here again Leskov chose a loose, accumulative form of storytelling, looped together by the “enchantment” that leads his hero in his wanderings from one chance encounter to another and one part of Russia to another, until it finally brings him to the place he was intended for by his mother’s prayers before he was born. The story is told by the hero himself in response to questions from his fellow passengers as they sail across Lake Ladoga to the monastery of Valaam.
Leskov made use of various other forms of storytelling, giving them names like memoir, potpourri, paysage and genre, rhapsody, sketch, stories apropos (“I very much like this form of story about what ‘was,’ recounted ‘apropos,’ ” he once wrote to Leo Tolstoy), and sometimes subtitling them “a story told on a grave,” “a Moscow family secret,” “a fantastic story,” “a spiritualistic occurrence.” Later in life, when he allied himself with Tolstoy, he wrote fables for publication by the Tolstoyan popular press, The Mediator, and he also wrote a series of legends set in the ancient Near East, Egypt, Byzantium, in early Christian times. He wrote a number of Christmas stories, and also a series of what he called “stories of righteous men,” several of which are included in this collection (“Singlemind,” “Deathless Golovan,” “The Spook,” “The Man on Watch,” “The Enchanted Wanderer,” “Lefty”). Leskov considered these last the most important part of his work. “The real strength of my talent lies in the positive types,” he boasted in a letter to a friend. “Show me such an abundance of positive Russian types in another writer.”c As Walter Benjamin says in “The Storyteller”: “The righteous man is the advocate for created things and at the same time he is their highest embodiment.”
All of these forms are based essentially on the anecdote, which serious critics tend to scorn. Mirsky enthusiastically defends Leskov’s practice:
His stories are mere anecdotes, told with enormous zest and ability, and even in his longer works his favorite way of characterizing his characters is by a series of anecdotes. This was quite contrary to the traditions of “serious” Russian fiction and induced the critics to regard Leskov as a mere jester. His most original stories are packed with incident and adventure to an extent that appeared ludicrous to the critics, who regarded ideas and messages as the principal thing.
Boris Eikhenbaum, in his essay “An ‘Excessive’ Writer,” published in 1931 in honor of Leskov’s hundredth birthday, says: “the anecdote … can be considered a sort of atom in Leskov’s work. Its presence and action are felt everywhere.” The anecdote is the most elementary form of story, told for its own sake or apropos of some more general topic of discussion in a group of friends, at a Christmas party, or among travelers stranded at an inn during a blizzard.
This last is the occasion for the telling of “The Sealed Angel,” a fine example of Leskov’s composition at its most complex. The story is held together by the event of the title, the official “sealing” of an old icon, but it includes much else besides. The storyteller, who is also the central character, is an orphaned peasant who has worked all his life as a stonemason; the action, as I have already mentioned, involves the construction of the Nikolaevsky suspension bridge in Kiev, which Leskov witnessed in the early 1850s. The masons who build the bridge belong to the Old Believers, a group that separated from the official Russian Orthodox Church in 1666, in protest against the reforms of the patriarch Nikon. The Old Believers were anathematized by the Church and deprived of civil rights; they were often persecuted and tended to live in the more remote parts of the empire. They had their own ways of speaking, which had fascinated Leskov since his youth in Kiev, and which he captures in his narrator’s voice. In 1863, soon after his return to Petersburg from Paris, Leskov was sent on an official mission to inspect the schools of the Old Believers in Riga, an experience that deepened his knowledge of and sympathy for their condition. The masons he portrays in “The Sealed Angel” are very devout, but have no priests or sacraments; their piety is centered on their collection of old icons, the most beautiful of which is the angel of the title. Leskov himself had become interested in icon painting, and particularly in the icons of the Old Believers, in the later 1860s. At around that time he made the acquaintance of an icon painter and restorer by the name of Nikita Sevastianovich Racheiskov, who was an Old Believer himself and lived in a shabby quarter of Petersburg inhabited mainly by Old Believers. Leskov visited him often, and in a tribute to him written after Racheiskov’s death in 1886, he claimed that “The Sealed Angel” had been “composed entirely in Nikita’s hot and stuffy workroom.”d The icon painter who comes to help the masons in the story is named Sevastian, from Racheiskov’s patronymic; he has enormous hands like Racheiskov’s, and yet, like Racheiskov, he sometimes paints with brushes made of only three or four hairs. Much of the discourse on icon painting that plays so important a part in the story was noted down by Leskov from his talks with the master.