Indeed, in several respects Leskov may be said to have anticipated some of Tolstoy’s positions. In 1877, he had quietly separated from Katerina Bubnova, and was henceforth to strive towards an ideal of celibacy, even though this ran counter to the strongly sexual component in his nature. For decades, he had regarded Tolstoy with an almost superstitious awe; War and Peace and Anna Karenina he had experienced not merely as great works of literature, but as spiritual watersheds – they had been a part of his own inner development. By the 1880s, both writers had arrived at a final repudiation of Orthodoxy. Yet while Tolstoy had proceeded to construct his own rationalized, ‘Tolstoyan’ version of Christianity, Leskov looked back towards the Protestant faith he had encountered at first hand in his childhood in the home of Alexander Scott, where there had been no icons, oil or candles, but only a practical, living desire to serve God and man. Even so, after his meeting with Tolstoy, Leskov became for a time a zealous convert to Tolstoyanism – on occasion his zeal was so strong that the master found it embarrassing.

With the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, a period of reaction began in Russian public and social life. It was the role played by the Orthodox Church, under the head of its Holy Synod, Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev (‘victory-bearer’) – Leskov always referred to him as ‘Lampadonostsev’ (‘lamp-bearer’) – in supporting and reinforcing this reaction which finally persuaded Leskov that no good could be expected from the established Church. Before 1881, while turning increasingly towards Protestantism, he had continued to view the Church as a positive force in Russian life, and had hoped that somehow it might yet help to transform society. In a certain sense, it appears that Tolstoy’s anti-ritualistic religion, with its intense faith in the Russian people, came to replace Orthodoxy in Leskov’s spiritual cosmos; for Tolstoy was no Protestant – indeed, he regarded Protestantism with just as much suspicion and disgust as any other form of established, ‘church’ religion. Tolstoy appealed to the ‘Old Believer’ in Leskov – here was a larger-than-life character from one of his own tales, a religious heretic who possessed a demonic angelism which might save the Russian people and return it to the fold of righteousness.

Under Tolstoy’s influence, Leskov began to examine the origins of the Christian religion, and its roots in both the Old and the New Testaments. The series of ‘Synaxarion’ tales on which he worked exclusively between 1886 and 1891 are didactic in the Tolstoyan manner, and look back to the lives of the early Christians. The Synaxarion, or Prolog, as it is known in Church Slavonic, is a short collection of exempla: lives of the early saints, ordered according to the ecclesiastical calendar. The first Slavonic translations of the Synaxarion date from the early Middle Ages, and they contain much material of a strange and flavoursome nature. The narrative style in which they are written is a primitive one, consisting to a great extent of long chains of sentences linked by the words ‘and then’. These texts were especially cherished by the Old Believers, who did not accept the later editions prepared during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the Holy Synod of the Church of Russia. In turning to them for inspiration, Leskov was also addressing the foundations of Russia’s spiritual identity, and the tales he constructed from them must be seen as an attempt to draw the attention of his readers towards a recognition that the Orthodox Church had distorted the living message of this inheritance.

Pamphalon the Entertainer (1887), like the other Prolog tales, is set in the oriental world of Palestine, Egypt and Byzantium. This exotic background stimulated Leskov’s imagination to many thoroughly un-Tolstoyan flights of imagery, and there are occasions when the reader suspects that, from a stylistic point of view at least, it is the Flaubert of La Tentation de Saint Antoine rather than the pedagogue of Yasnaya Polyana whom Leskov is seeking to emulate – as was indeed the case. Leskov had never travelled to the countries he describes in these narratives, and so his fantasy was able to roam freely, untrammelled by memory or fact. The tales are the purest of fictions, and in Pamphalon Leskov even invented a special form of ‘spoken’ Russian which is intended to convey the impression that the characters are talking Greek. This effect is almost impossible to bring across in translation, yet the tale deserves to be better known, as it is one of Leskov’s liveliest and most succinct statements of his own art poétique. The carefree juggler and acrobat Pamphalon is contrasted with the morose, ascetic Hermius; yet through the agency of Christian love, Pamphalon is able to set Hermius’s soul free from the bonds of ‘self-conceit’, and both are finally transformed into weightless spirits, beyond the reach of the earth and its snares.

Leskov’s fascination with Tolstoy, though a powerful one, was not sufficient to mitigate the deep sense of anger, sorrow and despair he experienced towards the end of his life, as he saw that the mass of the Russian people were no more developed in a moral sense now than they had been fifty years earlier. A Winter’s Day, written in the last year of his life, gives full vent to his emotions of grief and betrayal, and is one of the bleakest works in Russian literature. In the world that is evoked in this essentially dramatic composition, there is no hope, no redeeming feature to offset the universal panorama of greed, cruelty and stupidity which the author sees around him. Not even Gogol went so far in his denunciation of human nature as Leskov goes here. The Tolstoyans, while not condemned, are seen as powerless to affect the moral inertia of Russian society, while the radicals, though off-stage, lurk ready to add political tyranny to the general morass as their final contribution.

Leskov died early on the morning of 21 February 1895, after a return of the angina which had plagued him a year earlier. His funeral was held two days later on 23 February. In his ‘Posthumous Plea’ he had made the following request: ‘I select no place of burial for myself, as that in my eyes is a matter of indifference, but I request that no one shall ever place on my grave any memento other than a plain, ordinary wooden cross. If this cross disintegrates, and there be found a person who wishes to replace it with a new one, let him do this and accept my appreciation for the remembrance. Yet if there should be no such well-wisher, that means that the time has passed for anyone to remember my grave.’

NOTES

i.     For a detailed account of Leskov’s life and work, see Hugh McLean, Nikolai Leskov, The Man and His Art (Harvard University Press, 1977).

ii.   McLean, op. cit., pp.