His first attempts in the field were two articles – one in a specialist economics journal and the other in the St Petersburg News – complaining about the overpricing in a Kiev bookshop of the recently authorized Russian translation of the Gospels (previously only the Slavonic version had been allowed). These were followed by five articles for the journal Contemporary Medicine, covering such topics as the inferior design of hospitals and other public buildings in Russia, the poor quality of Russian physicians, and the prevalence of slum conditions in urban working-class districts. The articles are lively and well written; they display a Protestant humanitarianism of approach, and they fitted in well with the prevailing liberal mood among the St Petersburg intelligentsia. Spurred on by the favourable reception of his work, Leskov decided to escape from the intolerable burden of his married life – his wife’s behaviour was becoming more and more difficult, and she was eventually, but not until much later, declared insane – and seek employment as a journalist in St Petersburg, where he was helped by the editor of the economics journal in which he had begun his career. During the next year he launched himself upon a whole series of articles in various journals, and was soon involved in the thick of St Petersburg politics.

One of the first things Leskov had to do once he began to take part in the literary political debates which raged in the Russian capital was to define his stance vis-à-vis the divide between liberals and radicals which existed in the early 1860s. In 1861, with the emancipation of the serfs an accomplished fact, dissension had arisen between those members of the intelligentsia who were by and large satisfied with the changed order of society, and those who regarded any reform of what they regarded as a corrupt tyranny as a futile gesture, recommending instead the violent overthrow of the existing order. Although Leskov started out with some sympathy for the revolutionary, nihilist position, he very soon found himself overtaken by events, and arrived at a position where his mind was practically made up for him.

In St Petersburg, Leskov had quite a number of friends among the ‘neterpelivtsy’, the impatient radicals who wished to transform Russian society at a single stroke by calling for a peasant uprising. These included the brothers Nikolai and Vasily Kurochkin, Pavel Yakushkin (the model for ‘Musk-Ox’), the historian Platon Pavlov, and Nikolai Serno-Solovevich, a disciple of Herzen. In the spring of 1862, Leskov joined these and other leading St Petersburg radicals in taking control of a weekly magazine, The Age, which soon, however, ran into editorial squabbles and financial difficulties, and ceased publication. Another of Leskov’s radical contacts in St Petersburg, a man with whom he was initially on very good terms, was a Ukrainian government official named Andrei Nichiporenko. Nichiporenko made a pilgrimage to Herzen’s revolutionary headquarters in London, and in 1862 was sent by Herzen and Bakunin as a courier to Garibaldi. At the Austrian frontier he was searched, and the police discovered on his person a large file of revolutionary correspondence, of which they supplied copies to the Russian authorities. Nichiporenko was returned to St Petersburg and imprisoned in the fortress, where he informed on his radical colleagues. In the following year, he died. As a result of his informing, Leskov found himself summoned to give testimony. Although no charges were brought against him, he never forgave Nichiporenko for this betrayal.

Towards the end of 1861 Leskov found himself without a journal in which to publish his articles, having quarrelled with the editors of those in which he had previously been welcome. At this time a group of liberal intellectuals was taking control of a major daily newspaper, The Northern Bee, and Leskov joined them. The Bee’s political stance was somewhere midway between the liberal and radical positions, and it criticized the Right for being too reactionary and the Left for being negative and nihilistic. One of Leskov’s associates on the newspaper was the cosmopolitan socialist Artur Benni. Benni had arrived in St Petersburg from London in the summer of 1861, having given up a well-paid position at the Woolwich Arsenal in order to come to Russia and work for the socialist cause. Benni was of very mixed background, being of Italian, Scottish, Polish, German and Jewish descent. (In 1871 Leskov published a lengthy and fascinating study of Benni’s biography in An Enigmatic Man.) Benni was a naturalized British subject, an adherent of the Protestant faith, and was suspected in radical circles of being an agent of the ‘Third Department’, the Russian secret police.

During the afternoon of 28 May 1862, a fire destroyed the Apraksin and Shchukin markets in St Petersburg, and arson was suspected – a few days earlier, a group of revolutionary students had gone round the city distributing an extremist proclamation calling for the bloody overthrow of the Tsar. Such was the wrath of the St Petersburg citizenry in the aftermath of the fire that anyone identifiable as a university student was liable to be assaulted – as many were. Leskov decided to use his editorial capacity on The Northern Bee to defend the bulk of the students against the accusations that were being made against them; in an editorial he called on the police to name the persons they considered responsible for starting the fire, thus placing the blame where it belonged. This was interpreted, not only by the radicals, but also by many liberals, as tantamount to saying that the revolutionaries were, in fact, the culprits, and as an attempt to split the student body. Matters were further aggravated when a ‘deputation of the younger generation’ turned up in the Bee’s editorial offices, under the impression that Benni was the newspaper’s editor. The deputation demanded that Benni announce to the paper’s staff that Leskov’s accusation of arson would not go unpunished. Leskov began to receive threatening letters. In the end, Benni tried to put matters right by organizing volunteer fire brigades drawn from the ranks of the students (to counter their ‘arsonist’ image) – but this came to nothing, and merely provoked the mockery of the radicals. Leskov and Benni were now in public disgrace: in the eyes of ‘progressive’ opinion they had committed the ultimate act of betrayal – they had behaved as stool pigeons.

The Bee never managed to clear its name, and in the mind of the Russian intelligentsia Leskov was forever afterwards associated with the ‘betrayers of the revolution’.