Message about Leskov on the land of Penza. Nikolai Leskov - biography, information, personal life

P. Gromov, B. Eichenbaum. N. S. Leskov: Creativity Leskov

M. Gorky, who highly appreciated the work of N. S. Leskov, wrote about him: “This major writer lived away from the public and writers, lonely and misunderstood almost to the end of his days. Only now they are starting to treat him more carefully.” (M. Gorky, Collected works in 30 volumes, Goslitizdat, vol. 24, p. 235.) Indeed, Leskov's literary fate is strange and unusual. A writer who raised to the height of great artistic generalizations new aspects of Russian life that no one had studied before, who populated his books with a whole crowd of bright, peculiar, deeply national faces never before seen in literature, the finest stylist and connoisseur of his native language - he is also is much less read now than other writers of the same stature.

Much of the literary fate of Leskov is explained by the extreme inconsistency of his creative path. His contemporaries - the sixties from the progressive camp - had good enough reason to be distrustful of Leskov. The writer, who had recently begun his literary career, became an employee of such a far from advanced body as the newspaper "Northern Bee" of 1862 was. This was all the more offensive to his contemporaries, since it was a writer of a completely “sixties” warehouse: he had a good knowledge of practical, everyday, business Russian life, he had the temperament, tastes and abilities of a publicist, journalist, newspaperman. The leading magazine of the era, Sovremennik, in an April 1862 book, assessed the journalistic activity of the young Leskov as follows: “We are sorry for the upper columns of“ Bees ”. Power is being wasted there, not only not expressing itself and not exhausting itself, but perhaps not yet finding its true path. We think at least that with greater concentration and stability of its activity, with greater attention to its labors, it will find its true path and someday become a remarkable force, perhaps in a completely different way, and not in the one in which it is now. strives. And then she will blush for her top columns and for her shameless sentences…” hands of revolutionary-minded students and are associated with the proclamation "Young Russia" that appeared shortly before. V. I. Lenin in the article “Persecutors of Zemstvos and Annibals of Liberalism” wrote: “... there is a very good reason to think that the police spread rumors about arsonist students.” (V.I. Lenin, Works, vol. 5, p. 27.) Leskov comes forward with a newspaper article ("Northern Bee", 1862, e 143 (dated May 30).) In which he demands that the police either refute these rumors , or discover the real culprits and roughly punish them. In the tense political atmosphere of those years, the article was considered provocative by progressive circles. She gave grounds for this by the obvious ambiguity of the author's social position. Leskov, a man of a tough and quick-tempered temperament, reacted to what had happened with violent irritation. As a result, he had to go on a trip abroad in order to calm down himself and wait until the political passions that had flared up around his article subsided.

The fate of Leskov was very clearly affected by the fact that the social force “which cannot put up with serfdom, but which is afraid of the revolution, is afraid of the movement of the masses, capable of overthrowing the monarchy and destroying the power of the landowners” (V. I. Lenin, Works, 17, p. 96.) with a sharp turn of events, with the sharpening of the main historical contradiction of the era, it will inevitably find itself objectively in the camp of reaction. And so it happened with Leskov. In 1864 he published the novel Nowhere. Both in the era of the publication of the novel and much later, when Leskov's social paths changed greatly, he was inclined to believe that the evaluation of the novel by advanced contemporaries was largely based on a misunderstanding.

The writer's intention was to interpret some of the "nihilists" he depicts as people who are subjectively honest and sincerely concerned about the fate of the people, but who are mistaken about the course of the country's historical development (Rainer, Liza Bakhareva). This "author's amendment" hardly changes anything in the merits of the case.

Contemporaries absolutely thoroughly saw in the novel maliciously distorted portraits of a number of real people from the advanced camp. D. I. Pisarev and V. A. Zaitsev formulated the public qualification of the novel especially clearly and sharply and the conclusions from it. D. I. Pisarev defined the socio-ethical conclusions that need to be drawn from the current situation in the following way: “I am very interested in the following two questions: on its pages, is there anything coming from the pen of Stebnitsky (Leskov's pseudonym) and signed with his last name? 2. Is there at least one honest writer in Russia who will be so careless and indifferent to his reputation that he will agree to work in a magazine that adorns itself with stories and novels by Stebnitsky? Objectively, the novel "Nowhere" and - probably to an even greater extent - the novel "On the Knives" published by Leskov already in the early 70s are included in the group of so-called "anti-nihilistic" novels of the 60-70s, such as "The Stirred Sea » Pisemsky, Klyushnikov's «Demons», Dostoevsky's «Demons», etc.

For Leskov, the difficult years of "excommunication" from the great literature and journalism of the era are coming. In Katkov's reactionary Russian Messenger, he does not get along, and the reasons for this should be sought, of course, not in the peculiarities of the characters of Leskov and Katkov, but in the objective social sense of Leskov's further literary work. During the 1970s and especially the 1980s, a difficult, sometimes even painful reassessment of many of his former socio-political views took place. A significant role in the ideological self-determination of Leskov was played by his rapprochement with L. N. Tolstoy. The public position of Leskov in the 80s is not the same as it was in the 60s and 70s. In the artistic work and journalism of Leskov of this period, works related to the coverage of the life and life of the Russian clergy caused a special hostility of the conservative camp. A younger contemporary of Leskov, A. M. Skabichevsky, noted: “A great sensation was aroused by the Bishop's trifles published in the early eighties, a number of everyday paintings that denounce some of the dark sides of the life of our higher spiritual hierarchy. These essays stirred up the same storm in the conservative camp as the novel "Nowhere" produced in the liberal one.

Prior to this important turning point, which was associated with the growth of a new revolutionary situation in the country (“the second democratic upsurge in Russia”, as V. I. Lenin said), Leskov collaborated in various small magazines and newspapers of a conservative, dull liberal or indefinite direction. He was not allowed into the "venerable" bourgeois-liberal press. In connection with the more and more critical tendencies in his work, which led to the appearance of works that sharply and sharply raised a number of pressing issues of the social life of Russia, the attitude towards him from the side of liberal circles should have changed. And here a significant fact occurs, noted by the son and biographer of the writer A. N. Leskov: “A curious change of positions is gradually created with a sometimes surprising rearrangement of figures.” (The writer's son, A. N. Leskov, worked for many years on a biography of N. S. Leskov. Finished before the war, it appeared only in 1954 (Andrey Leskov - “The Life of Nikolai Leskov. According to his personal, family and non-family records and memories"). This book is, in terms of freshness and abundance of facts and liveliness of presentation, an exceptionally valuable work. We refer readers to it who are interested in the biography of the writer.) A. N. Leskov means the fact that it is liberal -bourgeois journals such as "Bulletin of Europe" or "Russian Thought" one after another, out of fear of censorship, refuse to publish Lesk's things on their pages because of their excessive critical sharpness. The progressive socio-literary circles of the 1960s had serious grounds for arguing with Leskov; The bourgeois liberals and the late Narodniks of the 1990s no longer had such grounds, but they continued to do so as if simply out of inertia. It was, however, not at all a matter of inertia.

In 1891, the critic M. A. Protopopov wrote an article about Leskov under the title "Sick Talent". Leskov thanked the critic for the general tone of his article, but strongly objected to its title and main points. “Your criticism lacks historicity,” he wrote to Protopopov. “Speaking about the author, you forgot his time and the fact that he is a child of his time ... When writing about myself, I would call the article not a sick talent, but difficult growth.” Leskov was right: without "historicity" it is impossible to understand his work (as well as the work of any writer). He was also right about something else: the whole history of his life and work is a picture of slow, difficult and often even painful growth for almost half a century - from the end of the 40s to the middle of the 90s. The difficulty of this growth depended both on the complexity of the era itself , and from the special position that Leskov occupied in it. He was, of course, "a child of his time" no less than others, but the relationship between him and this time took on a somewhat peculiar character. He often had to complain about his position and feel like a stepson. There were historical reasons for this.

Leskov came to literature not from the ranks of that "professional" democratic intelligentsia, which led its ideological origin from Belinsky, from social and philosophical circles of the 40s. It grew and developed outside of this movement, which determined the main features of Russian literature and journalism in the second half of the 19th century. Until the age of thirty, his life went on in such a way that he could least of all think about literature and writing. In this sense, he was right when he later repeatedly said that he got into literature “accidentally”.

Nikolai Semenovich Leskov was born in 1831 in the village of Gorokhovo, Oryol province. His father was from a spiritual milieu: "a great, wonderful wise man and dense seminarian," according to his son. Having broken with the spiritual environment, he became an official and served in the Oryol Criminal Chamber. In 1848, he died, and Leskov, leaving the gymnasium, decided to follow in his father's footsteps: he entered the service in the same criminal chamber. In 1849, he moved from Orel to Kyiv, where his uncle (on his mother's side) S.P. Alferyev, then a notorious professor at the Faculty of Medicine, lived. Life has become more interesting and meaningful. Leskov joined the Treasury Chamber, but sometimes had the opportunity to “privately” listen to lectures at the university on medicine, agriculture, statistics, etc. In the story “Product of Nature,” he recalls himself: “I was then still a very young boy and did not knew what to define himself. Now I wanted to study the sciences, then painting, and my relatives wanted me to go to serve. In their opinion, this was the most reliable thing.” Leskov served, but stubbornly dreamed of some kind of "living cause", especially since the service itself brought him into contact with the diverse environment of the local population. He read a lot and during the years of Kyiv life he mastered the Ukrainian and Polish languages. Next to Gogol, Shevchenko became his favorite writer.

The Crimean War began, which Leskov later called "the blow of the tocsin, which was significant for Russian life." Nicholas I died (1855), and that social movement began, which led to the liberation of the peasants and to a number of other consequences that changed the old way of Russian life. These events also affected Leskov's life: he left the government service and switched to private service - to the Englishman Shkott (his aunt's husband), who managed the vast estates of the Naryshkins and Perovskys. So, to some extent, his dream of a “living business” was realized: as a representative of Shkott, he traveled all over Russia - no longer as an official, but as a commercial figure, who, by the very nature of his activity, was in close contact with the people. Many landlords were then engaged in settling vast areas in the Volga region and in southern Russia. Leskov had to take part in this - accompany the settlers and arrange them in new places. It was then, during these trips, that Leskov got acquainted with the life of the Russian outback - with the life, customs and language of the working, commercial and petty-bourgeois people of the most diverse professions and positions. When he was later asked where he gets the material for his works, he pointed to his forehead and said: “Here from this chest. Here are stored the impressions of six or seven years of my commercial service, when I had to travel around Russia on business; this is the best time of my life when I saw a lot.”

In letters to Shkott, Leskov shared his impressions; F. I. Selivanov, Shkott’s neighbor on the estate, became interested in these letters, who, as Leskov himself later recalled, “began to ask them, read them and found them“ worthy of publication ”, and in the author he prophesied a writer.” Thus began the literary activity of Leskov, limited at first to a narrow circle of economic and everyday topics. In 1860, his first articles appeared in the Kiev newspaper "Modern Medicine" and in the St. Petersburg magazine "Economic Pointer": "A few words about the doctors of recruiting presences", "Police doctors in Russia", "About the working class", "A few words about the seekers Commercial Places in Russia” and others. These are not so much articles as essays, saturated with huge factual material and depicting the cultural and economic disorder of Russian life. We are talking about bribes, about the low level of officials, about all sorts of administrative outrages, etc.

In general, they adjoin the then widespread genre of the so-called accusatory essays - with the difference that the hand of the future novelist is already felt in them. Leskov inserts anecdotes, uses professional jargon, proverbs and folk phrases, vividly and vividly describes life, recounts individual scenes and episodes. The accusatory essay often turns into a feuilleton, and sometimes into a story.

In 1861, Leskov moved to St. Petersburg and began to contribute to large magazines and newspapers. He is already 30 years old - and he seems to be making up for lost time: for the years 1861-1863 he publishes a lot of articles, essays, stories and stories of the most diverse content. Here is an article about Shevchenko's death, and Essays on the Distillery Industry, and an article about Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done?, and the story The Musk Ox, and the long story The Life of a Woman. All this is distinguished by an extraordinary knowledge of folk life, and a variety of material, and courage in posing the most acute and new questions, and original literary manner and language. It was evident that this writer went through some special school of life and reading, which distinguishes him from others. It seemed that Leskov decided to enter into competition with all the major writers of that time, opposing them with his life experience and his unusual literary language. Gorky noted this characteristic feature of his first works, which immediately drew the attention of his contemporaries: “He knew the people from childhood; by the age of thirty he traveled all over Great Russia, visited the steppe provinces, lived for a long time in Ukraine - in a region of a slightly different way of life, a different culture ... He took up the work of a writer as a mature man, excellently armed not with a book, but with a genuine knowledge of people's life.

However, with all this, Leskov was by no means a mature writer, publicist or public figure in those years: he did not have such experience and could not have. He himself later said that in those years he was “a man poorly educated and prepared for literature,” and wrote to A.S. Suvorin: “Both you and I came to literature untrained, and, while writing, we ourselves were still studying.” Life in the provinces and commercial activities taught him a lot and gave him the opportunity to accumulate a huge everyday, linguistic and psychological material, but he had a very vague idea of ​​the intense social, political and ideological struggle of the parties that was then taking place. Time required a precise choice of position, clear decisions, firm principles, clear answers, and Leskov was not prepared for this either by his life experience or education; meanwhile, he immediately rushed, with his characteristic temperament, into battle - and very soon suffered a setback, which had severe and lasting consequences for him. Defending himself against attacks and accusations of misunderstanding advanced ideas and slandering the progressive intelligentsia, Leskov himself was forced to admit in the press: “We are not those writers who developed in the spirit of well-known principles and strictly prepared for literary service. We have nothing to boast about in the past; it was for the most part both gloomy and disorderly. There are almost no people between us on whom even a faint trace of the circles of Belinsky, Stankevich, Kudryavtsev or Granovsky would lie. The recognition is very important and characteristic, especially since Leskov is clearly talking not only about himself, but also about some of his like-minded people or contemporaries (“between us”). By "certain principles" he means, of course, those progressive ideas and theories that arose as early as the 1940s and led to the creation and formation of a revolutionary-democratic intelligentsia headed by Chernyshevsky. Leskov clearly regrets that he developed outside of these ideas and traditions and thus was not prepared for "literary service"; at the same time, he makes it clear that, compared with the "theoreticians" and "intellectuals," he has some advantages of his own. In letters and conversations, he sometimes ironically uses the word "intellectual" and opposes himself to "theoreticians", as a writer who has much more and, most importantly, more diverse life experience. He willingly and a lot writes and speaks on this topic that excites him, each time trying to highlight what seems to him the strongest side of his position. “I didn’t study the people from conversations with St. Petersburg cabbies,” he says with some vehemence, clearly alluding to the capital’s intellectual writers, “but I grew up among the people on the Gostomel pasture ... I was my own person with the people ... I need to study, I did not understand and now I do not understand. The people just need to know how our life itself is, not studying it, but living it.” Or so: “Books and a hundredth part did not tell me what the collision with life said ... All young writers should leave St. Petersburg to serve in the Ussuri Territory, in Siberia, in the southern steppes ... Away from Nevsky!” Or else like this: “I did not have to break through books and ready-made concepts to the people and their way of life. Books were good helpers to me, but I was the root. For this reason, I did not stick to any school, because I did not study at school, but at Sarks with Shkott. In this sense, his words about Gleb Uspensky are indicative - "one of the few of our brothers who does not break ties with the truth of life, does not lie and does not pretend for the sake of servility to the so-called directions." After the Crimean War and the social changes that took place, Russian life became very complicated, and with it the tasks of literature and its very role became more complicated. People came to literature from the outside, "self-taught" from the provinces, from the philistine and merchant environment. Next to writers who emerged from the environment of the Russian intelligentsia (“who developed in the spirit of well-known principles”), life brought forward writers of a different type, different skills and traditions, writers strong in their practical experience, their life connection with a remote province, with grassroots Russia, with peasant , craft and trade people of different regions. A characteristic feature of the general situation at that time was the promotion of the “raznochinets” as a mass figure in the political movement of the era, in the press, and in literature. At the same time, it must be remembered that the "various" environment was not at all something homogeneous - its various representatives expressed different, sometimes contradictory, tendencies of a very complex time as a whole. Therefore, in the very entry of Leskov into literature "from outside", in the very formation of him outside the circle struggle of the 40s, there was nothing either strange or unusual in the social life of the 60s. For the period of the 1950s and 1960s - the period of intensification of the class struggle - this was not only a natural phenomenon, but also inevitable. Under the new situation, voices from the localities were to be heard and people to appear as deputies from the masses. This was all the more necessary because alongside social issues, national-historical questions arose in all their acuteness, complexity and contradictory nature - as a result of both the Crimean War and social reforms. So the question arose anew about the character of the Russian people, about their national traits and peculiarities. This question should have been posed not in the spirit of state-owned "leavened" patriotism, which dominated in the Nikolaev era and provoked a rebuff from the advanced circles. In this regard, the appearance in the 60s of such a grandiose national-patriotic epic as Tolstoy's "War and Peace" was unusually characteristic and significant, which posed social and historical problems in a completely special way, offering other solutions to these problems than those solutions which were proposed by the leading theorists of the era.

