Scott’s Protestantism, sexual puritanism and practical British temperament, which survived his almost total assimilation of the Russian language and Russian social manners, made a profound impression on his nephew during the many visits his family paid to the Scott residence in Penza. The second was Leskov’s maternal grandmother, Akilina Vasilevna Alferyeva, a devout Orthodox believer who often took her grandson with her on her rounds of the local ‘hermitages’, or monasteries, which were a feature of the wooded Oryol countryside. The magic of these country travels is invoked particularly vividly by Leskov in his tale Musk-Ox, which is included in the present volume.

During his educational sojourn in the Strakhov household, Leskov began to sense that his presence was not an altogether welcome one; in particular, he felt that he had incurred the displeasure of his aunt by being more gifted than his cousins. A humiliating episode, in which he was made to receive a ‘scroll of honour’ which turned out to be a rolled-up advertisement for rheumatism ointment, brought his stay with the Strakhovs to an end. Thereafter he was sent to attend classes at the Oryol gymnasium (or ‘grammar school’), but failed to complete the course there. From the age of fifteen onwards, what education he had was largely self-obtained. In the years to come, Leskov bitterly regretted his lack of application in his formal studies, even going so far as to claim that external events had been responsible for his lack of success. In A Note About Myself, published five years before his death, he ascribed his failure to complete the gymnasium to being ‘left fatherless in my sixteenth year and entirely helpless. The insignificant amount of property my father left behind was destroyed in a fire. This was the time of the famous Oryol fires. This put an end to the proper continuation of my studies. After that I was an autodidact.’ In fact, however, Leskov’s father did not die until 1848, two years after his son had stopped attending the gymnasium, and the Great Fire of Oryol likewise happened in 1848; an additional fact is that the Leskov family possessed no property in Oryol – they had sold their house there before their move to Panino in 1839.

Leskov’s American biographer, Hugh McLean, has offered the following instructive commentary on the nature of Leskov’s education, and the effect it had on his writing:

Later Leskov more than made up for his lack of schooling, and few people suspected that he had no university degree. His general culture was broad, and his detailed knowledge of such recondite subjects as church history was such that he would have been qualified to teach them in a university. Like many autodidacts, however, he tended to educate himself in pockets, acquiring specialized information on a great variety of subjects, many of them out of the way from the point of view of his more conventional contemporaries – icons, Old Believers, Jewish rituals, Protestant theology and ethics, jewelry, clocks, rare editions, even spiritualism – in fact, the range of his competences is astonishing. And it is not even that he lacked general knowledge for these specialities to rest upon; what he missed was the confidence in dealing with cultural matters usually exhibited by people with university degrees.

This lack of confidence may help to account for some of Leskov’s peculiarities as a writer. Feeling somewhat out of depth in the mainstream of nineteenth-century European literature, he tried to find some lesser streams, a bit shallower perhaps, where his feet could touch bottom. He knew that there were areas of Russian life with which he was better acquainted than Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky – for instance, the world of the Russian clergy; and after some unhappy early attempts, he learned to avoid their patented genre, the novel. Instead, he became a master of all sorts of other forms – short story, novella, reminiscence, ‘chronicle’, ‘pot-pourri’, ‘story à propos’, ‘picture from nature’ – and he developed a particular fondness for the spoken inner narrative, or skaz, in which he could exhibit and exploit his ultra-Russian Russian, a Russian no one could learn in a university. Perhaps part of the explanation for the samobytnost, the peculiar ‘self-nature’ that Tolstoy perceived in Leskov, stemmed from his fateful abandonment of the Oryol gymnasium at the age of fifteen.ii

Leskov was slow to begin his literary career. During his eight years of service as an assistant clerk in the Kiev army recruiting office, a position obtained for him by his Uncle Sergei, he read a great deal, developed emotionally and intellectually, and married Olga Vasilevna Smirnova, a Kiev merchant’s daughter. The marriage was not a happy one. In his biography of his father, Andrei Leskov writes that ‘according to the unanimous consensus of the members of our family, [Olga Vasilevna] possessed neither brains, beauty, heart nor self-control … she represented an abundance of unredeemed “not’s”. Given the fact that Leskov’s gifts did not include gentleness or an easy disposition, success could not have been expected. And it was not forthcoming …’iii In 1857, Leskov moved with his family to Penza, in north-eastern Russia, to work as a commercial agent for the firm of his uncle, Alexander Scott. During his term of employment, he travelled the length and breadth of European Russia – ‘from the White Sea to the Black and from Brody to Krasny Yar’, was how he put it later in a letter to a friend. The precise nature of the business Leskov did in the course of his three years ‘on Scott’s barges’ remains unclear, though it is certain that at one point he was assigned to accompany a river transport of peasant serfs who were being taken from their homes in Oryol and Kursk to be resettled in south-eastern Russia. This ‘barge’ life gave him a deep insight into the psychology of the common people and an intimate acquaintance with the byways of the Russian countryside. At another period he worked as his uncle’s general factotum, supervising the running of an estate in the Penza area on which the principal activities were the milling of grain and the distilling of vodka.

Eventually, however, Scott’s firm ran into financial difficulties and, much to his chagrin, for he had enjoyed these years of travel very much, Leskov had to consider a return to government service. It was not until 1860, after he stopped working for Scott and before he briefly resumed his Kiev government office work, that Leskov tried his hand at writing for publication. He began as a journalist.