The progressives countered by saying they had been set by the police as a provocation. (Some also suggested they were simply the work of property owners who wanted to collect on their insurance. To this day, in fact, no one knows whether the fires were deliberate or accidental.) The fire in the Apraksin and Shchukin markets on May 28 caused the greatest panic and destruction. Two days later Leskov published an editorial in The Northern Bee responding to the rumors about arson, noting that “the public also points to what sort of people the incendiaries are, and hatred of that sort of people [he carefully avoids mentioning students] is growing with unheard-of speed.” He voiced his concern about the danger “the members of that body” might face as a result of the rumors. He did not presume to judge how well-founded the suspicions were and to what extent they might be connected to “the latest abominable and revolting proclamation calling for the overthrow of the entire civil order of our society.” But to avoid worse disorders, he called on the police to make public at once all the solid information they had. “They should boldly say whether the rumors circulating in the capital about the fires and the incendiaries have the least substance. The ignoble villains must not be spared; but neither is it fitting to risk a single hair on a single head living in the capital and exposed to the accusations of a totally frightened population.”

The editorial is somewhat awkwardly worded, but it is clear that Leskov wanted to get at the truth, so that the rumors would not continue to grow and threaten innocent people. He did not believe the students were responsible for the fires. He condemned the “Young Russia” proclamation in the strongest terms and meant to separate it from the majority of the students, but to the minds of the radicals, he was in fact connecting them with the fires and even inciting the police against them. The violence of their reaction astonished Leskov and wounded him deeply. He was accused of being a government agent and, worse than that, a turncoat. Dmitri Pisarev, the spokesman of the nihilists, anathematized him, calling him both reactionary and dishonest, and virtually banned him from the pages of the liberal press. What was more, the emperor was also said to be displeased with the editorial. Though he never recanted, and in fact had nothing to recant, Leskov’s attempts to explain himself in subsequent articles only made matters worse both on the right and on the left. He even received death threats. On September 6, 1862, to escape the turmoil and clear his head, Leskov went abroad as foreign correspondent for The Northern Bee. Choosing to travel by stagecoach rather than train,‡ he passed through the Ukraine, Poland, Bohemia, and finally settled in Paris, where he spent four months, returning to Russia only the next March.

Among the liberal intelligentsia Leskov bore the totally misplaced stigma of a reactionary all his life, and it lingered on into Soviet times. In a letter to his friend Pyotr Shchebalsky dated November 10, 1875, he mimicked the general editorial opinion of him: “He has marked himself off so clearly … and besides they say he’s close to the Third Section” (i.e., the secret police). A reviewer who praised the language of “The Sealed Angel” in 1873 added, “Leskov has such a reputation that it takes a sort of audacity to praise him.” As a result, though he always had readers, more and more of them as time went on, he suffered during his lifetime from an almost total critical neglect. Even his admirers among the critics were reluctant to write about him because of the suspicions he aroused. He was considered a minor writer, and the great originality of his work was overlooked. He remained, in that sense, undiscovered.

In the 1880s that situation began to change. A younger generation of writers, artists, and thinkers, who had themselves rejected the violent and doctrinaire judgments of nihilism, turned to Leskov as a master. This was his second discovery. In 1881 the new weekly humor magazine Fragments published Leskov’s story “The Spirit of Madame de Genlis.” Two years later the same magazine published “A Little Mistake.” Meanwhile, the stories of the young Anton Chekhov had begun to appear there. Chekhov was in medical school and earned his living by placing comic sketches wherever he could (Fragments published two hundred and seventy of them between 1882 and 1887). In 1883 he met Leskov in Moscow. “Leikin brought along with him my favorite writer, the famous N. S. Leskov,” he wrote in a letter to his brother.