It couldn't be otherwise. After the Crimean War, and especially after the liberation of the peasants, a contradiction naturally arose in the literary environment between the democratism of the advanced journalism of the era and the spontaneous democracy. It was a struggle of a completely different type than, for example, the struggle between revolutionary democrats and liberals; it was a complex ideological conflict that arose on the basis of new life contradictions - as a result of that very quick, hard, sharp breaking of all the old foundations of old Russia, about which Lenin speaks in articles about Tolstoy. The bearers of spontaneous democracy looked upon themselves as new heralds of the truth of life, as its missionaries, who were obliged to acquaint society with all the complexities and contradictions of Russian reality; this was their undoubted historical strength, because they really relied on a rich practical experience, on a real connection with certain sections of the people. However, precisely because of its spontaneity, this democracy was subject to all sorts of fluctuations and outside influences. In many respects opposing themselves to "well-known principles" and disagreeing with "ready-made concepts", elemental democrats quite often - precisely because of their theoretical lack of weapons - fell into the sphere of liberal-bourgeois and even reactionary influences. This was their historical weakness, which often led them themselves to tragic situations and serious ideological crises. Such was, for example, Pisemsky, rushing about from one camp to another; such was Leskov; Leo Tolstoy was essentially the same, with his characteristic patriarchal-village ideals (and this was his special historical strength). Pisemsky and Leskov came from the Russian provinces, from the uyezd backwoods - from bureaucratic, commercial and vagabond Rus'.

It was the spontaneous democrats who were characterized by that special “difficult growth” that Leskov wrote to Protopopov about at the end of his life. In Tolstoy, this growth was expressed in the form of sharp crises and fractures - in accordance with the significance of the questions he raised; in Leskov it did not take such forms, but had a similar historical meaning. Not without reason between him and Tolstoy formed in the 80s a special kind of spiritual closeness, which greatly pleased Leskov. “I always agree with him, and there is no one on earth who would be dearer to me than him,” he wrote in one letter. This was not an accident: to Leskov, like Tolstoy, what seemed decisive in the life of mankind was not the socio-economic side and thus not the idea of ​​a socio-historical reorganization in a revolutionary way, but a moral point of view based on the “eternal principles of morality”, on the “moral law ". Leskov said bluntly: "We need good people, not good orders."

Lenin showed the significance of Tolstoy as a "mirror", reflecting the strength "weakness of the spontaneous movement of the masses; this general historical situation also applies to a certain extent to Leskov, taking into account, of course, the differences mentioned above. Lenin says that the year 1905 brought with it "the end of that entire epoch which could and should have given rise to Tolstoy's teachings - not as an individual something, not as a caprice or originality, but as an ideology of the conditions of life in which millions and millions actually lived during known time." (V. I. Lenin, Works, vol. 17, pp. 31−32.)

Leskov, like Tolstoy, “could and should have been born” by the same post-reform, but pre-revolutionary era, about which Lenin speaks. He, like Tolstoy, reflected the "glaring contradictions" of this era and at the same time revealed a lack of understanding of the causes of the crisis and the means of overcoming it. Hence his “difficult growth” and all those historical misunderstandings from which he suffered so much, but for which he himself created a sufficient number of reasons and grounds. Leskov, like Tolstoy, was repeatedly accused of whims and originality - either about the language of his works, or about his views. It was not easy for contemporaries to understand his contradictory and changeable position, especially since with his journalistic articles he often only made it difficult or complicated to understand it. Critics did not know what to do with Leskov - with what social direction to connect his work. Not a reactionary (although there were objective grounds for accusing him of this), but not a liberal either (although he was close to liberals in many features of his worldview), not a populist, but even more so not a revolutionary democrat, Leskov (as later Chekhov) was recognized devoid of a “certain attitude to life” and a “world view” by bourgeois criticism. On this basis, he was included in the category of "secondary writers", from whom much is not asked and about whom one can not particularly spread. And so it happened that the author of such amazing and astonishing works precisely by their originality, such as “Cathedrals”, “The Enchanted Wanderer”, “The Sealed Angel”, “Lefty”, “Dumb Artist”, turned out to be a writer who does not have his own independent and honorable place in history of Russian literature.

This was a clear injustice and a historical mistake, testifying to the narrowness of the traditional schemes of liberal-bourgeois criticism. One of the first to rebel against this position was Gorky, who in some respects felt himself to be Leskov's pupil. In his lectures in 1908-1909 (on Capri), Gorky said that Leskov was “a completely original phenomenon in Russian literature: he is not a populist, not a Slavophil, but not a Westerner, not a liberal and not a conservative.” The main feature of his heroes is “self-sacrifice, but they sacrifice themselves for the sake of some truth or idea, not for ideological reasons, but unconsciously, because they are drawn to truth, to sacrifice.” It is in this that Gorky sees Leskov's connection not with the intelligentsia, but with the people, with the "creativity of the masses." In an article of 1923, Gorky already resolutely declared that Leskov, as an artist, was worthy to stand next to the great Russian classics and that he often surpassed them in “the breadth of coverage of the phenomena of life, the depth of understanding of its everyday mysteries, and a subtle knowledge of the Great Russian language.”

Indeed, it is with these three features of his work that Leskov stands out among his contemporaries. Without him, our literature of the second half of the 19th century would have been very incomplete: it would not have been revealed with such convincing force and with such penetration the life of the Russian outback with its “righteous people”; “one-minded” and “enchanted wanderers”, with his stormy passions and worldly troubles, with his peculiar way of life and language. There would not have been what Leskov himself liked to call "genre" (by analogy with "genre" painting), and, moreover, this "genre" would not have been given so vividly, so intimately, so diversely and so poetically in its own way. Neither Turgenev, nor Saltykov-Shchedrin, nor Ostrovsky, nor Dostoevsky, nor Tolstoy could do it the way Leskov did it, although this important and characteristic task of the era was present in the work of each of them. Gorky said well about this: "He loved Rus', all that it is, with all the absurdities of its ancient way of life." That is why he entered into a kind of competition or rivalry with each of these writers. Having begun his career in the 1960s with essays full of vital material directed against the deformities of the pre-reform system, Leskov quite soon enters into polemics with “known principles”, “ready-made concepts”, “schools” and “trends”. Taking the position of a “skeptic and little faith” (as Gorky said about him), he persistently portrays the tragic abyss that formed between the ideas and hopes of the revolutionary “theoreticians” (“impatients”, as he called them in his own way) and dense Russia, from which he came to literature. In his very first story, The Musk Ox (1863), he describes the fate of a kind of revolutionary “righteous man,” a seminarian-agitator, “ready to sacrifice himself for the chosen idea.” It is characteristic, however, that this righteous man is not at all an intellectual or a theoretician: “He could not stand new literature and read only the gospel and the ancient classics ... He did not laugh at many theories, in which we then fervently believed, but deeply and sincerely despised them “. About capital journalists, he says: “The bolts are chatting, but they themselves do not know anything ... They write stories, stories! .. But they themselves, I suppose, will not move.” And even this peculiar democrat can do nothing with the ignorant peasantry; Convinced of the hopelessness of his experiments, the Musk Ox commits suicide. In a letter to a friend, he says: “Yes, now I also understand something, I understand ... There is nowhere to go.” This is how Leskov’s novel Nowhere (1864) was prepared and appeared, in which instead of the Musk Ox, Rainer, a representative of the revolutionary circles, was already depicted. After listening to "poeticized stories about the Russian community" and "the innate inclinations of the Russian people towards socialism", Reiner travels to Russia. Of all his attempts, nothing but tragicomic misunderstandings and failures comes to fruition: Russia turns out to be completely different from what he imagined from the stories. In the tense and difficult situation of that time, Leskov's novel was perceived as a reactionary attack against the revolutionary intelligentsia. The writer himself imagined his idea a little differently, but there was no such time to understand individual shades. Whatever the subjective intentions of the author, objectively this novel had a reactionary meaning, because it was directed by drinking away the progressive social camp of the era. The verdict was pronounced - and that "literary drama" of Leskov began, which left its mark on his entire literary destiny.

Leskov believed that the complex problems of the life of post-reform Russia could not be solved through revolutionary changes. In his artistic work, he sought to reproduce the life of different circles of society, different estates and classes; the result was to be the creation of a broad picture of national life in all the individually peculiar features of its development. In this way, it seemed to Leskov, contradictions could be discovered that were much deeper and more complex than social contradictions. However, as soon as we begin to look more closely at the artistic practice of the early Leskov, we immediately find in his work an extremely sharp formulation of a number of important social problems of the era. This shows with great force the general inconsistency of Leskov's position. During the 1960s, Leskov created a whole series of "essays" in which a distinctive artistic system was emerging. The basis of this system is the specific formulation of questions of social and national life in their complex relationship. The central social problem of the era is undoubtedly the question of serfdom and the attitude towards reforms, and Leskov, as a journalistic writer, cannot and does not avoid expressing his position in this complex set of social contradictions. As early as the beginning of the 60s, his story “The Life of a Woman” (in a revised version - “Cupid in Lapotochki”) dates back, where the theme of serfdom and reforms is given sharply, sharply and unusually, purely in a Leskovian way. The plot of this "experience of a peasant romance" is the story of tragic love under the conditions of serfdom. The tragedy is brought in the finale to the utmost concentration, to an almost Shakespearean exacerbation and "cruelty" of dramatic tension, and the source of tragedy is precisely the specificity of the social system and the nature of its basic institutions.

It is significant how Leskov begins, develops and completes his story about an integral and internally unbroken passion, bringing its bearers to a bitter and terrible ending. The love of Nastya and Stepan arises in the conditions of a precisely defined social class environment, everything plays with colors characteristic of this environment, which Leskov brought to great poetic brightness. At the beginning, an outline of the typical life of a peasant family is given. Its individual members see their life path differently. The submissive position of the mother is characteristic - everything should go as it has been going on for a long time. Nastya could be given to the city, to the store, but this is not necessary - there is debauchery, corruption. She is assigned to the household. Here intervenes brother, Kostya. He is possessed by a violent passion for profit. Within the serf class itself, differentiation is taking place, the kulak Kostya appears, which appears exactly as such in the epilogue, after the reform. In order to maintain a companionship in a kulak enterprise, in a butter churn, Kostya sells Nastya to the Prokudin family, for the feeble-minded Grishka. The landlord family does not interfere, it lives its own terrible class-limited life. It is busily reported that the lady asked for seventy rubles for the deal, they agreed on forty, and the intervention of the landowner class was limited to this. The estates live, as it were, autonomously, confining themselves to the exact designation of direct economic obligations. Mother and Nastya herself dutifully agree to the deal. Going to the city seemed like debauchery and corruption, going for 40 rubles and companionship in a butter churn to marry a feebleminded - this is following the patriarchal, old-fashioned class custom. You can't disobey the head of the family.

Life is densely written everywhere - both at home and in the Prokudin family. Life here is important precisely as a sign of class inviolability. It is exactly told how they have breakfast, dinner, where the old people sleep, and where the young ones sleep, who and when cooks food during the harvest, who made what kind of kvass, what is the wedding custom and how they beat a disobedient wife or sister. Life predetermines the entire course of human life: here it is not a decoration, but the root cause of all sorrows - as an ugly manifestation of class limitation. Class life is taken in all its extremes, the extremes are expressed so sharply that they become almost eccentric.

The birth of love is also shown among the exact signs of everyday life, but artistically painted in a completely different way. Nastya's life under this unbearable pressure from time immemorial established customs that have turned into ugliness is tragic. The life of Stepan is just as tragic. His drama is simple to the limit - he has an angry and quarrelsome wife, and it is impossible to escape from her under the conditions of automatically predetermined class boundaries. Again, a number of accurate household sketches show that this is really impossible. But precisely because life here has already reached the point of absurdity in its predestination, it is by no means possible to fit the living human soul into these forms. This theme is expressed through the song. All spiritual impulses of Nastya pour into a song, Stepan too. Both of them are excellent songbirds. The theme of the song runs through the entire "peasant romance". They sing at Nastya's wedding, Krylushkin, who heals Nastya from a woman's illness - hysteria, sings, Stepan, who is still unfamiliar to Nastya, sings, passing by the punk where she sleeps, the song competition between Nastya and Stepan at their first meeting becomes a love explanation. The song here is also one of the forms of life, folklore, folk art - this is what expresses the "spiritual" in the class peasant life. Life in its direct form has become ugliness, eccentricity. An irreconcilable conflict arises between "everyday life" and "song". This conflict testifies to the complete collapse of the intra-estate relations established once and for all. The song throws Nastya and Stepan into each other's arms. Love here is monolithic, irresistible, it is also brought to an extreme. Overwhelmed by the "song", these rustic Romeo and Juliet will stop at nothing to merge into the "song". And here - a new stylistic coloring of the plot. Stepan is portrayed as a fair-haired, kind young man with a hat twisted to one side, yearning for life with a dashing wife, a homemaker, Nastya - a beauty, yearning "at the slanted window." The estate coloring of the lyrical theme leads to stylization, to "cupid in paws".

The entire development of the novel, right up to the climax, proceeded only within the framework of the life of the peasant class and did not go beyond these limits. The goal here was to show that intra-estate relations are historically exhausted, blurred, reduced to absurdity. But events forced Stepan and Nastya to flee. And here the absurdity of inter-class relations, the cruelty of the feudal system as a whole, already comes into play. The tragic climax of the plot begins with the fact that there are no passports, you have to turn to "specialists" in forgery. Overwhelmed by tragic love, the heroes should discuss in a businesslike way where to get twenty-five rubles in banknotes (precisely banknotes - all such details are underlined by Leskov, specially highlighted) for the purchase of "residence permits". The whole subsequent tragedy is plotted by the fact that the crook took twenty-five rubles, but did not give passports. Then comes the terrible phantasmagoria, again in an everyday way, accurately described to the utmost absurdity of feudal institutions; the heroes of this phantasmagoria are the police chief, the prison warden, the governor, who “driven the old bribe-takers from their places and identified new ones,” members of the council, block officers, etc. they can’t, they put them in prison, punish them with rods, send them to a stage, etc. In words, the mechanism of social relations of that system comes into full force, the main feature of which V. I. Lenin saw in the “discipline of the stick”. (V. I. Lenin, Works, vol. 29, p. 387.) The consequences of the operation of this mechanism inevitably lead to the fact that the “thinking apparatus” in the characters “spoiled”. The ending is given with the utmost precision and realistic authenticity: Stepan's death from typhus in the prison hospital, the death of the distraught Nastya, freezing at night in an open field. Despite the too clear and even, as it were, deliberately sharpened opposition of the two plans of the work - the plan of personal, lyrical and the plan of social life (characteristic of Leskov's other works of the 60s as well) - his general "conception is extremely holistic. This is explained by the fact that in each of these plans the same theme is embodied in different ways. The traditional intra-estate situation has the most severe, oppressive effect on the personality of the hero and even the meekest person, if he wants to remain a man, forces him to “break out” from the class “to break out”. In the second plan - in terms of inter-estate relations - the whole mass of feudal statehood falls upon the individual. This is precisely the logic of the composition of the novel, with its sharp division of the narrative into two layers, two layers of episodes - “personal” and “public”. Characteristic of the terrible ordeals of Stepan and Nastya, first of all, is that they go through a series of unthinkable personal insults, they are treated as a cheerful owner would not treat animals. The orders of serf-owning social relations as a whole come into play only at the moment of a catastrophe, but here already they act absolutely mercilessly towards the "classified". The concept of the novel as a whole has a deeply democratic and passionately anti-serfdom character. But democratism and anti-serfdom are also special here. Concentrating all the tragedy on the theme of the individual, Leskov comes to the conclusion, frankly expressed in the epilogue, that after the reform, the whole point is to continue uprooting the remnants of serfdom in public institutions and, especially, in personal relationships.

For all of Leskov's subsequent work, the theme of the individual, freed from class ties, is of extraordinary importance. V. I. Lenin noted, touching upon the question of the most striking features of the social situation of the 60s, that it was characterized, among other things, by "a hot war of literature against the senseless medieval constraints of the individual." (V. I. Lenin, Works, vol. 1, p. 394.) The very emergence of the problem of personality V. I. Lenin connected directly with social processes: “It was post-reform Russia that brought this rise in the sense of personality, self-esteem.” (Ibid.) And in The Life of a Woman, of course, such a sharp posing of questions of personal dignity, a special, even somewhat romantically tragic accentuation of the theme of personality objectively represents an original Lesk solution of social problems important for the era.

The story “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” is built on a similar compositional principle. The tragedy of the young merchant's wife Katerina Izmailova is completely predetermined by the well-established and steadily regulating the life of the individual merchant environment. The drama of the main situations here also lies in the fact that, taken to the logical limit, and extremes, the everyday canon blows itself up. The predominant occupation of Katerina Izmailova is that she goes from room to room and yawns - “Russian boredom, the boredom of a merchant’s house, from which it’s fun, they say, even hang yourself,” reigns here, the heroine of Leskov’s story is clearly opposed by the author Katerina Kabanova from Thunderstorm » Ostrovsky. The heroine of Ostrovsky's brilliant drama does not merge with everyday life, her character is in sharp contrast with the prevailing everyday skills. Kabanikha has to constantly teach Katerina how she should behave in this or that case, and is sadly surprised that none of the teachings work - there is no way to cut this character under a merchant's comb. Everything with Katerina Kabanova turns out like this; it is no coincidence that according to Boris's description of her behavior in the church, Kudryash instantly guesses who he is talking about. Based on the description of Katerina Izmailova's behavior, no one under any circumstances would have determined which particular young merchant's wife they are talking about. The drawing of her image is a household template, but a template drawn with such thick paint that it turns into a kind of tragic popular print. Katerina Kabanova is an alien phenomenon in her environment, a ray of light that has broken through from outside and illuminated for a moment all the ugliness of the dark kingdom, testifying to the complete doom of this kingdom. That discharge of lightning, which brought death to Katerina Izmailova, was born in the dark, dense depths of this very environment.

