Leskov considered these last the most important part of his work. “The real strength of my talent lies in the positive types,” he boasted in a letter to a friend. “Show me such an abundance of positive Russian types in another writer.”c As Walter Benjamin says in “The Storyteller”: “The righteous man is the advocate for created things and at the same time he is their highest embodiment.”

All of these forms are based essentially on the anecdote, which serious critics tend to scorn. Mirsky enthusiastically defends Leskov’s practice:

His stories are mere anecdotes, told with enormous zest and ability, and even in his longer works his favorite way of characterizing his characters is by a series of anecdotes. This was quite contrary to the traditions of “serious” Russian fiction and induced the critics to regard Leskov as a mere jester. His most original stories are packed with incident and adventure to an extent that appeared ludicrous to the critics, who regarded ideas and messages as the principal thing.

Boris Eikhenbaum, in his essay “An ‘Excessive’ Writer,” published in 1931 in honor of Leskov’s hundredth birthday, says: “the anecdote … can be considered a sort of atom in Leskov’s work. Its presence and action are felt everywhere.” The anecdote is the most elementary form of story, told for its own sake or apropos of some more general topic of discussion in a group of friends, at a Christmas party, or among travelers stranded at an inn during a blizzard.

This last is the occasion for the telling of “The Sealed Angel,” a fine example of Leskov’s composition at its most complex. The story is held together by the event of the title, the official “sealing” of an old icon, but it includes much else besides. The storyteller, who is also the central character, is an orphaned peasant who has worked all his life as a stonemason; the action, as I have already mentioned, involves the construction of the Nikolaevsky suspension bridge in Kiev, which Leskov witnessed in the early 1850s. The masons who build the bridge belong to the Old Believers, a group that separated from the official Russian Orthodox Church in 1666, in protest against the reforms of the patriarch Nikon. The Old Believers were anathematized by the Church and deprived of civil rights; they were often persecuted and tended to live in the more remote parts of the empire. They had their own ways of speaking, which had fascinated Leskov since his youth in Kiev, and which he captures in his narrator’s voice. In 1863, soon after his return to Petersburg from Paris, Leskov was sent on an official mission to inspect the schools of the Old Believers in Riga, an experience that deepened his knowledge of and sympathy for their condition. The masons he portrays in “The Sealed Angel” are very devout, but have no priests or sacraments; their piety is centered on their collection of old icons, the most beautiful of which is the angel of the title. Leskov himself had become interested in icon painting, and particularly in the icons of the Old Believers, in the later 1860s. At around that time he made the acquaintance of an icon painter and restorer by the name of Nikita Sevastianovich Racheiskov, who was an Old Believer himself and lived in a shabby quarter of Petersburg inhabited mainly by Old Believers. Leskov visited him often, and in a tribute to him written after Racheiskov’s death in 1886, he claimed that “The Sealed Angel” had been “composed entirely in Nikita’s hot and stuffy workroom.”d The icon painter who comes to help the masons in the story is named Sevastian, from Racheiskov’s patronymic; he has enormous hands like Racheiskov’s, and yet, like Racheiskov, he sometimes paints with brushes made of only three or four hairs. Much of the discourse on icon painting that plays so important a part in the story was noted down by Leskov from his talks with the master.

The construction of the Nikolaevsky bridge, the ways and speech of the Old Believers, the icon painter Racheiskov and his art—these are the realities Leskov builds on. And yet the story has nothing of the documentary about it. On the contrary, the storyteller’s voice transforms it all into an intensely personal, human story, with touches of the visionary and fantastic. What calls up the story is a question one of the guests at the inn asks tauntingly at the beginning: “So you saw an angel, and he led you—is that it?” “Yes, sir,” the stonemason replies, “I saw him, and he guided me.”

In his letter to Shchebalsky, Leskov wrote of his need for living persons whose spiritual content interested him. That content is revealed in the spoken word. This sort of “oral writing” is known in Russian as skaz, from the verb skazat, to speak or tell. A story in Russian is a rasskaz, a folktale is a skazka. Skaz includes the teller in the tale, so that we do not simply read the printed word, but also hear the speaking voice; we listen to the telling and even begin to mouth the words ourselves. George Orwell’s dictum “Good prose is like a window pane” does not apply here. On the contrary, language becomes physically present in skaz; we are as conscious of it as we are of the events it narrates. In “The Sealed Angel,” the author, who places himself among the listeners, creates the frame setting; other listeners occasionally interrupt to ask questions; but the story itself is told by the stonemason in his own particular language. Skaz is not merely an imitation of old-fashioned storytelling; it is a new form of written expression, even a “modern” one, which draws on the qualities of oral recitation.

Leskov’s comic masterpiece, “Lefty,” is subtitled “The Skaz of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea.” Its speech is the most richly and playfully misspoken Leskov ever invented. The first separate edition of the story, published in 1882, included a preface in which Leskov declared:

I wrote this legend down in Sestroretsk from the skaz of an old gunsmith there, a native of Tula, who had moved to the Sestra River back in the reign of the emperor Alexander I.