Background
He was born in Orel Province, Russia in 1831. Leskov's ancestors on his father's side were all clergymen in the village of Leska in Oryol Gubernia, hence the name Leskov.
(The story of a passionate young woman who escapes her sti...)
The story of a passionate young woman who escapes her stifling marriage through adultery and murder, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is now the basis for an acclaimed new film starring Florence Pugh Nikolai Leskov is one of the most unique voices of nineteenth-century Russia, with a fascination for idiosyncratic characters, lurid crimes, comic absurdity, spirituality and the joy of pure story. This volume contains five of his greatest short tales, including the matchless masterpiece Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Translated with an introduction by David McDuff
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He was born in Orel Province, Russia in 1831. Leskov's ancestors on his father's side were all clergymen in the village of Leska in Oryol Gubernia, hence the name Leskov.
He has been called the most Russian of writers; but his intellectual formation owed much to non-Russian influences - notably to Ukrainian culture, with which he became acquainted during eight years of residence as a young man in Kiev, and to the English culture that he absorbed through years of close association with his uncle by marriage, Alexander Scott.
In St. Petersburg, where he lived from 1861 until his death, he cultivated the role of the provincial and outsider in Russian literature and constantly went against the main currents of St. Petersburg literary fashions. Leskov's literary production is so varied that it is hard to single out even half a dozen works which can satisfactorily illustrate its range. His lifelong interest in religion is illustrated in Soboryane (1872; The Cathedral Folk), Zapechatlenny ángelangel (1873; "The Sealed Angel"), and Na krayu sveta (1875; "At the End of the Earth"). Levsha (1881; "'The Steel Flea") is the most famous example of his comic, exuberant, almost untranslatable language. In contrast, "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District" is a stark account of illicit passion and murder, unlike anything else Leskov ever wrote. Ocharovanny strannik (1873; The Enchanted Pilgrim) is a Russian picaresque novel, in which the principal character is, however, less a rogue himself than a victim of rogues. NesmertelnyGolovan (1880; "Deathless Golovan") presents one of Leskóv'sLeskov's long series of comic heroes against a colorful background of Russian provincial life. Polunoshchniki (1891; "Night Owls") is a defense of Tolstoyism which sums up all the essentials of sLeskov's storytelling genius: his folktale manner, in which he uses a character as narrator, his verbal virtuosity and humor, and his skill in getting his meaning past the Russian censor. His last masterpiece, Zayachi remiz (1894; The March Hare), is a prophetic attack on political witch-hunting.
(The story of a passionate young woman who escapes her sti...)
Leskov's Christianity, like that of Tolstoy, was anti-clerical, undenominational and purely ethical.
Leskov neither believed in the possibility of an agrarian revolution in Russia, nor wanted it to happen, seeing education and enlightenment, often of religious nature, as the factors for social improvement,
A profound analysis of Russia through its language was for him a major aim.
Quotes from others about the person
Gorky saw Leskov as a true artist whose place "beside masters like L. Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgenev and Goncharov is well-deserved".
On 6 April 1853, Leskov married Olga Vasilyevna Smirnova (1831–1909), the daughter of an affluent Kiev trader. Leskov's marriage was an unhappy one; his wife suffered from severe psychological problems and in 1878 had to be taken to the St. Nicholas Mental Hospital in Saint Petersburg. In 1865 Ekaterina Bubnova (née Savitskaya), whom he met for the first time in July 1864, became Leskov's common-law wife.