This lightning bolt is caused by love. This love flared up instantly and immediately became irresistible, engulfing the entire being of the heroine. The everyday details of this love are remarkable. A young merchant's wife, passing through the yard, among the jesting clerks sees a new clerk - the most witty, the most servilely polished. There is a dialogue that immediately turns into a love match. The love contest between Nastya and Stepan in "The Life of a Woman" was a contest in song, for these heroes themselves were people who, in the conditions of the collapse of the old social conditions, preserved the human soul. The love match between Katerina and the clerk Sergei is that they are measured in strength - first on the fists, then in "sets". In love dreams, Katerina Lvovna is haunted by a fat cat, which appears further and in reality as a witness to love joys. The love dialogues of Nastya and Stepan were built like a folk song broken into replicas. Love dialogues between Katerina Lvovna and Sergey are perceived as ironically stylized inscriptions for popular prints. The whole movement of this love situation is, as it were, a template condensed to the point of horror - a young merchant's wife deceives her old husband with a clerk. Only the results are not templates. Overwhelmed by human pure love, Nastya wanted to hide with her love, to leave the class framework. It was overtaken by the feudal system and dealt with in the most disgusting “way. Katerina Kabanova turned out to be unable to hide her love, as was envisaged by the everyday “morality” of the social environment: her direct and pure nature forces her to throw the truth right in the face of the most typical representatives of the estate. Katerina Izmailova, in whom the way of loving behavior, typical for the environment, is extremely concentrated, brought to extreme expression, does not run away anywhere, but wants to hide her excessively overgrown passion that filled her entire being, remaining within the limits of the estate. It turns out that this is impossible. In order to preserve her social position and her love, Izmailova takes an act that is stereotyped to the limit: poison comes into play in traditional fungi, after eating which the head of the family, father-in-law Izmailova, fell ill and went to the next world. Blurred, the disintegration of estate life is most clearly reflected in the fact that the more carefully Katerina tries to fulfill the everyday ritual of behavior, the more terrible it looks and with the greater force it falls on the heroine. The murder of the father-in-law is followed by the murder of the husband, then the murder of the nephew. The horror of what is happening is that the murder, mechanically repeated with automatic sequence, more and more reveals the complete absence of any restraining moral barriers in the heroine. Class traditional morality is complete immorality. The murder of an innocent child is the climax of a drama, a catastrophe. A sharp turn in the action, a compositional breakdown is carried out in the same form as in the "peasant novel". What happens - in a different form - is the same thing that happened with Nastya: society intervenes at the very moment when the heroine thinks that she has completely freed herself from annoying estate establishments and norms. The very form of public interference is indicative - the crime is solved by a terribly traditional, inert, patriarchally unceremonious interference in the life of an individual: a crowd of onlookers leaving the church after vespers, discussing why Izmailova does not perform a household ritual characteristic of the environment - does not go to church, climbs to peep into the window crack at the very moment of the murder. The heroine is flogged and sent to hard labor. Everything is crowned with the impudent outrage of Sergei himself over the love of Katerina Izmailova. The personality of Katerina Kabanova could not be humiliated in love - Boris also came from somewhere outside, for Kabanova herself he was a ray of light in a dark kingdom. Sergei, who aspired to become a merchant, turns out to be a vile spiritual lackey when everything conceived collapses. The last grave insult is inflicted on the personality of the heroine in the very center of her spiritual world, in her love. There is nothing left to do and nothing to live on. Izmailova dies, true to herself: she drowns herself and drags her rival with her into the cold river. Izmailova's rampage is another form of the same social pattern as Nastya's humility, submissiveness. It testifies to the death, the internal disintegration of the old, feudal social structure. The two heroines of Leskov behaved very differently - one humbly, the other violently, but both come to a tragic ending, due to the same historical circumstances. The spiritual fruits of the decay of the old foundations are shown in The Warrior Woman (1866). The heroine of this story said goodbye to her former crumbling social environment in complete prosperity and flourishing health. She is also a Mtsensk and also a merchant's wife, only a small one. Domna Platonovna, after the death of her husband and after the loss of her previous earnings, ended up in St. Petersburg. Here she trades for the appearance of trading in lace, but in essence she trades in live goods. The core of the story is the story of Domna Platonovna herself about the black ingratitude of a certain Lekanidoya, a young intelligent woman who left her husband and found herself in a hopeless situation in St. Petersburg. With a whole series of deliberate manipulations, Domna Platonovna brings the unfortunate woman to prostitution. This is the main craft of Domna Platonovna. The most noteworthy circumstance is that Domna Platonovna sincerely regards herself as the benefactor of Lekanidka and her ilk. The tragedy of Lekanidka, who tried to defend the dignity of her personality, who was looking for love and found herself forced by the course of life to trade herself, is completely incomprehensible to Domna Platonovna. Brought up in a traditional environment and in traditional moral and everyday habits, Domna Platonovna got used to the disintegration and decay of natural and moral personal ties and norms. Unbridledness, complete immorality of a person who lives only by carnal and material interests, seems to Domna Platonovna to be the most natural phenomenon, full of inner meaning; Such, in her opinion, is the nature of man. The writer, in his own words, is primarily interested in “what paths she followed and reached her current position and her original convictions about her own absolute rightness and the universal desire for any kind of deception.” Excursions into the Mtsensk past of Domna Platonovna reveal that the life of the patriarchal merchant environment is not much different from that everyday and widespread corruption, in the circle of which Domna Platonovna now exists. She, this former life, is given in such a concise outline because everything is already known about her from Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Life in Petersburg expanded Domna Platonovna's experience quantitatively, multiplied it mechanically, but introduced little that was new qualitatively. The result of the heroine’s life path is universal (moral cynicism. Everything is turned upside down in the mind of Domna Platonovna only apparently: before that, everything was already dead in Mtsensk, that there was nothing to turn over. Domna Platonovna, in her own way, gained that very freedom of the individual from class restrictions, to which Katerina Izmailova aspired. At first, this freedom turns into cynicism. The special psychological color of the image of the "warrior" is that she is engaged in her disgusting craft with complete pleasure, as if by vocation. In essence, Domna Platonovna really likes to live the way she lives. The following is said about her: “Domna Platonovna loved her job like an artist: to arrange, assemble, cook and admire the work of her own hands - that was the main thing, and behind this all sorts of other benefits were visible, which the person is more realistic for anything I wouldn't have looked."

Compositionally, the story is divided into parts that are sharply separated from each other and opposing each other. Like Katerina Izmailova, Domna Platonovna was overtaken by a tragic catastrophe at the very top of her existence. It is extremely important for understanding the meaning of the story that Domna is moving towards a catastrophe. Both Nastya and Katerina Izmailova lived more or less organically within their social environment until the catastrophe. Only the catastrophe itself, predetermined by the life of an internally decomposed class, pushed them into a wider circle of socio-historical relations. The reader finds Domna Platonovna already completely out of her former everyday life, already in the sphere of general social relations: she is known to “all Petersburg”, that is, to the most diverse groups and groups of the ruling classes, and she herself knows the life of the social lower classes. Here, in this sphere of different interests, the tragic culmination overtakes Domna. Cynically denying love, the heroine, having lived to gray hair, falls unconsciously in love with a certain twenty-year-old dunce Valerka, unrestrainedly devoted, in turn, to all Petersburg pleasures, like cards, circus, vodka, etc., and ending with Vladimirka. The compositional drawing is, as it were, inverted; Domna Platonovna ends up where Nastya and Katerina Izmailova started. What is the meaning of this inverted pattern, this seeming vicious circle? In the fact that the same confusion reigns in interclass relations that I am in the seemingly closed life of outwardly divided and opposing classes. Outwardly, the estates observe the decorum of the former integrity, strength, and stability. Internally, they fell apart, and this is most clearly revealed in interclass relations. The declassified, declassed man returns to where he started. Denying any inner meaningfulness of her personal life, referring to Lekanidka's impulses as a transient whim, Domna Platonovna turns out to be a slave to the needs of her personality, which take on a shameful and even ridiculous form in her.

Domna Platonovna, who denied the very possibility of the existence of human passions and motives, free from material interests, ends up in the grip of an absolutely uncontrolled and unnatural passion. This ugly, miserable passion of Domna collides, in turn, with Valerka's characteristic cynicism, which until recently seemed to Domna to be universal and a completely acceptable law of life. The collapse of obsolete old foundations and norms, the absence of new social and personal human ties - all this is disastrous for the human person. In The Warrior Woman, perhaps no less sharply than in the previous essays, the same questions of the post-reform life in Russia are posed.

All those phenomena that are discussed in the most important works of Leskov of the 60s find their explanation in the peculiarities of the historical situation, social, public relations. Attentive observers of the era note sharp shifts in public consciousness that characterize the period of preparation and implementation of reforms. So, M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin wrote: “Everything at that moment changed, as if by magic, and proportions, and forms, and names. What was humbled yesterday—today rose to the top, what stood yesterday on high—in an instant hid and sank into that region of obscurity and indifference, from which, if it came out again, it was only to sing in unison. It goes without saying that these shifts are least of all due to the reformist activity of the social elites of the feudal state, who were forced to reform "by the force of economic development, which drew Russia onto the path of capitalism." (V. I. Lenin, Works, vol. 17, p. 95.) The feudal lords were unable to “hold on to the old, crumbling forms of economy.” (Ibid.) This process is connected with the disintegration of the old classes - the estates of serf society and the formation of new classes and new class relationships. Those shifts in public consciousness, which are so vividly described by M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, are explained primarily by shifts in class relations, the disintegration of old social ties and the formation of new ones. As V. I. Lenin wrote, historical contradictions were reflected in the work of L. N. Tolstoy, “which determined the psychology of various classes and various strata of Russian society in the post-reform, but pre-revolutionary era.” (Ibid., vol. 16, p. 295.) The same historical contradictions were reflected in Leskov's work.

The individual artistic feature of the writer is that he is most concerned about the processes of disintegration of social ties within the old class-estates and the issues of “complete destruction of class divisions”. (Ibid., vol. 6, p. 130.) These processes took place in Russia for a long time and painfully: while “rebellious economic development is increasingly undermining the foundations of estates”, (Ibid., vol. 5, p. 259.) in the country, at the same time, “everything and everything is saturated with estates,” (ibid.) artificially supported by the ruling classes. During this epoch, numerous “unbearable” remnants of “pre-reform regulation in Russian life” continued to remain in force (Ibid., vol. 2, p. 489.) from oneself the fetters of class and to find new forms of human relations in the processes of folding new social ties.

It is with this strong side, extremely controversial. In general, Leskov’s position, one should link the theme of the search for a “righteous man”, so essential for Leskov in the 70s and 80s, the theme of positive principles in Russian life and a positive type of person, re-forming in an era when “everything has turned upside down and is only just fitting in”. This is how Gorky understood the peculiarity of Leskov's position in the literature of the 1970s and 1980s. He saw the valuable quality of Leskov's work in the fact that Leskov was soberly aware of the weak side of populism. Gorky opposed Leskov precisely to the populists, and not to the revolutionary democrats. In this regard, it must be remembered that Gorky's assessments were polemically sharpened "in defense of Leskov," and therefore Gorky did not always draw a clear distinction in this case between the progressive, revolutionary tendencies of Narodism itself and its weak, utopian, liberal-legal sides. Speaking of Leskov and the Narodniks, Gorky most often had in mind precisely the weak sides of Narodism. Gorky wrote: “When, in the midst of a solemn and somewhat idolatrous liturgy, a heretical voice of a dissenter was heard to a peasant, he aroused general bewilderment and distrust ... In Leskov’s stories, everyone felt something new and hostile to the commandments of the time, the canon of populism.”

In this regard, the assessment of Leskov's artistic heritage made by N.K. Mikhailovsky is extremely characteristic. The largest ideologist of legal populism expressed his final judgment on Leskov's work in connection with the publication of the second, posthumous edition of the writer's collected works (1897). He spoke, as he himself admits, only because he considered Leskov's artistic activity to be excessively high in the introductory article by R. Sementkovsky, which was pre-published. Mikhailovsky stated that, in his opinion, Leskov could not be put on a par with the classics of Russian literature of the second half of the 19th century. Mikhailovsky directed the fire of his criticism primarily at the most important features of Leskov's artistic manner. In Leskov the artist, the most disputable thing for Mikhailovsky is “immensity”, the writer's penchant for overly acute situations and faces. According to Mikhailovsky, "Leskov can be called an 'immeasurable writer' in the sense of a writer devoid of a sense of proportion." This excess "does not testify to the significance of artistic forces and causes obvious damage to artistic truth." Mikhailovsky accuses Leskov of departing from artistic truth, from realism. A “purely artistic” assessment clearly turns into a socio-political one. According to Mikhailovsky, one must be more sober and calmer and give everyone what they deserve, and not scream about contrasts, contradictions, both in assessing people and events. “The same lack of a sense of proportion is also reflected in Leskov’s predilection for depicting, on the one hand, the “righteous” (he sometimes calls them that), and on the other, villains who surpass all probability. Of our writers, not only first-class, but at least somewhat deserving of a memorable mark in the history of literature, there is not one who would so immoderately exalt his favorites and oppress his stepsons in every possible way. Here the aesthetic "immensity" passes already into that parallel in the moral field, which is called the lack of justice. However, the critic does not dare to insist that the “lack of justice” imputed to Leskov is of a socio-political nature: after all, Leskov’s last things, their general, sharply critical coloring in relation to Russian reality, are too memorable for the contemporary reader. The critic, on the other hand, wants to appear objective and impartial in the eyes of the reader. Therefore, he confines himself to the following deaf phrase: “Natural immensity is inspired by political anger”, as a result of which the images and paintings take on a monstrously fantastic character. The critic puts himself in the position of a defender of the progressive heritage of the 1960s, but does not directly express his thought and is limited to a derogatory conclusion in the aesthetic sense: "Leskov is par excellence a storyteller of anecdotes."

The true meaning of the demands made by Mikhailovsky is revealed only in the context of his entire article. The fact is that the review of the collected works of Leskov is the first chapter of a literary review, in the second part of which Chekhov's story "Men" is analyzed. Here, the critic is already fully focusing his attention on the social meaning of the images and pictures created by the writer: he also accuses Chekhov of "exaggerations", of "excessiveness", of "injustice" in his depiction of the Russian post-reform village, the village of the end of the century. The critic assures the reader that everything in the village is not at all as gloomy as it seems to Chekhov, who allegedly exaggerated the colors too much when depicting the social contrasts of the modern village. He does not like Chekhov's "excessiveness" in revealing social contradictions, in showing their sharpness, their insolubility within the existing conditions. The fact that Chekhov is not inclined to smooth out social contradictions, Mikhailovsky calls the absence of positive principles in the writer's worldview. In essence, the critic is calling Chekhov to a liberal populist softening of social contrasts. Mikhailovsky's assessment of Chekhov clarifies a lot in his own assessment of Leskov, in whose work the critic finds artistic excess. In fact, they are talking about the same thing in both cases, although from different ends. Mikhailovsky is outraged by the exposure of contrasts, contradictions, the absence of "measure", "justice" and faith in "peaceful progress". For accusations of “immension”, of “absence, justice”, Leskov really gave many arguments throughout his life and career. But Mikhailovsky attaches to this "immensity" a universally negative meaning, not wanting to see its dual nature. It is clear to every reader of Leskov that Mikhailovsky is unfair in relation to: Leskov as an artist - the author of "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District", "Warriors" and "Cathedrals", the author of "The Man on the Clock" and "Hare Remise". These works have their own artistic completeness, their own special artistic measure, which, of course, Leskov, like any great writer, had his own "measure" inherent only to him.
Article author: P. Gromov, B. Eichenbaum

Unfortunately, it so happened that for decades, many literary historians and critics, faced with these obvious violations of the “measure” by Leskov (often in questions that in the historical perspective already sound like secondary), continued, like Mikhailovsky, not to see the positive side of Leskov's inherent "immensity", which allowed him to reflect many of the contradictions of Russian life with a sharpness and artistic depth unacceptable either for the liberal populist or for the conservative camps of Russian society. Leskov's contemporaries were offended by many obvious injustices that he fell into when responding to the events of his current life, the extremes to which he reached in their assessment, excesses from which he was not always able to resist. These features of Leskov's manner sometimes affected the perception of contemporaries so strongly that they prevented them from seeing the objective content of the writer's best works.

