Volume 25, Number 6 · April 20, 1978
Two Cheers for Leskov
By Leonard Schapiro
Nicolai Leskov: The Man and His Art
by Hugh McLean
Harvard University Press, 780 pp., $30.00
Nikolai Semenovich Leskov (1831-1895), somewhat younger than Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Goncharov and a contemporary of Tolstoy, was a minor star in the brilliant constellation of the writers of fiction in nineteenth-century Russia. He published over a hundred stories, as well as several novels and collections of sketches. He won little fame in his lifetime—he confronts us, wrote Chekhov, with a 'mixture of virtue, piety, and fornication.' Countess Tolstoy, who detested him, recorded, after reading one of his stories to her husband, that 'his filthy soul shows through his supposed humor,' and even the great novelist himself criticized Leskov as 'untruthful.'
Review, 3012 words
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