(1831-1895)

Russian storyteller, novelist, and journalist, who portrayed in his works a wide variety of characters from meek monks and religious fanatics to mad lovers, and from simple peasant to eccentrics, bureaucrats, and merchants. "Writing," Leskov once confessed in a letter, "is to me no liberal art, but a craft." In his stories Leskov revived narrative techniques and used colloquial and peasant speech. Leskov, who was un-doctrinaire and never became agnostic, criticized the Orthodox Church for its rigidity and was condemned by conservatives, but he was also rejected by leftist intellectuals, who considered him an outcast.