For the rejection of Leskov, representatives of different social camps had their own, each time special, but by no means random circumstances. Leskov lived in a very difficult era and followed extremely complex social and artistic paths. This explains the struggle around his work; this also explains the attempts to hush up and belittle Leskov, about which Gorky spoke so sharply. Not at all justifying "extremes" and blunders. Leskov, who brought him to the reactionary camp for a while, Gorky points out that in Nowhere * "the intelligentsia of the sixties was portrayed rather viciously", that this is "a book, first of all poorly written, it everywhere feels that the author is too knows little of the people he is talking about.” Regarding the novel On the Knives, Gorky says that it is “a bad novel in all respects”, “in this novel the nihilists are depicted even worse than in Nowhere” - ridiculously gloomy, stupid, powerless, - as if Leskov wanted to prove that that sometimes malice is even more miserable and poor in spirit than stupidity. However, Gorky saw the historical role of Leskov as an artist not in these extremes and mistakes of his, but in the desire to multilaterally and realistically truthfully show a country “where people of all classes and estates know how to be equally unhappy”, that is, a country where all classes and estates are characterized by the processes of disintegration of old social ties and the formation of new ones. In connection with Leskov's depiction of "new people", Gorky argued that the writer's sober mind "understood well that the past is the hump of each of us" and that it was necessary "to throw off the heavy burden of history from our shoulders." In other words, according to Gorky, it turned out that both the “new people” and Leskov were characterized in different ways for the same range of social phenomena, for the same historical soil. It is from the writer’s sober awareness of the collapse of old social ties, Gorky believes, that Leskov’s desire to find the “righteous” is born, “little great people, cheerful great martyrs for their love’s sake” appear in his work. But according to Gorky, Leskov is looking for his "righteous" not where populist literature was looking for them, he is a stranger to the "idol liturgy of the peasant", he is looking for the righteous among "all classes and estates." Therefore, “Leskov managed not to please everyone: the youth did not experience from him the usual pushes “to the people”, - on the contrary, in the sad story “Musk Ox”, a warning was felt: “not knowing the ford, do not poke your head into the water”; mature people did not find in him “civil ideas expressed quite vividly, the revolutionary intelligentsia still could not forget the novels “Nowhere” and “On Knives”. It turned out that the writer, who discovered the righteous in every class, in all groups, did not like anyone and remained on the sidelines, in suspicion. Gorky's approach to Leskov's work is complex, imbued with historical dialectics. Gorky sees Leskov's weaknesses and sharply condemns them, but he sees them in an organic connection with the positive aspects, and therefore, not embarrassed by the extremes of Leskov's reactionary antics and sharply condemning them, in the writer's desire to know and artistically reproduce "Russia, all as it is ”, in “the breadth of coverage of the phenomena of life, the depth of understanding of its everyday mysteries”, he finds a deeply democratic sub-foundation of Leskov’s work.

When the leading press turned out to be closed to Leskov, he began to collaborate in such conservative journals as Katkov’s Russky Vestnik, Russkiy Mir, Grazhdanin, etc. But very soon he felt himself completely alien here, although, of course, for some time and in some respects fell under the influence of reactionary ideas and sentiments. In 1875, he already writes about Katkov as a person "harmful to our fiction", as a "murderer of native literature." Subsequently (in a letter to M. A. Protopopov, 1891) he tells about this sad period in the following way: man is not ours. We parted (on the look at the nobility), and I did not begin to finish the novel. We parted politely, but firmly and forever, and then he again said: "There is nothing to regret - he is not at all ours." He was right, but I didn’t know whose I was? .. I wandered and returned and became myself - what I am ... I was simply mistaken - I didn’t understand, sometimes submitting to influence, and I didn’t read the gospels well at all. Characteristic of this late, final assessment of one's ideological wanderings is the persistent opposition of one's own paths to social reaction, and no less characteristic is the conclusion: it turns out that it was all about insufficiently attentive reading of the gospel, that is, insufficient concentration on questions of the moral improvement of the individual. The weak sides of Leskov's historical development stand out with great force in this self-assessment, but it is precisely the spontaneous nature of these searches that is most clearly expressed. Undoubtedly, in the whole context of this confession painted in sad tones, the most expressive, effective and weighty interrogative phrase: "I did not know whose I am?" The sad overtones are probably largely due to the woeful dissatisfaction of the already old writer with the "extremes" and "excesses" of his own reactionary antics. According to M.P. Chekhov, the writer’s brother, Leskov advised the young A.P. Chekhov (Leskov undoubtedly felt quite clearly the continuity of whose work with his own artistic activity): “You are a young writer, and I am already old. Write only good, honest and kind, so that you do not have to repent like me.

Finding an imaginary "way out" from the collapse of old social ties in "moral self-improvement" is already characteristic of Leskov in the era of his polemics with the populists. Perhaps this controversy is expressed most sharply in Leskov's book The Mysterious Man (1870). This is a biography of Arthur Benny - the same revolutionary figure that Leskov portrayed under the name of Reiner in the novel Nowhere. While defending Benny from unfair suspicions of espionage, Leskov also defended himself from accusations of being reactionary. Benny and Nechiporenko "go to the people" - and complete ignorance of life, life, sorrows and joys, all the customs and habits of everyday life of ordinary people "theorists" is revealed. Leskov’s book goes on to say the following about Benny: “In prison, during his imprisonment, Benny, out of boredom, read a lot of Russian books and, among other things, read all of Gogol. After reading “Dead Souls,” he, returning this book to the one who delivered it to him, said: “Imagine that only now, when they drive me out of Russia, I see that I never knew her. I was told that I needed to study it this way and that way, and always only one nonsense came out of all these conversations. My misfortunes were simply due to the fact that I did not read Dead Souls in due time. If I had done this, at least not in London, but in Moscow, then I would be the first to consider it an obligation of honor to prove that in Russia there can never be such a revolution as Herzen dreams of. For Leskov himself, "Dead Souls" was one of the main, supporting books, a kind of "Russian gospel". Leskov seeks, as it were, to continue the search for Gogol, to go further than where Gogol left off. No less sharply than Gogol, in assessing Russian pre-reform reality, Leskov, like Gogol, seeks to correct real evils in the improvement of the individual, in his moral enrichment and rearmament. This is the conclusion that Leskov draws from his knowledge of Russian life, from his ideological searches and throwings. Leskov's artistic practice in the 1970s and 1980s, as before, turns out to be in fact much broader, more contradictory, complex and democratic than one might assume, considering only this conclusion. In Leskov's artistic practice of this period, the central problem is the problem of the "positive hero", the "righteous man".

It would be naive to limit this topic in the writer's creative searches only to the book The Righteous, which Leskov at the end of his life somewhat artificially constructed from stories about fifteen years of his life, even prefaced it with a special preface. The theme of the "righteous" in Leskov's work goes beyond the scope of this book, its origins are in the earliest works of art by Leskov, and it stretches, refracting in diversity, until the end of the writer's life. This theme was expressed sharply and distinctly in The Cathedrals (1872), followed by The Sealed Angel (1873) and The Enchanted Wanderer (1873). Leskov is looking for his positive heroes not at all where Gogol, and later Dostoevsky or Turgenev, looked for them, he looks for them in different strata of the people, in the Russian outback, in that diverse social environment, knowledge of life and attention to which, the ability to imbue the interests and the needs of which testify to the deeply democratic orientation of Leskov's creative searches.

First, under the obvious influence of Katkov's reactionary ideas, he turned to the life of the provincial Russian clergy: this is how the idea of ​​"Bozhedoms" arose, from which the "Soboryane" with Archpriest Tuberozov in the center emerged. It is clear, in connection with all that has been said above, that the general ideological and artistic conception of Soboryan, which, according to Gorky's definition, is a "magnificent book" is marked by extreme inconsistency. In the center of the story is a completely unexpected hero - the old provincial Russian priest Saveliy Tuberoza. The old archpriest is characterized by features common to a number of Leskov's heroes. On the one hand, there are features in him that are firmly associated with a certain everyday environment, he is emphatically “estate”, as is always the case with Leskov, his life path, his skills, customs are unthinkable anywhere except among the Russian clergy. The everyday beginning, very clearly and many-sidedly outlined, is here also the key to the human personality, to psychology, to the peculiarities of spiritual life - in this sense, the principles of constructing character are absolutely no different from those that we saw in “The Life of a Woman” or in “ Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. At the same time, Savely Tuberozov, no less than other heroes of Leskov, seems to have “broken out” from his environment. The old archpriest is a white crow in the circle of people and customs typical of the spiritual environment, the reader learns about this from the very first pages of his “life”. He does not behave at all in the way that an ordinary, ordinary Russian priest is supposed to behave, and, moreover, he does this literally from the very first steps of his activity. He is a man who "broke out" from the very moment he entered the active life of the class. A bizarre combination of a typical everyday personality pattern with riot, with obstinacy, sharply distinguishes Tuberozov's character building from Nastya or Katerina Izmailova, built according to the same scheme, despite the dissimilarity of these characters. This essential difference is demonstrated by a separate insert short story - the “demicotone book”, the high artistic qualities of which were especially noted by Gorky. The “Demicotonic Book” is the diary of old Tuberozov for thirty years of his pre-reform life (in the book the action takes place in the 60s). The entire "demicotonic book" is filled with variants of one life story - Tuberozov's incessant clashes with ecclesiastical and partly civil authorities. Tuberozov imagines his activity as a civil and moral service to society and people. With horror, the archpriest is convinced that the church itself evaluates its functions in a completely different way. The church administration is represented by a completely dead bureaucratic organization, which, above all else, seeks the outward fulfillment of ossified and internally meaningless rites and rules. The clash of a living person and a dead estate ritual: this is the theme of the “demicotone” book. The archpriest receives, let’s say, a solid service “reprimand” for daring in one of his sermons to present as an example to follow the old man Constantine of Pison, a man who, in his life, is an example of effective philanthropy. The official church is interested in everything, anything, except for what Tuberozov seems to be the very essence of Christianity, she meticulously monitors the performance of a dead ritual and severely punishes her servant who dares to look at herself as a worker assigned to a living cause. It is no coincidence that everything that happens in the "demicotone book" is mainly attributed to the pre-reform era. Leskov suggests that by the era of reforms, the same signs of internal decay appeared among the clergy as in other classes - the merchants, the peasantry, etc.

In the post-reform era, in the 1960s, the drama of the "broke out" archpriest develops into a genuine tragedy, the climax and denouement of which are conveyed by Leskov with great artistic power. The obstinate archpriest becomes more and more violent as the social contradictions in the country become aggravated. Persecuted by both ecclesiastical and civil authorities, the old priest decides to take an unusually daring (for the given social environment, of course) step: he calls all the officials of the provincial town to church on one of the official service days and spiritually “shames the publicans”: he delivers a sermon, in which accuses officials of an externally official, state-owned attitude towards religion, of "mercenary prayer", which is "disgusting to the church." According to Tuberozov, the life and daily activities of the officials gathered in the church reveal that this “mercenary prayer” is not accidental - in their very life there is not a drop of that “Christian ideal” that Tuberozov himself serves. Therefore, “it would be enough for me to take a rope and drive them out of those who are now selling in this temple.” Naturally, after this, both ecclesiastical and civil punishments fall upon Tuberozov. “Don’t bother: life is already over, life begins,” - this is how Tuberozov, who is taken away for punishment to the provincial town, says goodbye to his archpriest. The social, inter-class norms of the bureaucratic state came down in a climax on Nastya and Katerina Izmailova. The climax of "Soboryan" is the challenge thrown by Tuberose to social and inter-class relations. Particularly clear in these parts of the book is the literary analogy persistently pursued by Leskov and by no means accidental for the general concept of "Soboryan": the violent old-town archpriest clearly resembles the central character of the brilliant "Life of Archpriest Avvakum".

It is essential for understanding the general inconsistency of the ideological and artistic structure of Soboryan that the enemies of the frantic truth-seeker Tuberozov are not only spiritual and secular officials representing the administrative apparatus of the autocratic-feudal state, but also former “nihilists”. Moreover, the former "nihilists" act in the book together, in alliance with officials in cassocks and uniforms. Just like in the novels “Nowhere” and especially “On the Knives”, Leskov shows not the advanced people of the 60s, but the self-serving and anarchistic human scum that lives on the principle of “everything is allowed” and which is not shy about means in order to achieve its goals. small goals. Here, in depicting the intrigues of the officials Termosesov and Bornovolokov, whom Leskov persistently seeks to pass off as former representatives of the progressive social movement of the era, Leskov allows a rude attack on progressive social circles.

This mistake is connected with the general inconsistency of the ideological composition of Soboryan. Leskov does not consider the rebellion of Archpriest Tuberozov to be a random and private phenomenon: in this rebellion, according to the writer, the general crisis of the feudal system and the collapse of old class ties are reflected. When applied to Tuberozov, it is no coincidence that the word “citizen” is persistently used in the book, the recalcitrant clergyman himself interprets his frantic rampage as an act of civic service, the fulfillment of a public duty that arises before every person of any estate group in new historical conditions. According to the archpriest and the author himself, Tuberozov’s struggle with the Termasesovs, Bornovolokovs, and Prepotenskys is particularly acute, in that “the fruit from your loins is already growing,” as Tuberozov puts it, or, in other words, the actions of the Bornozolokovs and Termasesovs seem to Leskov one of forms of social crisis, which was also expressed in the pre-reform activities of people like Tuberozov himself. The Tuberozovs and the Bornovolokovs are fighting on the same historical ground, their different mode of action has the same social premise—the historical crisis of serfdom.

Tuberozov contrasts the deadening and disintegration of old social forms, the extremes of "nihilism" with the idea of ​​the spiritual originality of national development. According to him, the particular difficulty of the situation in the post-reform era lies precisely in the search for original ways of national development: “our allegorical beauty, external civilization, we simply got; but now, when it is necessary to get acquainted with another beauty, when spiritual independence is needed… and this beauty is sitting opposite her window, how shall we get her?” The original ways of national development, according to Leskov, presuppose a sense of unity and organic nature of national history. One of the central episodes of "Soboryan" is the episode with "Plodomasovsky. dwarfs ”, the story of a courtyard man, dwarf Nikolai Afanasyevich about his life with the noblewoman Plodomasova. Boyarynia Plodomasova is given by Leskov as an original, integral character of the serf era. She is smart, and brave, and even kind in her own way. She treated her yard dwarf well, but he was never a person, a person for her. She is ready to marry him for her amusement, becomes furious when this fails, she showers him with benefits, but it never occurs to her that the dwarf is not an instrument of her amusement or her benefits, but an independent person, with his own and rather complicated mental life. The originality of Leskovsky's construction here is that the dwarf rebels at the very moment when he, it would seem, is at the peak of prosperity: the noblewoman freed his entire family "from the fortress" and did him a favor in every possible way. Even a meek, humble dwarf realizes that these benefits themselves are a form of arbitrariness, a kind of whim, and that he himself, as a person, as a person, is not taken into account. Plodomasova crushed, extremely insulted the dwarf with beneficences caused by whim, arbitrariness, which took the form of "good". The distraught dwarf shouts in the face of his benefactor: “You! So it’s all you, cruel, therefore, you really want to crush me with your goodness! Later, after the death of Plodomasova, the dwarf recalls with tenderness about his "benefactor", and the more he is touched, the more terrible the reader. The offended human dignity broke through with anger only for a minute, then the idyll went on. The tenderness of a dwarf is a form of human dehumanization. Further, in the ideological conception of the book, a peculiar and very sharp turning point occurs: it turns out that the main problem in the fight against serfdom is the problem of personality, personal dignity. Personal dignity is acquired only in conscious unity, in connection with national historical development. Archpriest Tuberozov draws the following conclusions from what he told the dwarfs: “Yes, mind you, there is a lot, a lot of poverty in this, but it smelled of Russian spirit to me. I remembered this old woman, and it became so cheerful and pleasant, and this is my joyful reward. Live, my lords, Russian people, in harmony with your old fairy tale. Wonderful old story! Woe to him who will not have it in old age! A purely personal relationship, a purely personal conflict between a serf-owner and a slave - this is one of the forms of the "old fairy tale". The conflict finds resolution in the moral sphere. And in modern conditions it is necessary to rely in their struggle on the "old fairy tale", on the national identity of development, which is the source of the identity of the individual, the source of his moral perfection. Archpriest Tuberozov, in his revolt against the bureaucratically numb forms of the official church and dead statehood, relies on Archpriest Avvakum, on the "old fairy tale", on the "eternal" moral norms developed in the process of national development. His rebellion is a rebellion of a personality, bright, colorful and original, against dead social norms. Leskov contrasts the national and moral issues with the social issues - this is the source of the extreme ideological inconsistency of Soboryan. This also explains the presence of reactionary attacks against the progressive social camp on the pages of the book.

The most impressive pages of Soboryan are the story of the tragic death of a violent archpriest, who naturally turned out to be powerless in his lonely struggle with the church and police bureaucracy. Tuberozov’s ally in this struggle is the deacon Achilles Desnitsyn, who turned out to be “hard to tell our sleepy slumber when a thousand lives burn in him.” It is no coincidence that the deacon of Achilles is placed in the book next to the tragically concentrated in himself "righteous" Tuberozov. The deacon of Achilles, only by misunderstanding, wears a cassock and has an unusually comical appearance in it. Above all, he appreciates wild riding in the steppe and even tries to get himself spurs. But this man, who lives a direct, thoughtless life, for all his ingenuous brilliance, is also “wounded” by the search for “righteousness” and “truth” and, like the archpriest himself, will stop at nothing in serving this truth. Deacon Achilles, with all his appearance and behavior, no less than Tuberozov, testifies to the destruction of the old class, everyday and moral norms in the new era. The comical epic of Achilles' trip to St. Petersburg is by no means comical in its meaning: it is an epic of searching for the truth. Achilles and Tuberozov, as conceived by Leskov, represent different facets of the national Russian character that is united in their foundations. The tragedy of the archpriest lies in his irreconcilability. Even after an anti-church sermon in the temple, the matter could easily be settled. The ecclesiastical and secular bureaucracies are so rotten in their very essence that the decorum of order is most important to them. It was enough for the archpriest to repent, and the case would be dismissed. But the archpriest who “broke out” from his midst does not bring repentance, and even the death of the archpriest does not force him to repent. The petitions of the dwarf Nikolai Afanasyevich lead to the fact that Tuberozov was allowed to go home, but he still does not repent until the moment of his death. In the finale, it was not by chance that the figures of Plodomasov's dwarf and the frantic archpriest collided - they represent, according to Leskov, different stages of Russian life. When leaving their environment in the world of inter-class relations, Nastya and Katerina Izmailova turned out to be victims of the system that fell upon them. Tuberozov keeps his fate in his hands to the end and does not reconcile with anything. Compositionally, the book is structured differently than Leskov's early works. The theme of Tuberozov's rebellion, the theme of inter-class relations, within which the bright, adamant, implacable character of the hero stands out most clearly, has been developed the most. After the death of Tuberozov, the deacon Achilles wages a fierce battle for his memory in ways characteristic of his personality, as a worthy heir to the daring Zaporizhzhya Sich, and in this battle his national-peculiar character is also most clearly revealed, as the character of a “righteous man” and a “truth seeker”. In its conclusion, the "magnificent book" turns out to be a book of reflection on the peculiarities and peculiarities of the national character.

