The language in which the novel – particularly those parts of it which purport to be Tuberozov’s ‘diary’ – is written is a curious blend of nineteenth-century Russian, Old Slavonicisms and ecclesiastical jargon, and is extremely difficult to translate adequately into another tongue.

The same may be said of the linguistic texture of The Sealed Angel (1873), another literary work by Leskov which deals with ecclesiastical themes and problems, but treats a secular subject – the building of the first suspension bridge across the River Dnieper at Kiev, and the part played in it by a colony of Old Believers. In Musk-Ox, Leskov had given a negative portrayal of the Old Believers (the outlawed schismatics who did not accept the liturgical reforms introduced by Patriarch Nikon in the mid-seventeenth century) as being cruel and obsessed with the rigid observance of their faith. In 1863, Leskov had accepted a journalistic commission from the Tsarist Ministry of Education to investigate the secret schools of the Old Believers, who ran them illegally in defiance of the state authorities. The Tsarist government was considering a softening of its policy of persecuting the Old Believers, and Leskov was sent to Riga and Pskov to compile a first-hand report on the schools there. In his report, Leskov had pleaded for tolerance, claiming that the schism could only be overcome through education. In Waiting for the Moving of the Water, he had depicted a mass voluntary conversion of Old Believers to Orthodoxy, and throughout his life he was to return to the subject of their persecution. The plot of The Sealed Angel, which contains another, similar conversion, represents what is probably his most inspired treatment of the theme, and forms the basis of one of his finest and most gripping tales. As for the conversion itself, Leskov was criticized for this ending to the tale; at the time, many readers (including Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who reviewed the work in his Diary of a Writer for 1873) found that it lacked credibility. Yet read today, outside the context of nineteenth-century Russian religious and secular politics, the Old Believers’ conversion to Orthodoxy has an undeniable rightness about it: it is Leskov’s way of showing how the ‘angel’, ‘the angel in men’s hearts’ may be revealed, in opposition to the ‘aggel’, or ‘demon’ which holds sway over human beings for most of the time.

In addition to a dramatic and exciting plot, The Sealed Angel displays a high degree of stylistic ornamentalism. This is mostly associated with the autodidactic speciality around which the action centres – the science of icon-painting. At the time the tale appeared, the study of Russian icons, whose beauty is nowadays universally appreciated, was still in its infancy, and Leskov was in many ways ahead of his time in taking a serious interest in them for their own sake. The studies and treatises which had appeared hitherto, such as the Slavist and folklorist Fyodor Buslayev’s General Concepts of Russian Icon-Painting (1866), had viewed Russian icons almost solely as an expression of the national religious spirit; in his tale, Leskov writes of them as works of art, and demonstrates their living connection with the environment from which they spring. That he was able to do this was in no small part due to the fact that he had established a friendship with a living icon-painter, Nikita Savostianovich Racheiskov, who had a studio in St Petersburg. The ‘isographer Sevastyan’ (I have opted to preserve the old Graeco-Russian term izograf, meaning ‘icon-painter’) in The Sealed Angel derives his character and identity from Racheiskov, who lived entirely from the painting and restoration of icons. In a tribute to Racheiskov, published after the latter’s death in 1886, Leskov claimed that ‘on the publication of my Christmas story The Sealed Angel (which was entirely composed in Nikita’s hot and stuffy studio), he received many orders for icons of angels’.

The Sealed Angel was first published in The Russian Messenger, a journal edited by the conservative Russian nationalist and publicist Mikhail Nikiforovich Katkov. Katkov had already published Leskov’s long anti-radical novel, At Daggers Drawn, and during the years between 1870 and 1875, spurred on by Katkov’s encouragement and generosity, Leskov produced a large number of major literary works – in addition to the two already mentioned, they included Cathedral Folk, The Enchanted Pilgrim, A Decrepit Clan and At the Edge of the World, and constitute the heart of Leskov’s creation – nearly all of which appeared in the Messenger. Many of these works make use of the skaz, or spoken inner narrative, and their baroquely configured Russian speaks less of ‘the individual’ and his experience than it does of the mass of highly individual individuals who comprised the Russian people of Leskov’s time. It is no exaggeration to say that in Leskov’s writings we hear, as almost nowhere else apart from Gogol, the voice of Russia. This ethnocentric quality of Leskov’s art seems to have impressed even those who were in charge of Russia’s destiny: in 1873, S. E. Kushelev, a prominent statesman and general with influence at the Imperial Court, visited the author to tell him that The Sealed Angel had been read aloud to the royal family by Boleslav Markevich, and that the Empress Maria Aleksandrovna had expressed a wish to hear the tale read by Leskov himself. In her memoirs, Leskov’s granddaughter, Natalya Bakhareva, relates that her mother inherited from her husband a diamond-encrusted gold watch and a gold snuffbox which were gifts from the Empress on the occasion of his reading The Sealed Angel at court.

As a result of this favourable interest in his work by highly placed individuals, Leskov was able, in early 1874, to acquire a modest government service position in the Ministry of Education, one he held for the next ten years. It was just as well for him that he was able to obtain it; after quarrelling with Katkov, he had found himself somewhat out on a limb with regard to the literary journals on which he depended for his livelihood (it was almost impossible for an author to live on the royalties of book publication in nineteenth-century Russia, so negligible were the amounts paid). Suspected by the liberals and left of having connections with the Russian secret police, and by the right of a ‘literary’ disregard for the principles of conservative nationalism (Leskov’s quarrel with Katkov had centred on the latter’s politically tinged editing of A Decrepit Clan), he had found himself with nowhere to go. The government service position provided him and his family with at least a basis of security, though the relatively meagre salary of a thousand roubles a year was not really sufficient for them to live on to any degree of comfort. The difficulties and uncertainties of Leskov’s professional and public life at this time seem to have had their effect on his already strained unofficial marriage with Katerina Bubnova; in the spring of 1875, Leskov made an attempt to escape from his problems for a while, and set off for a second time through Europe for a visit to Paris. While there, he began to revise his attitudes towards Russian Orthodoxy. In particular, he met Louis Naville, the son of the Swiss Protestant theologian Ernest Naville: his conversations with Naville had a profound effect on him, precipitating a religious crisis, and, after a stay in Marienbad where he took the waters and mud baths, he returned to St Petersburg having exchanged his Orthodox convictions for what he termed a ‘spiritual Christianity’. This bore many similarities to the form of Christianity soon to be propounded by Leo Tolstoy.

Leskov’s first meeting with Tolstoy did not take place until 1887. In the twelve years before that time, Leskov had been steadily moving closer to Tolstoy’s ideas in life as well as art.