The theme of the "righteous" is solved in a different way in the things that followed the "Cathedrals". More and more, Leskov departs from the idealization of the “old fairy tale”, his critical attitude to reality deepens more and more, and, accordingly, the writer is looking for the “righteous” in a different environment. In The Sealed Angel (1873), the heroes are already Old Believers who are fighting against Orthodoxy, but the story ends with their transition to the bosom of the Orthodox Church. It was an obvious stretch. In 1875, Leskov told his friend from abroad that he had become a “changeling” and no longer burns incense to many old gods: “Most of all, he was at odds with churchism, on issues of which I read to my heart’s content things that are not allowed in Russia ... I will only say one thing, that had I read everything that I have now read on this subject, and listen to what I heard, I would not have written The Soboryan the way they are written ... But now it twitches me to write a Russian heretic - an intelligent, well-read and free spiritual Christian. Here he also reports that in relation to Katkov he feels something "which a literary person cannot but feel towards the murderer of his native literature."

As for The Sealed Angel, Leskov himself later admitted that the end of the story was “attached” under the influence of Katkov and did not correspond to reality. Moreover, in the final chapter of the Pechora Antiques, Leskov stated that in fact the Old Believer did not steal any icon and did not carry it through the chains across the Dnieper: “But it was really only the following: once, when the chains were already stretched, one Kaluga authorization from his comrades, went during Easter matins from the Kiev coast to Chernigov in chains, but not for an icon, but for vodka, which was then sold much cheaper on the other side of the Dnieper. Having poured a barrel of vodka, the brave walker hung it around his neck and, having a pole in his hands, which served him as a balance, safely returned to the Kiev coast with his tavern burden, which was drunk here to the glory of St. easter. The brave passage through the chains really served me as a theme for depicting desperate Russian prowess, but the purpose of the action and in general the whole story of the “Sealed Angel” is, of course, different, and I simply invented it. So, behind the "icon-painting" plot there is a completely different plot - a mischievous character. The combination of this kind of opposites is typical for Leskov: next to icon painting, there is a love for popular prints, for folk pictures, for manifestations of real Russian prowess. Describing his life in Kiev, he says: “I lived in Kyiv in a very crowded place between two churches - Mikhailovsky and St. Sophia, and then there were still two wooden churches. On holidays there was so much ringing here that it was hard to endure, and downstairs, along all the streets descending to Khreshchatyk, there were taverns and pubs, and on the site there were booths and swings. This combination is noted and emphasized by Leskov not without reason; it is reflected in all of his work, including in "Cathedrals": it is not by chance, as we have seen, that the mighty hero Achilles stands next to Tuberozov.

This is how Leskov's "difficult growth" gradually took place. In 1894, he wrote to Tolstoy that now he could not and would not write anything like "Soboryan" or "The Sealed Angel", but would gladly write "Notes of the Unshown"; “but this cannot be printed in our country,” he added.

Particularly important for understanding the meaning and further movement of the theme of the "righteous" in Leskov's work is the story "The Enchanted Wanderer" (1873). Here Leskov is already departing from the church theme: the black-earth hero Ivan Severyanych Flyagin, who looks like Ilya Muromets, a connoisseur of horses, a "non-lethal" adventurer, becomes a Chernorizian monk only after a thousand adventures, when he already "had nowhere to go." A long and seemingly incoherent story filled with a special and deep meaning - the vicissitudes of this human fate are so diverse and sometimes even inconsistent with anything - a story about the wanderings through the life of Ivan Flyagin. The starting point of these wanderings is the fortress, courtyard position of the hero. It is illuminated in a special, purely Leskian way. Behind the pressure of strange omens, will accept the mysterious "fate" hanging over the future wanderer, the reader sees the bitter truth of serf relations. Ivan Flyagin, at the cost of immeasurable dedication, saved the life of his master, but he can be mercilessly flogged because he did not please the owner's cat. Leskov does not particularly insist on this topic, the topic of offended personal dignity, because in this case he is interested in something else, he is interested in the further deepening and development of the same topic. The most important thing is that in the mind of Ivan Flyagin there is no reference point, no thread connecting the individual manifestations of his personality. It is not known how he will act in this or that case - he can act in one way or another. The internal vagueness of the norms of estate life is reflected here by the absence of moral and, in general, any other criteria of spiritual life. Chance is the main sign of Ivan Flyagin's "spiritual economy" at the beginning of his wanderings. Here is one of the episodes of the beginning of Ivan Flyagin's wanderings. Ivan guards and nurses a bureaucratic child, whose mother left her husband for a certain officer. The mother would like to take the child with her, Ivan does not succumb to any persuasion and is not flattered by any promises. It takes place on the seashore, and suddenly Ivan notices that "a light lancer is walking along the steppe." This officer goes to the aid of his beloved. The only thought that arises in Ivan is “I wish I could play with him out of boredom”, “God willing, we’ll fight for our pleasure.” And Ivan really provokes a fight in the most brazen way. But as soon as an official, the father of the child, appears, with pistols aimed at an opponent, Ivan grabs the child in an armful, catches up with the officer and his lover who had just been mortally insulted by him and runs away with them. This is not the voice of conscience suddenly speaking, but pure and, so to speak, consistent and boundless chance, as the only norm of inner life. It is this complete indifference to both good and evil, the absence of internal criteria, that drives the wanderer around the world. The randomness of the external vicissitudes of his fate is organically connected with the peculiarities of the wanderer's inner world. This type of consciousness itself was created by the disintegration of old social ties.
Article author: P. Gromov, B. Eichenbaum

The epic of the wanderer is at the same time (and this is its main theme) the search for new connections, the search for high moral standards. As a result of "going through pain", wandering, Ivan Flyagin acquires these high moral standards. What matters is how he finds them. The culmination of the wanderer's spiritual drama is his meeting with the gypsy Grusha. This meeting is preceded by an extreme degree of spiritual emptiness, expressed in senseless and wild binges. Accidentally met in a tavern by a man from the "noble", a declassed nobleman-tramp, Ivan Flyagin asks to save him from this illness, and he saves him (the plot of The Enchanted Wanderer is generally marked by the features of a fairy tale epic). The drunkard is a “magnetizer” and pronounces in words the meaning of what is happening with Flyagin. His drinking, as well as the fall of the “magnetizer” himself, is a consequence of emptiness and the loss of old social ties. As the wanderer tells, the "magnetizer" "brought the drunken demon away from me, and put the prodigal one before me." Flyagin selflessly, with infinite readiness to serve another person, fell in love with Grusha, a gypsy. In another person, in infinite respect for him, admiration for him, the wanderer found the first threads of ties with the world, found in high passion, completely free from egoistic exclusivity, and his personality, the high value of his own human individuality. From here - a direct path to love, even wider and more comprehensive - love for the people, for the motherland. The epic of "going through the torments" turned out to be a drama of searching for ways to serve the motherland. Straniiik got to the monastery not by vocation, religious fanaticism, not because the fabulous “fate” judged so. He got there because "there was nowhere to go" to a man who had broken out of his midst. He makes speeches that are completely uncharacteristic of a monk: “I read in the newspapers that peace is constantly being affirmed everywhere both here and in foreign lands. And then my petition was fulfilled, and I suddenly began to understand that what was spoken was approaching: “when peace is spoken, all-destruction suddenly attacks,” and I was filled with fear for the Russian people ... "At the end of the story, Flyagin tells the audience that he is going to go to war:" I really want to die for the people.” To the question: “How are you: in a klobuk and in a cassock, will you go to war?” - he calmly answers: “no, sir; Then I'll take off my hood and put on my armor." This is not so much a "story" as an epic, which has a fabulous basis: about a hero-hero, to whom death is not written in his family, despite the constant dangers. From here - a direct path to the "Non-lethal Golovan" and to the further "righteous" Leskov, who are strong in that, without suspecting it themselves, they turn out to be bearers of high moral qualities. It is they, from the point of view of Leskov, who are the creators of Russian life and history, and that is why the writer himself, with such energy and passion, “sorts out people” in order to find support for the future among them.

Thus, the theme of the "righteous" in the work of Leskov as a whole is extremely significant. In it, in this topic, the writer's desire is expressed to find, in the era of the collapse of old social ties, new norms of behavior, morality, and, more broadly, a new national self-determination. And from this point of view, the movement, development, change of this theme in Leskov's artistic work is extremely important and revealing. More and more clearly, the conservative narrow-mindedness disappears from the image of the “righteous man”, which for a while obscured the social significance of the search for a positive hero from Leskov. This conservative limitation in a number of cases determined the iconographically stylized solution to the theme of the “righteous man”, the idealization of “humility” and “submission”, which sometimes bordered on the artistic plane (this is especially noticeable in Leskov’s favorite genre of “lives” at one time); with sweetness. From this point of view, the replacement of Archpriest Tuberozov by the wanderer Ivan Flyagin quite clearly reveals shifts in the writer's creative consciousness. For the further movement of the topic, the most important thing is that Leskov's "righteousness" is increasingly democratized. The writer seeks to find a "righteous person" in a "breaking out" person of any class, overcoming the limitations of class norms - M. Gorky wrote well about this, who considered such a solution to the problem to be Leskov's special advantage.

Fundamentally important for Leskov's democratic tendencies is the fact that "righteousness" in the writer's view is associated with the creative attitude of a simple Russian person to work, with a kind of "artistry" in work. Already Ivan Flyagin was characterized as a man-artist; True, the question arose about this feature of character in terms of the general attitude of the hero to life, the general features of his place and behavior in life. Hence the theme of "enchantment", "easy", artistic attitude to life. This side of Leskov's staging of the theme is also preserved in things that specifically demonstrate the labor prowess, scope and artistry of a simple Russian person. In this regard, Leskov's "The Tale of the Tula Oblique Lefty and the Steel Flea" (1881) is very typical of Leskov. Labor virtuosity here becomes a true art, artistry. But not without bitterness (or rather, perhaps, bitter irony), Leskov emphasizes in this virtuoso labor skill the features of eccentricity, almost eccentrics. The result of miraculous labor skills is completely useless, and, in the clearest way demonstrating the creative possibilities, creative imagination, artistic skill of a simple Russian person in work, the plot of Leskovsky's work shows at the same time how stupidly, irrationally, senselessly the life-giving spring of people's talent is used under the existing social system . The plot, which at first glance seemed “eccentric”, “eccentric”, begins to play with bright social colors. But the “eccentricity” itself here is not an accidental paint. After all, it also expresses the same social theme, refers to those "riddles of Russian life", the great master of solving which Leskov Gorky considered. After all, talent acquires an eccentric, eccentric form quite naturally; it is not for nothing that Leskov loves people of strange, unusual professions so much (“Darner”, 1882). In the special conditions of the ossified, artificially preserved class life, the adherence to traditional class norms and the “breaking out” of them take extreme eccentric forms. Leskovsky "eccentrics" and "eccentrics" testify to the writer's great and varied knowledge of Russian life. Leskov narrates merrily and captivatingly about how a steel flea is made, the reader must be "infected" - and "infected" by the cheerful, artistic attitude of the characters to their work. But at the same time, the reader should become bitter at the end of the story: the story of a senselessly wasted talent is essentially tragic. Leskovsky's "grotesque" is filled here with a deep social meaning.

Leskov's movement "to the left", the saturation of his work with critical elements in relation to the reality of autocratic Russia, is very clearly seen in the story of the Tula craftsman. Therefore, the apparently mischievous story organically includes the national-patriotic theme, which is so essential for Leskov, which sounds completely different here than in the things of the late 60s and early 70s. The left-hander, who has been in England, asks before his death to tell the sovereign that the British do not clean their guns with bricks: “Let them not clean ours either, otherwise, God forbid, they are not good for shooting.” These words were not conveyed to the sovereign, and the narrator adds on his own behalf: “And if they had brought Levsha’s words to the sovereign in due time, in the Crimea, in a war with the enemy, a completely different turn would have turned out.” A simple craftsman worries about the interests of the country, the state, the people - and indifference, indifference characterizes representatives of the social elite. "Skaz" has the form of a popular print, a stylization, but its theme is very serious. The national, patriotic line of things is decided quite differently than in The Cathedral. There it was given as an "old fairy tale", it was not differentiated socially, it was opposed to "nihilism". Here it is socially concretized: the social tops treat the national interests of the whole people with disdain, the social bottoms think stately and patriotically. Social and national themes no longer oppose each other, they have merged. Merging was achieved by a rather sharply expressed critical attitude towards reality by the 1980s.

In another aspect, an equally sharp increase in critical tendencies and a new filling of the theme of "righteousness" is reflected in "The Man on the Clock" (1887). The soldier Postnikov, who was on duty in the palace guard (the circumstance is emphasized that this standing is completely meaningless), saved a man who was drowning in the Neva opposite the palace. Around this incident, an extraordinary bureaucratic pandemonium arises, as a result of which the medal "For the salvation of the drowning" is received by an outsider, a rogue officer, and the real savior is punished with two hundred rods and is very pleased that he so easily got out of the bureaucratic machine, which could completely destroy him. Very high-ranking secular and clergy persons were drawn into the analysis of the incident (among them, the figure of the well-known reactionary, Metropolitan Filaret Drozdov, is distinguished by a special virtuosity of satirical treatment), who unanimously approve of the outcome, because “punishment on the body of a commoner is not destructive and does not contradict either the custom of the peoples, or the spirit of scripture,

The theme of "righteousness" is here; is overgrown with sharply satirical material, which, in turn, is solved purely in Leskovian style - a simple person who has accomplished a feat of good without expecting "rewards for it anywhere" is given a huge personal insult, but he is glad, because the autocratic order is so terrible that the "righteous" should already rejoice in the fact that he carried off his feet.

That special ideological approach to the phenomena of social life, which is characteristic of Leskov's mature work, determines the writer's original, original approach to the problems of artistic form. Gorky saw the most important distinguishing feature of Leskov, the master of form, in the principles of his solution: the problem of poetic language. Gorky wrote: “Leskov is also a magician of words, but he did not write plastically, but by telling, and in this art he has no equal. His story is a spiritualized song, simple, purely Great Russian words, descending one with the other into intricate lines, now thoughtfully, now laughingly ringing, and you can always hear in them a quivering love for people, covertly tender, almost feminine; pure love, it is a little ashamed of itself. The people in his stories often talk about themselves, but their speech is so amazingly lively, so truthful and convincing that they stand before you just as mysteriously tangible, physically: clear, like people from the books of L. Tolstoy and others - in other words, Leskov achieves the same result, but with a different technique of skill, "Leskov wants the Russian person to speak for himself and for himself - and, moreover, the estate of a simple person who does not look at himself from the side, as the author usually looks at his characters, He wants, so that the reader listens to these people themselves, and for this they must speak and tell in their own language, without the intervention of the author. There should not be a third, outsider between the hero and the reader; if a special narrator is needed (as in Lefty), then he must be from the same professional or exiled milieu as the hero. Therefore, special introductions, or beginnings, are so characteristic of his works, which prepare the further narration on behalf of the narrator. “The Sealed Angel” begins with a conversation in an inn, where an earth blizzard has brought travelers of various ranks and occupations; from this conversation arises the story of the Old Believer in a manner appropriate to him. In The Enchanted Wanderer, the entire first chapter is a preparation for the further story of the Chernoriz hero about how he "died all his life and could not die in any way." The first edition of Lefty opened with a special preface (later removed), where Leskov reported that he “recorded this legend in Sestroretsk according to a local tale from an old gunsmith, a native of Tula, who moved to the Sestra River back in the reign of Emperor Alexander the First ... He willingly recalled antiquity, lived "according to the old faith", read divine books and bred canaries. As it turned out from the special "literary explanation" that was needed in connection with the conflicting rumors about Lefty, there was in fact no such narrator, and Leskov invented the whole legend himself; it is all the more characteristic and significant that he needed such an imaginary narrator.

Leskov himself spoke very clearly and precisely about this peculiarity of his, which so distinguished his works from the then dominant genres of the novel and the story: In myself, I tried to develop this skill and, it seems, I reached the point that my priests speak in a spiritual way, peasants - in a peasant way, upstarts from them and buffoons - with frills, etc. From myself, I speak the language of old tales and church-folk in purely literary speech ... It is rather difficult to study the speeches of each representative of numerous social and personal positions ... The language in which many pages of my works are written was not composed by me, but was overheard from a peasant, from a semi-intellectual, from rhetoricians, from holy fools and saints. After all, I have been collecting it for many years based on catchphrases, proverbs and individual expressions caught on the fly in the crowd, on barges, in recruiting offices and monasteries ... I carefully and for many years listened to the pronunciation and pronunciation of Russian people at different levels of their social status. They all speak to me in their own way, and not in a literary way. As a result, Leskov's language acquired an unusual diversity and often seemed to his contemporaries "pretentious", "excessive". In fact, it reflected the national and historical complexity of Russian life, which attracted the main attention of Leskov and was very important for the post-reform era, the era of revision and restructuring of all intra-national, social and international relations.

Leskovsky's special "technique of mastery" affects, of course, not only the language and is determined not only by the solution of narrowly linguistic problems. The new ideological function of a hero from different strata of the people forces Leskov to solve the problems of composition, plot, and character in a new way. We saw how boldly and in his own way Leskov solves questions of composition already in his early works. The more profound Leskov's approach to the problems of social and national life that concerns him, the bolder and more original Leskov solves the issues of plot, composition, and characters. Things Leskov often confuse the reader when trying to determine their genre nature. Leskov often blurs the line between newspaper journalistic articles, essays, memoirs and the traditional forms of "high prose" - a story, a short story. This has its own special ideological meaning. Leskov seeks to create the illusion of a genuine historical existence of people living in a very diverse social environment, in dramatically shifting historical conditions. Leskov most of all wants to convince the reader of the socio-historical authenticity of quite sometimes bizarre faces, whose “eccentricity” is really due to the processes of breaking up the old Russian life and folding it into new forms. That is why he so often gives his things the form of a memoir, and here the memoirist himself acquires a special function. He is not just a witness to what is being told, he himself lived and lives in the same bizarre, unusual socio-historical conditions as those about whom the story is told, the author's self enters the circle of heroes not as a direct participant in plot events, but as if as a person as historically authentic as the heroes themselves. The author here is not a writer summarizing events, but an "experienced person", a literary character of the same social order as the characters; in him, in his consciousness and behavior, the same era of historical turning point is refracted, as in literary heroes in the proper sense of the word. The function of the author is to remove the "literary mediastinum" and lead the reader straight into the variegation of life itself. Leskov created his own special genre of literature, and his work in this direction greatly helped Gorky later, who also strove to write not a “novel” or “story”, but “life” itself. Traditional literary genres are most often poorly managed by Leskov. As M. Gorky rightly noted, “Nowhere” and “On Knives” are not only books of reactionary ideological content, but also books that are poorly written, banally written, bad novels.

It is generally recognized both in Soviet literary criticism and in old journalism and criticism that there has been a more or less drastic change in Leskov’s social position, a change that has been clearly visible since about the end of the 70s and the beginning of the 80s and is refracted in a variety of ways both in his creative and life paths. writer. In this regard, certain biographical facts are of particular public interest; related to this last period of Leskov's life. Living from the very beginning of his literary career on magazine earnings, materially poor, Leskov was forced for many years to be a member of the Scientific Committee of the Ministry of Public Education, despite a number of humiliating details of his career and meager pay for sometimes extremely laborious activities. However, for Leskov, greedy for diverse life impressions, inquisitive about the most diverse aspects of Russian life, this service also had some creative interest: he sometimes printed the departmental material that most interested him, subjecting him to journalistic or artistic processing. It was these publications that aroused the unfavorable attention of such pillars of autocratic reaction as K. P. Pobedonostsev and T. I. Filippov. Lighting that. Leskov attached to the facts he published, far from coinciding with the intentions and aspirations of the government leaders. Dissatisfaction with Leskov's literary activity especially intensified at the beginning of 1883, apparently in connection with Leskov's speeches on questions of church life. The Minister of Public Education, I. D. Delyanov, was instructed to "reason" the masterful writer in the sense that Leskov would adjust his literary activity to the types of government reaction. Leskov did not succumb to any persuasion and categorically rejected the inclinations of the authorities to determine the direction and nature of his literary work. There was a question about resignation. In order to give the case a decent bureaucratic guise, Delyanov asks Leskov to file a letter of resignation. The writer resolutely rejects this proposal as well. Frightened by the threat of a public scandal, the confused minister asks Leskov why he needs to be dismissed without a petition, to which Leskov replies: “It is necessary! At least for obituaries: mine and… yours.” The expulsion of Leskov from the service caused a well-known public outcry. Of even greater social significance, undoubtedly, was the scandal that broke out during the publication by Leskov, already at the end of his life, of the collected works. The publication of a ten-volume collected works undertaken by the writer in 1888 had a double meaning for him. First of all, it was supposed to sum up the results of his thirty-year creative path, the revision and rethinking of everything he created over these long and turbulent years. On the other hand, having lived after his retirement exclusively on literary earnings, the writer wanted to achieve a certain material security in order to focus all his attention on the realization of the final creative ideas. The publication was started, and things went well until the sixth volume, which included the chronicle "The Seedy Family" and a number of works interpreting issues of church life ("Trifles of Bishop's Life", "Diocesan Court", etc.). The volume was seized, as anti-church tendencies were seen in its content. For Leskov, this was a huge moral blow - there was a threat of the collapse of the entire publication. At the cost of removing and replacing things objectionable to censorship, after long ordeals, the publication was saved. (The part of the volume that was confiscated by the censorship was subsequently, apparently, burned.) The collected works were a success and justified the hopes placed on him by the writer, but the scandalous story with the sixth volume cost the writer dearly: on the day when Leskov found out about the arrest of the book, he was with him for the first time , according to his own testimony, there was an attack of illness, a few years later (February 21 / March 5, 1895) that brought him to the grave.

The change in Leskov's literary and social position in the last period of his life is also characterized in a certain way by the range of journals in which he is published. Magazines that previously turned away from him are interested in his cooperation. More often than not, his writings are even overly harsh in their critical tendencies for the liberal press; for this reason, some of his artistically perfect creations never saw the light of day before the revolution, including such a masterpiece of Leskov's prose as "Hare Remise".

The sharp increase in critical tendencies in the last period of Leskov's work is especially pronounced in a whole group of works created by him at the end of his life. A number of lines in Leskov's artistic work of the 1970s and 1980s lead directly to this rise of progressive aspirations, especially the satirical line. Due to the peculiar qualities of his stylistic (in the broad sense of the word) manner, talking about satire as a clear genre variety in relation to Leskov has to be somewhat conventional; elements of satire are to some extent inherent in most of Leskov's works. And yet, one can talk about things that are actually satirical, such as, for example, the story "Laughter and Sorrow" (1871). This story, with all the specifics of its genre coloring, is close in many ways to The Enchanted Wanderer: its main theme is the theme of accidents in the personal and social fate of a person - accidents due to the general way of life. In The Enchanted Wanderer, this theme was solved mainly in a lyrical and tragic aspect: “Laughter and Sorrow” give an advantage to the satirical aspect. Some researchers of Leskov's work come to the conclusion that the satire in Leskov's work is somewhat softened and toothless. This conclusion can be drawn only by ignoring the specifics of the tasks of Leskov the satirist. The fact is that Leskov never satirically ridicules an entire public institution, an institution, a social group as a whole. He has his own way of satirical generalization. Leskov's satire is based on showing a sharp discrepancy between the dead canons, norms, establishments of this or that social institution and the vital needs of the individual. As in the lyric-epic genres, the problem of personality in Leskov's satirical experiments is the center of the entire ideological construction of the thing.

Thus, for example, in Iron Will (1876), the reactionary features of Prussianism are subjected to sharp satirical ridicule: its colonialist tendencies, its wretched "master morality", its chauvinistic insignificance. But even here, in the work, perhaps most sharply demonstrating the satirical possibilities of Leskov's talent, in the center of the narrative is what Prussianism turns out to be for its bearer as a person. The more life hits the dull, wooden principles of Pectoralis, the more stubbornly and fiercely he defends these principles. In the end, the complete stifled emptiness of the hero is revealed: he is not a man, but a puppet on a leash of meaningless principles.

If you do not particularly think about the meaning of Leskov's satirical assignment in "Trifles of Bishop's Life" (1878), then these essay sketches at first glance may seem completely harmless. It may even seem strange that this book so agitated the highest spiritual hierarchy and, by order of spiritual censorship, was delayed in publication and burned. Meanwhile, Leskov's task here is extremely poisonous and really satirical in Leskov's way. With the most innocent look, the author tells how bishops fall ill with indigestion, how they treat prominent officials with selected wines, almost breaking into a dance, how they take exercise to combat obesity, how they do good only because the petitioner managed to to find a weak spot in their likes and dislikes, how petty and ridiculous they are at enmity and compete with secular authorities, etc. The selection of small, at first glance, everyday details, skillfully recreating the everyday existence of spiritual officials, is subject to a single task. Leskov, as it were, consistently exposes the masquerade of external forms by which the church artificially separates itself from the ordinary philistine Russian life. Quite ordinary philistines are found, who absolutely do not differ in any way from those who look after the name of spiritual children. The colorlessness, emptiness, banality of ordinary philistine life, the absence of any bright personal life - this is the theme that permeates seemingly innocent everyday sketches. It turns out really a satire, very offensive to those who are depicted, but the satire is special. All this is a shame for the clergy, first of all, because the reason for the masquerade is quite clearly exposed - special forms of clothing, language, etc. This masquerade is needed because, in essence, an ordinary bishop is absolutely no different from an ordinary tradesman or an ordinary official. There is not even a glimpse of the main thing that the bishop officially represents - the spiritual life. The spiritual principle is likened here to a cassock - under the cassock is hidden an ordinary official with indigestion or hemorrhoids. If among the Leskovsky bishops there are people with a humanly pure soul and a warm heart, then this applies exclusively to their personal qualities and has nothing to do with their service and professional functions and official social position. On the whole, Leskov, in his own special ways, exposes the everyday ritual of church life, in many respects close to the “tearing off the masks” that Leo Tolstoy later carried out so vividly and sharply.

Towards the end of Leskov's life, the satirical line of his work sharply intensifies and at the same time its internal connection with those big questions of Russian life and Russian national history that the writer solved in other plans of his work clearly appears. And from this point of view, the history of his rapprochement and his differences with Leo Tolstoy is important and indicative for understanding his ideological and artistic evolution. The proximity of Leskov at a certain stage of his creative development with Tolstoy is by no means accidental. In the very paths of the historical movement of Tolstoy and Leskov there were elements of undoubted similarity, determined by the social position of each of these great artists within a single segment of Russian life saturated with contradictory content. Therefore, in the socio-historical and moral searches of Leskov in the 60s and 70s, one can find many elements that, in the era of a sharp turning point in Leskov’s views, will organically bring him closer to an even greater degree, already directly and directly with Tolstoy. The writer himself stated the following on this occasion: “Leo Tolstoy was my benefactor. I understood a lot before him, like him, but I was not sure that I was judging correctly.

But Leskov did not turn into a Tolstoyan. Moreover, the initial ardor of passion has passed, sobering has come. Leskov speaks ironically about Tolstoyism and especially about the Tolstoyans. It is no coincidence that in the late story "Winter Day", varying several times, there appears, in relation to Tolstoy, an ironic phrase - "the devil is not so terrible as his babies"; Leskov states directly that he does not agree with Tolstoyism as a set, a system of views: “he wants, and his son, and the Tolstoyans, and others - he wants what is higher than human nature, which is impossible, because such is our nature.” For Leskov, Tolstoyism is unacceptable as a dogma, as a program, as a utopian recipe for the restructuring of human nature and human relations. If you take a closer look at the cycle of his last, most acute socially things, it will be found that Tolstoy strengthened in Leskov the sharpness of his critical view of reality, and this was Tolstoy's main significance for Leskov's evolution. In Leskov's last works, the heroes, in whose behavior there is a noticeable desire to realize those elements in Tolstoyism that Leskov considered valuable, socially necessary, appear as a counterbalance to those pictures of social and domestic decay that he draws, appear as a kind of moral measure by which; forms of life unworthy of man are being tested and exposed.

A group of Leskov's last works - such as Midnight Men (1891), Improvisers (1892), Yudol (1892), Administrative Grace (1893), Corral (1893), Winter Day (1894) ), “Hare Remise” (1894), shows us an artist who not only reveals the untruth of social relations with the objective content of his work, but also consciously fights against social evil. In this cycle of works, the most important topics that worried Leskov throughout his entire work arise anew - questions of serfdom and its consequences for the life of post-reform Russia, questions of the collapse of old social ties and the consequences of this collapse for the human personality, the search for a morally full existence of a person in an environment of decay of old and the formation of new forms of life, and finally, the questions of the features of the national-state development of Russia. All these questions are solved by the writer in a new way, differently than before - the writer's struggle for progressive paths of socio-historical and national life appears more sharply, more definitely and more clearly. The peculiar features of Leskov's artistic work in these things sometimes lead researchers to underestimate the critical elements contained in them.

Thus, in application to the story "Midnight Occupants" one can sometimes hear the opinion that Leskov here gives a critique of the official ecclesiasticism, which is not very deep in its results. Meanwhile, the content of the "Midnight Occupants" is by no means exhausted by a satirical depiction of the activities of John of Kronstadt; the writer's intention is deeper and more complex, and it can only be comprehended by taking into account the whole originality of Leskovsky's construction, the integral concept of the whole thing. The activity of John of Kronstadt is by no means given here by chance against a certain social background, the figure of the famous official religious teacher just as naturally appears surrounded by a number of other, already fictional characters and in the refracted perception of a number of heroes, and only the totality of the relationships of the characters introduces the writer into the plan. The main character of the story, from whose lips we hear about all the events, is a certain Marya Martynovna, a host in a rich merchant's house. She resembles in the main features of her spiritual appearance the “warrior” Domna Platonovna, but only this Domna Platonovna is already at a completely different stage of her life, and the writer has already placed her in a different social life, and the writer draws conclusions about her somewhat different than he did about his early heroine.
Article author: P. Gromov, B. Eichenbaum

Marya Martynovna talks about things that are essentially terrible, but the most terrible thing of all is the imperturbable, unctuous tone in which she narrates. She talks about how the merchant family has become morally corrupted, how conscience is bought and sold, how moral convictions are wholesaled and retailed. All this takes place in the foyer of the “fall of papers”, “underground banks”, dubious financial transactions, expensive restaurants and brothels. A new stage in the life of Russia is shown not directly and directly, but in the perception of Marya Martynovna, and this is what can mislead an inattentive reader. What is important here is the person's personality, the impact on it of developed bourgeois relations. For Marya Martynovna there is nothing sacred, this is a completely empty soul, unlike Doina Platonovna, she is not at all an “artist”, she is chased in all this sodom only for her petty profit. The collapse and decay in the merchant's house Marya Martynovna wants to treat with the sermons of John of Kronstadt. The ironic definition of the genre of a thing by the writer himself is “landscape and genre”. The "landscape" and "genre" colored in a special way carry a really great ideological and semantic load here. The "landscape" in which the "doctor" appears is the Kronstadt hotel. It is given as a trading event, where they sell and buy holiness in an organized and systematic way. "Genre" is a story about the arrival of a "doctor" in St. Petersburg. Thirsty for spiritual healing arrange a wild stampede on the pier. "Doctors" are torn apart, seized and put into carriages, forcibly taken away to heal souls. It turns out that there is a system in this. Here, too, there is a joint-stock company - for a reasonable price, a "doctor" can easily be obtained through speculators organized in a society. Literally the same thing happens around religion that happens in “underground banks”, expensive brothels, and other similar institutions.

Finally, the “doctor” was brought to the “sick”. The young girl Klavdinka turned out to be ill, who does not want to live the way the people around her live, the dialogue between Klavdinka and John of Kronstadt constitutes the climax of the story. Klavdinka justifies her way of life with references to the gospel, rationally understood according to Tolstoy. John of Kronstadt, in the name of the way of life he defends, has to refute the gospel endlessly. John of Kronstadt is given here as one of the apex, most complete manifestations of that abomination, about which Marya Martynovna narrates. It is precisely this comparison that is most valuable here: John of Kronstadt is no different from Marya Martynovna, he just as coldly and prudently defends obvious social and moral abomination. Marya Martynovna and John of Kronstadt are put on the same level as phenomena of the same social and spiritual order. As a result, both were expelled from the merchant's house: John of Kronstadt was expelled politely but firmly by Klavdinka, Marya Martynovna, who embarrassed the merchant's surname, was expelled rather impolitely by the owners. Marya Martynovna has not changed her convictions in any way, I continue my activities of pandering, instigating all sorts of abominations, trading in officially organized holiness, no tragedy has happened to her. Domna Platonovna in her finale produces not so much a funny as a tragic impression. Marya Martynovna remained with all her qualities. Such ulcers are not healed in an individual way - this is the conclusion to which the writer leads. The life philosophy of Domna Platonovna's universal cynicism spread to wide circles in the decaying social elite. It is clear that Klavdinka's Tolstoyanism is only a moral measure of the fall of the social elite. Leskov's deep democratism has not ceased to be spontaneous. As before, he measures social decay with abstract moral norms. But he paints the processes of social disintegration themselves in a broader, sharper, more merciless way. And this is the secret of distrust towards the late Leskov on the part of liberal-bourgeois and liberal-populist circles. In the story "Winter Day" Leskov (draws the same "landscape" and "genre" already directly and directly, showing a bourgeois family where young men are sold to old women for money, and old women blackmail their former lovers for the same money. The money obtained by such By the way, dear young men use it to buy especially profitable stocks on the stock exchange.In "Midnight Men" this type of transaction was treated as the same type with the official religion. In "Winter's Day" the love and business hardships of lovely young men and withered ladies are unraveled by an old cocotte, majestic in appearance, who at the same time performs high state and diplomatic functions. Here, the autocratic-bureaucratic state in person is cooperating with the typical figures of the era of “destruction of papers” and “underground banks”. Regarding Winter Day, the editor of the liberal-bourgeois Vestnik Evropy wrote to Leskov: “... all this is concentrated in you to such an extent that it catches your head. This is a passage from Sodom and Gomorrah, and I do not dare to bring such a passage into the light of God. It is perhaps more frank to explain the reasons for the unacceptability of Leskov's "excesses" than the liberal Stasyulevich did, it is difficult.

Central in some important respects, the position among Leskov's later works is occupied by "Zagon" and "Improvisers". Here Leskov sums up the creative results of the topics that worried him throughout his life. "Zagon" is an essay type work, caused by a specific reason for public life - a frank statement by one of the members of the "Society for the Promotion of Russian Industry and Trade" in September 1893 that "Russia must separate itself", close tightly from general historical development. In the genre of sharp political feuilleton, with many highly artistic “memoir digressions” typical of his style, Leskov shows the objective social, social, class meaning of such theories. Leskov shows to what absurdities and in the name of what reactionaries of various persuasions resort to in order to justify social inequality. Thus, one of the reactionaries goes so far as to publish a pamphlet on the advantage of chicken huts over clean ones; the content of the pamphlet is retold with purely Leskovian malicious irony; “... evil spirits are running from the chicken hut, and even if a calf and a sheep stink, everything will be pulled out again by the door during the furnace ... And from soot, not only is there no small filth in the wall, but this soot has very important healing properties.” In a number of colorful "memoir" sketches, it is shown that the darkness of the people, who are resisting obviously expedient innovations, is caused by their social downtroddenness, that this darkness is artificially maintained by the defenders of serfdom: "the nobles were happy about this, because if the paradise peasants had accepted the blessings of their landowner differently, then this could serve as a harmful example for others who continued to live as obras and dulebs, "in the image of an animal." Such a seductive example, of course, was to be feared.

When creating Soboryan, Leskov contrasted national problems with social problems. Now he sees an organic internal connection between these two aspects of the artistic representation of reality. The reactionary interpretation of “national identity”, what Leskov himself used to call “an old fairy tale”, without which it is difficult for a person to live, is already interpreted in the works of the last period of his activity as one of the ideological tools of the feudal lords and industrialists, social characters such as the heroes of “Winter days." The "old fairy tale" turned into a "corral", it turned out to be one of the means of social struggle, one of the methods of social oppression, fooling the people. Leskov makes calculations with his own delusions of the era of the late 60s and early 70s. Its democracy is becoming broader and deeper, freeing itself from many preconceived, one-sided, incorrect ideas and assessments. The "Zagon" depicts not only the darkness and oppression of the people. Leskov shows here the ultimate degree of decomposition of the social upper classes. Secular ladies in a fashionable Baltic resort have discovered, in the person of the clever rogue Mifimka, a new “saint”, skillfully resolving them from “intimate secrets”. All these secret ailments and spiritual sorrows of the ladies clearly recall the moral atmosphere of "Winter Day". The darkness of ordinary people is understandable and curable, the darkness of the upper classes is disgusting and testifies to socio-historical degradation.

The same range of questions is summarized and sharpened in the story "The Improvisers", which is amazing in its tragic power. In "The Improvisers" it is also about darkness, prejudices, delusions. But even more sharply than in Zagon, the social origins of these delusions, these "improvisations" are revealed. Throughout his career, Leskov was occupied with the question of "classification", the erosion of the old classes - the estates of the serfdom era and the formation of new social groups in the era between 1861 and the first Russian revolution. In The Improvisers, a completely ruined peasant is shown, who has turned into the shadow of a man, into a crazy beggar, spreading rumors, "improvisations" about doctors who kill their patients. He does not believe in the "comma", in the microbe that causes epidemic disease. The true source of these improvisations is in declassification, in the complete loss of human face, caused by social deprivation, caused by the social process that V. I. Lenin called "depeasantization." V. I. Lenin wrote: “The entire post-reform forty years is one continuous process of this depeasantization, a process of slow, painful extinction.” (V. I. Lenin, Works, vol. 4, p. 396.) Leskovsky's "portioned peasant" is a vivid artistic illustration of this complex and multilateral process. More sharply than anywhere else in Leskov, the fall of a person from the old class framework and the tragic spiritual fruits of this are shown here: “Western writers do not at all know the most perfect people of this kind. A portioned man would be a better model than a Spaniard with a guitar. It was not a person, but some kind of moving nothingness. This is a dry leaf that has been torn off from some kind of icy tree, and now it is being driven and circling in the wind, and it wets it, and dries it, and all this again in order to drive and throw it somewhere further. The social elites are also subject to the wildest superstitions, and they are subject to them precisely because they have destitute and turned into nothing the "portioned peasant", and to them from their own devastation, corruption and inertia, from the fear of the "comma" not to pay off any alms. The main “comma” here, the cause of all troubles is social: “And that it was she, that same “comma” that we saw and did not recognize, and also put bread and two two kopecks in her teeth, then it was suddenly realized or the shopkeeper ". The question of the ways of Russia's national development, which always worried Leskov, merges organically here, at the end of Leskov's work, with questions of the social structure. The problem of moral responsibility that arises here at the sight of a “portioned peasant” is also given as a new solution to the problems of moral self-determination of the individual that are so significant for Leskov in conditions “when everything has turned upside down and is only just fitting in.”

Reflection on the historical destinies of the Russian national character could least of all be resolved by Tolstoy's "perfection of personality", Leskov himself understands that his new "righteous men" like Klavdinka from "Midnight Occupants" cannot be called in the full sense of the word found images of goodies. He is looking for this new positive hero. In The Sunny Day, the moral disintegration of that bourgeois family that Leskov portrays is opposed by a heroine very close to Klavdinka - the “white crow” in her circle, Lydia. Almost the author's conclusion, generalizing the theme of the belts of "righteousness" in Leskov's work, is the most important remark in the dispute between Lydia and her aunt. The aunt says: “What kind of characters have ripened,” Lydia answers: “Come on, ma tante, what kind of characters are these! Characters are coming, characters are maturing - they are ahead, and we are no match for them, And they will come, they will come! "Spring noise will come, cheerful noise!" Thus, the expression of faith in the great possibilities of the national Russian character, which will unfold in the progressive, progressive social development of the country and people, completes the theme of the search for righteousness in the work of the writer, whose entire path was the most intense social, moral and artistic quest. The thought of Russia, of the people, of its future was the main one throughout the complex, contradictory creative path of Leskov, replete with brilliant successes and gross failures.

Leskov sought in his work to comprehend the life of different classes, social groups, estates of Russia, to create a multicolored, complex, largely unexplored (in those aspects that he was especially worried about) image of the whole country in one of the most confusing and difficult periods of its existence. . From this stem the sharp contradictions of his creative path. The range of the national theme in Leskov is enormous. His work covers not only a variety of classes, professions and everyday conditions, but also the most diverse regions of Russia with the peoples inhabiting them: the Far North, Ukraine, Bashkiria, the Caspian steppes, Siberia, the Baltic states. For him, national and social themes are given not as a "landscape" and not as "morals", but as material for solving great historical and moral problems - for solving the question of the fate of Russia. His artistic work found recognition and a kind of continuation and development in the work of two great Russian writers, who managed to use a lot in his searches and finds in their own way and move forward, in accordance with the new historical era. Leskov's attention to the life of people of different classes, estates, social groups, professions, and household formations turned out to be very valuable for A.P. Chekhov, who, in somewhat different conditions, in his own way, differently than Leskov, sought to create the broadest picture of the life of Russia in its different, mostly untouched by anyone except Leskov, manifestations. At the end of his life, M. Gorky, sharing his experience with young writers, wrote: “I think that my attitude to life was influenced by each in his own way - three writers: Pomyalovsky, Ch. Uspensky and Leskov. One must think that for Gorky in the artistic work of Leskov, other aspects of it were of the most significant importance than for Chekhov. In historically different conditions and from completely different social positions, M. Gorky, as an artist, throughout his creative life was interested in the complex relationship between the class and the individual, between the class-defined, closed-class, traditionally immobile and historical dialectics of the disintegration of old classes and the formation of new ones. Gorky's images of "break out" people, "mischievous people", "eccentrics", people living "on the wrong street" - with all the historical corrections, are probably genetically related to Leskov's search in this direction. Thus, the ideological and artistic experience of the writer turned out to be valuable and fruitful in the history of literature, who in his work, as they say on the pages of The Life of Klim Samgin, “pierced all of Rus'.”

Shoe a flea, you can get acquainted with an enchanted wanderer only when you plunge into the artistic world of the famous writer Nikolai Semenovich. A brief biography of Nikolai Leskov allows you to understand what he talks about in his works.

Nikolai was born in the Oryol province in the small village of Gorohovo in February 1831. His mother came to this area to visit relatives, but it turned out that this visit also served as the birth of the future writer. Relatives were rich and prosperous people. It is worth noting that the Leskov family belongs in its origin to the clergy. So, all the men on the paternal side were priests in the village of Leska, which belongs to the Oryol region. Hence the name of the writer Nikolai Semenovich - Leskovy.

Leskov's parents are pious people, but they have a title of nobility. So, the father of the future writer Leskov Semyon Dmitrievich was a servant of the chamber of the criminal court, for such service he was granted the title of a nobleman. The mother of Nikolai Semenovich, Marya Mikhailovna, bore the surname Alferyeva as a girl, and belonged to a family where the noble family was passed down from generation to generation.

Born in the village of Gorokhovo, in the house of a close relative, Nikolai spent the first years of his life with the Strakhovs. Until the age of 8, he lived and was brought up with his cousins ​​and brothers, of whom he had 6 people. To teach children in this family, teachers were hired, both of Russian origin and German, as well as a Frenchwoman.

But soon Nikolai showed his talents and began to do much better in his studies than his cousins ​​and brothers. Of course, this state of affairs did not please the parents of the children, so very soon the future writer was disliked. Grandmother, the mother of Nikolai's father, wrote a letter to her son asking him to take the boy home. So, at the age of 8, the future writer finally got to the house of his parents, who at that time lived in Orel. But Nikolai Semenovich did not have to live long in this city, because the family soon moved to the Panino estate. So, his father was engaged in farming and farming, and Nikolai was sent to study at the Oryol gymnasium. The future writer at that time was 10 years old.

Nikolai Semenovich studied at the gymnasium for five years and proved himself to be a talented and gifted student, who was very easy to study. But in the 4th grade, he did not pass the exam well, and suddenly, unexpectedly for the teachers, he refused to retake it. As a result of this situation, he was issued a certificate instead of a certificate. It was impossible to continue his studies without a certificate, so he was forced to go to work.

Father helped Nikolai Semenovich find a position as a scribe in the Oryol Criminal Chamber. At the age of 17, he held the position of assistant clerk of the same chamber. But in 1848, Nikolai's father suddenly dies and another relative, Alferyev, wants to help in the future fate of the young man. The professor at Kyiv University was the husband of his mother's sister, and he offers Nikolai Semenovich to move to him in Kyiv.

Nikolai Semenovich accepted the invitation of a relative and already in 1849 he moved to Kyiv, where already in the Kyiv chamber he occupied the position of assistant clerk, but already on the recruiting table. And here, quite unexpectedly for all relatives, Leskov decides to marry. Parents try to dissuade him, but to no avail. His fiancee was the daughter of a well-known merchant in Kyiv, and besides, he was also a rich man. But the interests of the spouses, as it turned out later, turned out to be completely different, and the death of the first child only increased the gap between them. And already in 1860 this marriage practically did not exist.

But at the same time, his promotion begins: 1853 - a collegiate registrar, then a clerk. In 1856 he was provincial secretary. 1857 - an agent of the Schcott and Wilkins company, which was headed by Leskov's aunt's husband, an Englishman who came to Russia. On the business of this company, Nikolai Semenovich had to travel a lot, so he managed to visit many cities. He spent three years in this service and decided to try his hand at literary work. He enjoyed writing very much. But he did not want to publish his works under his real name, so he used the pseudonym M. Stebnitsky. But then he came up with other pseudonyms: Nikolai Gorokhov, V., Peresvetov, Freishits and others. For example, there were such interesting ones as the Watch Lover, or the Man from the Crowd.

In 1861, Nikolai Semenovich moved to St. Petersburg. He publishes his articles in the most popular magazines of the time. But, only after leaving his homeland, Leskov begins to write novels.

Nikolai Semenovich dies at the beginning of March 1895 in St. Petersburg. His death was not a surprise, because he had been suffering from asthma attacks for 5 years and he died from her next attack.

Nikolai Semenovich Leskov

Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov (1831 - 1895) - prose writer, the most popular writer of Russia, playwright. The author of famous novels, short stories and short stories, such as: "Nowhere", "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District", "On the Knives", "Cathedrals", "Lefty" and many others, the creator of the theatrical play "Spender".

early years

He was born on February 4 (February 16), 1831 in the village of Gorokhovo, Oryol province, in the family of an investigator and the daughter of an impoverished nobleman. They had five children, Nikolai was the eldest child. The writer's childhood passed in the city of Orel. After the father left the position, the family moved from Orel to the village of Panino. Here the study and knowledge of the people by Leskov began.

Education and career

In 1841, at the age of 10, Leskov entered the Oryol Gymnasium. The future writer did not work out with his studies - in 5 years of study he graduated from only 2 classes. In 1847, thanks to the help of his father's friends, Leskov got a job as a clerical clerk in the Oryol Criminal Chamber of the court. When Nikolai was 16 years old, his father died of cholera, and all his property burned down in a fire.
In 1849, with the help of his uncle, a professor, Leskov transferred to Kyiv as an official of the Treasury, where he later received the post of clerk. In Kyiv, Leskov developed an interest in Ukrainian culture and great writers, painting and architecture of the old city.
In 1857, Leskov left his job and entered the commercial service in the large agricultural company of his English uncle, on whose business he traveled most of Russia in three years. After the closing of the company, in 1860 he returned to Kyiv.

creative life

1860 is considered the beginning of Leskov's creative path, at this time he writes and publishes articles in various magazines. Six months later, he moves to St. Petersburg, where he plans to engage in literary and journalistic activities.
In 1862, Leskov became a permanent contributor to the Severnaya Pchela newspaper. Working in it as a correspondent, he visited Western Ukraine, the Czech Republic and Poland. He was close and sympathetic to the life of the Western twin nations, so he delved into the study of their art and life. In 1863 Leskov returned to Russia.
Having studied and observed the life of the Russian people for a long time, sympathizing with their sorrows and needs, Leskov wrote the stories “Extinguished Business” (1862), the stories “The Life of a Woman”, “Musk Ox” (1863), “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” (1865).
In the novels Nowhere (1864), Bypassed (1865), On Knives (1870), the writer revealed the theme of Russia's unpreparedness for revolution.
Having disagreements with the revolutionary democrats, Leskova refused to publish many magazines. The only one who published his work was Mikhail Katkov, editor of the Russky Vestnik magazine. It was incredibly difficult for Leskov to work with him, the editor ruled almost all of the writer's works, and some even refused to print at all.
In 1870 - 1880 he wrote the novels "Cathedrals" (1872), "The Mean Family" (1874), where he revealed the national and historical issues. The novel "The Seedy Family" was not completed by Leskov due to disagreements with the publisher Katkov. Also at this time, he wrote several stories: "The Islanders" (1866), "The Sealed Angel" (1873). Fortunately, "The Sealed Angel" was not affected by the editorial revision of Mikhail Katkov.
In 1881, Leskov wrote the story "Lefty (The Tale of the Tula Oblique Lefty and the Steel Flea)" - an old legend about gunsmiths.
The story "Hare Remise" (1894) was the last great work of the writer. In it, he criticized the political system of Russia at that time. The story was published only in 1917 after the Revolution.

Writer's personal life

Leskov's first marriage was unsuccessful. The writer's wife in 1853 was the daughter of a Kyiv merchant Olga Smirnova. They had two children - the firstborn, son Mitya, who died in infancy, and daughter Vera. My wife fell ill with a mental disorder and was treated in St. Petersburg. The marriage broke up.
In 1865 Leskov lived with his widow Ekaterina Bubnova. The couple had a son Andrei (1866-1953). He divorced his second wife in 1877.

Last years

The last five years of Leskov's life were tormented by asthma attacks, from which he later died. Nikolai Semenovich died on February 21 (March 5), 1895 in St. Petersburg. The writer was buried at the Volkovo cemetery

The Enchanted Wanderer ( 1873 )

Summary of the story

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On the way to Valaam on Lake Ladoga, several travelers meet. One of them, dressed in a novice cassock and looking like a "typical hero," says that, having "God's gift" to tame horses, he, according to his parents' promise, died all his life and could not die in any way. At the request of the travelers, the former koneser (“I am a koneser,<…>I am a connoisseur in horses and was with repairmen to guide them, ”the hero himself says about himself) Ivan Severyanych, Mr. Flyagin, tells his life.

Coming from the yard people of Count K. from the Oryol province, Ivan Severyanych has been addicted to horses since childhood and once “for fun” beats a monk to death on a wagon. The monk appears to him at night and reproaches him for taking his life without repentance. He also tells Ivan Severyanych that he is the “promised” son of God, and gives a “sign” that he will die many times and will never die before the real “death” comes and Ivan Severyanych goes to Chernetsy. Soon, Ivan Severyanych, nicknamed Golovan, saves his masters from inevitable death in a terrible abyss and falls into mercy. But he cuts off the tail of the owner's cat, which drags pigeons from him, and as a punishment he is severely flogged, and then sent to "an English garden for a path with a hammer to beat pebbles." The last punishment of Ivan Severyanych "tormented", and he decides to commit suicide. The rope prepared for death is cut off by the gypsies, with whom Ivan Severyanych leaves the count, taking horses with him. Ivan Severyanych breaks up with the gypsy, and, having sold a silver cross to an official, he receives a leave of absence and is hired as a "nanny" to the little daughter of a gentleman. For this work, Ivan Severyanych is very bored, leads the girl and the goat to the river bank and sleeps over the estuary. Here he meets the mistress, the mother of the girl, who begs Ivan Severyanych to give her the child, but he is relentless and even fights with the current husband of the mistress, an officer-lancer. But when he sees the angry approaching owner, he gives the child to his mother and runs with them. The officer sends the passportless Ivan Severyanych away, and he goes to the steppe, where the Tatars drive horse shoals.

Khan Dzhankar sells his horses, and the Tatars set prices and fight for horses: they sit opposite each other and whip each other with whips. When a new handsome horse is put up for sale, Ivan Severyanych does not hold back and, speaking for one of the repairmen, traps the Tatar to death. According to "Christian custom", he is taken to the police for murder, but he runs away from the gendarmes to the very "Ryn-Sands". The Tatars "bristle" Ivan Severyanych's legs so that he does not run away. Ivan Severyanych moves only by crawling, serves as a doctor among the Tatars, yearns and dreams of returning to his homeland. He has several wives "Natasha" and children "Kolek", whom he regrets, but he admits to the listeners that he could not love them, because they are "unbaptized". Ivan Severyanych completely despairs of getting home, but Russian missionaries come to the steppe "to establish their faith." They preach, but refuse to pay a ransom for Ivan Severyanych, arguing that before God "everyone is equal and it's all the same." Some time later, one of them is killed, Ivan Severyanych buries him according to Orthodox custom. He explains to the listeners that "the Asian must be brought to faith with fear," because they "will never respect a humble god without a threat." The Tatars bring two people from Khiva who come to buy horses in order to "make war." Hoping to intimidate the Tatars, they demonstrate the power of their fiery god Talafy, but Ivan Severyanych discovers a box with fireworks, introduces himself as Talafy, converts the Tatars to Christianity and, having found "caustic earth" in the boxes, heals his legs.

In the steppe, Ivan Severyanych meets a Chuvash, but refuses to go with him, because he simultaneously reveres both the Mordovian Keremeti and the Russian Nicholas the Wonderworker. Russians come across on the way, they cross themselves and drink vodka, but drive away the "passportless" Ivan Severyanych. In Astrakhan, the wanderer ends up in prison, from where he is taken to his hometown. Father Ilya excommunicates him for three years from communion, but the count, who has become devout, releases him “for quitrent”, and Ivan Severyanych settles in the horse department. After he helps the peasants to choose a good horse, he is famous as a magician, and everyone demands to tell the "secret". Including one prince, who took Ivan Severyanych to his post as a koneser. Ivan Severyanych buys horses for the prince, but from time to time he has drunken “exits”, before which he gives the prince all the money for the purchases to be safe. When the prince sells a beautiful horse to Dido, Ivan Severyanych is very sad, "makes a way out", but this time he keeps the money to himself. He prays in church and goes to a tavern, where he meets an “over-empty-empty” person who claims that he drinks because he “voluntarily took weakness on himself” so that it would be easier for others, and Christian feelings do not allow him to stop drinking. A new acquaintance imposes magnetism on Ivan Severyanych to free him from "zealous drunkenness", and at the same time gives him extra water. At night, Ivan Severyanych finds himself in another tavern, where he spends all the money on the beautiful songstress gypsy Grushenka. Having obeyed the prince, he learns that the owner himself gave fifty thousand for Grushenka, bought her out of the camp and settled in his house. But the prince is a fickle person, he gets bored with the “love word”, he gets sleepy from “yakhont emeralds”, besides, all the money ends.

Having gone to the city, Ivan Severyanych overhears the prince's conversation with his former mistress Yevgenia Semyonovna and learns that his master is going to marry, and wants to marry the unfortunate and sincerely loved Grushenka to Ivan Severyanych. Returning home, he does not find the gypsy, whom the prince secretly takes to the forest to the bee. But Grusha escapes from her guards and, threatening that she will become a "shameful woman", asks Ivan Severyanych to drown her. Ivan Severyanych fulfills the request, and in search of an imminent death he pretends to be a peasant son and, having given all the money to the monastery as a “contribution for Grushin’s soul”, goes to war. He dreams of dying, but "neither earth nor water wants to accept", and having distinguished himself in business, he tells the colonel about the murder of a gypsy. But these words are not confirmed by the sent request, he is promoted to an officer and dismissed with the Order of St. George. Using the colonel's letter of recommendation, Ivan Severyanych gets a job as a "reference officer" at the address desk, but falls on the insignificant letter "fit", the service does not go well, and he goes to the artists. But the rehearsals take place during Holy Week, Ivan Severyanych gets to portray the “difficult role” of the demon, and besides, stand up for the poor “gentlewoman”, he “pulls the whirlwinds” of one of the artists and leaves the theater for the monastery.

According to Ivan Severyanych, monastic life does not burden him, he stays there with horses, but he does not consider it worthy to take senior tonsure and lives in obedience. To the question of one of the travelers, he says that at first a demon appeared to him in a “seductive female form”, but after fervent prayers only small demons, “children”, remained. Once Ivan Severyanych kills a demon with an ax, but he turns out to be a cow. And for another deliverance from demons, he is put in an empty cellar for a whole summer, where Ivan Severyanych discovers the gift of prophecy in himself. Ivan Severyanych ends up on the ship because the monks let him go to pray in Solovki to Zosima and Savvaty. The Stranger admits that he expects an imminent death, because the spirit inspires him to take up arms and go to war, and he “wants to die for the people.” Having finished the story, Ivan Severyanych falls into quiet concentration, once again feeling the influx of a mysterious broadcasting spirit, which is revealed only to babies.

Nikolai Semenovich Leskov (1831-1895) is a famous Russian prose writer who became famous for the incredible closeness of his work to the people. He created a number of short stories, novels and short stories that made him famous.

Childhood

Nikolai Leskov was born on February 16, 1831. The circumstances were such that the village of Gorokhovka, located in the Oryol province, became the place of his birth.

It was here that his mother stayed with rich relatives. The boy spent the first eight years of his life with them. The tradition of staying for such a long time was quite normal in those days.

The father of the future writer seriously intended to connect his life with the clergy, but as a result he changed direction and by the time his son appeared he was serving in the criminal chamber. It was this service that gave him the right to a noble title in the future. Leskov's mother came from a noble family, but her father became impoverished and could not provide his daughter with a worthy dowry.

After the father's quarrel with the authorities and dismissal from the service, the family moved to the Panino farm. By that time, Nikolai already had two brothers and two sisters, and he himself was finally taken away from his relatives.

It was at the new place of residence that Leskov first saw the life of the people. He spent many days watching the work and leisure of the peasantry, imbued with their way of life, views and hopes. The boy's father contributed to this by the fact that he himself was engaged in hard work on the land: he sowed grain, worked at a mill, looked after the garden.

Studies

Leskov grew up as a very smart and quick-witted boy. Therefore, it turned out to be very strange that his studies at the Oryol gymnasium did not work out. The boy was able to finish only two classes, given that he spent five years in an educational institution.

Many literary critics claim that he was not interested in learning, memorizing texts. But there is a lot of evidence that, being very active and temperamental, Leskov simply did not know how to follow school rules and constantly clashed with teachers.

Be that as it may, but the young man went to free bread and had to somehow arrange his life.

Service

Leskov's adult life began with the help of his father. He placed his son in the criminal ward, in which he himself served and where he still had friends. However, the prosperity did not last long.

In 1848, the young man's father died of cholera. Almost all of the family's property burned down in a fire. Nikolai was a little over 17 years old when his uncle, a professor, helped him move to Kyiv and obtain a position as an official in the state chamber. Soon the future writer rose to the rank of head clerk.

Life in Kyiv led to the fact that the young man, with all the ardor of youth, began to study Ukrainian culture. He was occupied with absolutely everything: literature, art, painting, and architecture.

In 1857, Nikolai Semenovich decided to drastically change his life. He left the service and went to work in an agricultural company, which was headed by his English uncle (the husband of his mother's sister). As the writer himself says, it was a wonderful opportunity to see the world, which was used in those days by many who were eager to travel, but were not able to pay for them.

For three whole years, Leskov traveled around Russia, fulfilling the instructions of the company, but in fact, eagerly studying his native country and the life of its people. He managed to visit a large part of it and collect a huge material of observations, which he would never have been able to do while sitting in a dusty office. His voyage was interrupted in 1860 due to the closure of the company. Leskov returned to Kyiv.

Creation

Upon his return, Leskov began to write essays for various magazines. His work is successful. He decides to connect his future life with literary work and moves to St. Petersburg.

Becoming an employee of the popular newspaper "Northern Bee", Leskov again got the opportunity to travel. This time the geography of his wanderings was not limited to his homeland. The writer visited Poland, the Czech Republic and Western Ukraine. Everywhere he sought to study the local life, history, culture as deeply as possible.

Returning to his homeland, he plunges headlong into creativity. For the first time, he begins to write stories and novels: “Extinguished Business”, “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”, “The Life of a Woman”. The first novels come out from under his pen: Nowhere, Bypassed, At Knives.

Leskov's views in most cases differed from the official opinion of the state, so he was practically not printed anywhere. The only magazine in which his works were published was Russkiy Vestnik. But even here they were subjected to merciless censorship.

In 1881, one of the writer's most famous stories, Lefty, was written.

In 1984, he created his last story - "Hare Remise". Unfortunately, it was filled with criticism of the country's political system, so it saw the light only after the 1917 revolution.

Personal life

Leskov's personal life cannot be called successful. In 1853, he married for the first time, despite the fact that his relatives dissuaded him from this step. Olga Smirnova became his wife.

Perhaps they would have been happy, but the death of the first child, the son of Mitya, knocked down the young wife. Even the birth of the girl Varya did not save her from a mental disorder and a long treatment. As a result, the marriage broke up.

Leskov decided to marry again only in 1865. But this marriage did not last long. After the birth of their son Andrei and thirteen years of marriage, the couple still separated. The writer no longer tied the knot.

Leskov died in 1895 and was buried at the Volkovo Cemetery in St. Petersburg.

Russian ethnographer. Nikolai Semenovich Leskov was born on February 16 (February 4, according to the old style), 1831, in the village of Gorokhovo, Oryol province, where his mother was visiting rich relatives, and his maternal grandmother also lived there. The Leskov family on the paternal side came from the clergy: the grandfather of Nikolai Leskov (Dmitry Leskov), his father, grandfather and great-grandfather were priests in the village of Leska, Oryol province. From the name of the village of Leski, the family surname Leskovs was formed. The father of Nikolai Leskov, Semyon Dmitrievich (1789-1848), served as a noble assessor of the Oryol Chamber of the Criminal Court, where he received the nobility. Mother, Marya Petrovna Alferyeva (1813-1886), belonged to the noble family of the Oryol province. Nikolai had six cousins ​​and sisters.

The childhood years of Nikolai Leskov were spent in Orel and on the estates of the Oryol province owned by the parents. Leskov spends several years in the house of the Strakhovs, wealthy relatives from his mother's side, where he was given due to the lack of funds from his parents for homeschooling his son. The Strakhovs hired a Russian, a German teacher, and a Frenchwoman to raise their children. Leskov studies together with his cousins, and far surpasses them in abilities. This caused him to be sent back to his parents.

In 1841, he entered the Oryol gymnasium, but his studies were uneven, and in 1846, unable to pass the transfer exams, he began serving as a scribe in the Oryol Chamber of the Criminal Court. In those years, he read a lot, rotated in the circle of the Oryol intelligentsia. The sudden death of his father and the "disastrous ruin" of the family changed the fate of Leskov. He moved to Kyiv, under the tutelage of his uncle, a university professor, and began to serve in the Kyiv State Chamber. The influence of the university environment, acquaintance with Polish and Ukrainian cultures, reading A. I. Herzen, L. Feuerbach, L. Buchner, G. Babeuf, friendship with icon painters of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra laid the foundation for the writer's versatile knowledge.

1850 - Leskov marries the daughter of a Kyiv merchant. The marriage was hasty, the relatives did not approve of it. However, the wedding took place.

In 1857, Leskov began to serve in the private company of a distant relative, the Englishman A. Ya. Shkott. The commercial service required constant traveling, life "in the most remote backwoods", which gave "an abundance of impressions and a supply of everyday information", reflected in a number of articles, feuilletons, notes with which the writer appeared in the Kiev newspaper "Modern Medicine", in St. Petersburg magazines "Domestic notes" and "Index economic" (here in 1860 he made his printed debut). Leskov's articles dealt with practical issues and were mostly revealing in nature, which created many enemies for him. In the same period, the first-born Leskovs, named Mitya, dies in infancy. This breaks the relationship and so not very close to each other spouses.

In 1860, Schcott and Wilkens went bankrupt, and Leskov had to return to Kyiv. During commercial trips, Leskov accumulated a huge amount of material, which makes it possible to engage in journalism. He began to implement this project in Kyiv, but ambitions pushed him to a wider field of activity, and Leskov went to St. Petersburg.

1862 - a trip abroad as a correspondent for the newspaper "Northern Bee". Leskov visits Western Ukraine, Poland, Czech Republic, France.

In 1863, Nikolai Leskov's story The Life of a Woman was published in the Library for Reading magazine, then Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1864) and The Warrior Woman (1866). A little later, Leskov made his debut as a playwright. In 1867, the Alexandrinsky Theater staged his play The Spender.

In 1864, under the name of M. Stebnitsky, Leskov's novel Nowhere was published in the popular St. Petersburg magazine Library for Reading. The nihilists were superbly written in the novel, covering their rotten insides with revolutionary ideas and really only wanting to live at someone else's expense and mess around. Nihilism was then a very fashionable topic, many people wrote about it in different ways, but so evil and exactly no writer even tried to encroach on the shrines of the raznochintsy. Naturally, the authorship of Leskov quickly became known, and he was ranked among the reactionaries and agents of the Third Section.

1866 - the birth of his son Andrei. In the 1930s and 1940s, it was he who for the first time compiled a biography of his father.

In 1874, Nikolai Semenovich Leskov was appointed a member of the educational department of the Scientific Committee of the Ministry of Public Education; the main function of the department was "to review the books published for the people." In 1877, thanks to the positive feedback from Empress Maria Alexandrovna about the novel The Cathedral, he was appointed a member of the educational department of the Ministry of State Property.

Since the 70s, the topic of nihilism has become irrelevant for Leskov. If she still sounds strongly in The Cathedral, then in the following things - The Sealed Angel, The Enchanted Wanderer, At World's End and others - Leskov's interest is directed almost entirely towards church-religious and moral issues.

In 1880, Leskov left the Ministry of State Property, and in 1883 he was fired without a petition from the Ministry of Public Education. The resignation, which gave him independence, accepted with joy.

In 1881, Nikolai Leskov published his most famous "The Tale of the Tula Oblique Left-hander and the Steel Flea", which was considered by criticism for a simple recording of an old legend.

Gradually, Leskov, in his own words, "breaks with the church." At the same time, his worldview continued to be deeply religious. Leskov's sympathies for non-church religiosity, for Protestant ethics and sectarian movements especially intensified in the second half of the 1880s and did not leave him until his death. Against this background, Leskov draws closer to L.N. Tolstoy. As a result of the publication of a number of artistic and journalistic anti-church works, Leskov falls into final disfavor with censorship.

Soon, on the material of plots extracted from the Prologue (an old Russian collection of lives and legends), Leskov wrote a series of "legends" from the life of the first Christians ("The Tale of the God-Pleasing Woodcutter", 1886; "Buffoon Pamphalon", 1887; "Zeno the Goldsmith", 1890), turning them into an artistic sermon of the "well-read gospel". These works, along with many later novels and stories, permeated with rejection of "church piety, narrow nationality and statehood," strengthened Leskov's reputation as a writer of broad humanistic views.

Vegetarianism occupies a considerable share in the biography of Nikolai Leskov. After meeting L. Tolstoy, Leskov became a staunch vegetarian and published notes on vegetarianism. Nikolai Leskov is the creator of the first vegetarian character in Russian literature (the story "The Figure" in 1889), later introducing them into his other works.

March 5 (February 21), 1895 - Nikolai Semenovich Leskov dies in St. Petersburg. The cause of death is an asthma attack, which tormented the writer for the last 5 years of his life. He was buried at the Volkovsky cemetery.