Nikolai Leskov - Legacy

Legacy

Nikolai Leskov, now widely regarded as a classic of Russian literature, had an extremely difficult literary career, marred by scandals which resulted in boycotts and ostracism. Describing the Russian literary scene at the time Leskov entered it, D. S. Mirsky wrote:

It was a time of intense party strife, when no writer could hope to be well received by all critics and only those who identified themselves with a definite party could hope for even partial recognition. Leskov had never identified himself with any party and had to take the consequences. His success with the reading public was considerable but the critics continued to neglect him. Leskov's case is a striking instance of the failure of Russian criticism to do its duty.

After his 1862 article on the "great fires" and the 1864 novel No Way Out, Leskov found himself in total isolation which in the 1870s and 1880s was only partially relieved. Apollon Grigoriev, the only critic who valued him and approved of his work, died in 1864 and, according to Mirsky, "Leskov owed his latter popularity to the good taste of that segment of the reading public who were beyond the scope of the 'directing' influences". In the 1870s things improved but, according to B&EED, "Leskov's position in his last 12 to 15 years was ambivalent, old friends distrusting him, new ones being still wary. For all his big name, he wasn't a centerpiece literary figure and critics all but ignored him. This didn't prevent the huge success of the Complete Leskov." After the 10th volume of this collection was published, critic Mikhail Protopopov came up with an essay called "The Sick Talent". Giving Leskov credit for being a superb psychologist and a master of "reproducing domestic scenes", he rated him equal to Melnikov-Pechesky and Mikhail Avdeev. What prevented Leskov from getting any higher, the critic argued, were "his love of hyperbole" and what he termed "an overload of spices". At the time of his death in 1895 Leskov "had few friends in literary circles but a great many readers all over Russia," according to Mirsky.

In 1897 The Adolf Marks publishing house re-issued the 1889-1893 12-volume series and in 1902-1903 released the 36-volume version of it, expanded with essays, articles and letters. This, along with Anatoly Faresov's book of memoirs Against the Grain (1904), caused a wave of new interest in Leskov's legacy. Among writers who were mentioned as being influenced by him were Aleksey Remizov, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Andrey Bely, and the later Serapion Brothers, Mikhail Zoschenko in particular. In 1923 three volumes of Nikolai Leskov's selected works came out in Berlin, featuring an often-quoted rapturous preface by Maxim Gorky (who called Leskov "the wizard of wording"), and was re-issued in the USSR in early 1941.

For decades after his death the attitude of critics toward Leskov and his legacy varied, mostly according to political conjuncture. Despite the fact that some of his sharpest satires could be published only after the 1917 Revolution, Soviet literary propaganda found little to use in Leskov's legacy, often labeling the author a "reactionary" who had "denied the possibility of social revolution", placing too much attention on saintly religious types. For highlighting the author's 'progressive' inclinations Leftie (a "glorification of Russian inventiveness and talent") and The Toupee Artist (a "denounciation of the repressive nature of Tsarist Russia") were invariably chosen. "He is a brilliant author, an insightful scholar of our ways of life, and still he's not being given enough credit," Maxim Gorky wrote in 1928, deploring the fact that after the 1917 Revolution Leskov was still failing to gain ground in his homeland as a major classic.

The inability of the new literary ideologists to counterbalance demands of propaganda with attempts at objectivity was evidenced in the 1932 Soviet Literary Encyclopedia entry, which said: "In our times when the problem-highlighting type of novel has gained prominence, opening up new horizons for socialism and construction, Leskov's relevancy as a writer, totally foreign to the major tendencies of our Soviet literature, naturally wanes. The author of Lefty, though, retains some significance as a chronicler of his social environment and one of the best masters of Russian prose". Nevertheless, by 1934 Dmitry Shostakovich had finished his opera Katerina Izmaylova which caused a furore at home and abroad (to eventually be denounced in 1936 by Pravda). Before that, in 1929, Ivan Shyshov's opera The Toupee Artist (after Leskov's story of the same name) had been published and successfully staged.

In the post-World War II USSR the interest in Leskov's legacy was continually on the rise, never going, though, beyond certain censorship-set limits. Several scholarly essays came out and then an extensive biography by the writer's son Andrey Leskov was published in 1954. In 1953 the Complete Gorky series featured his 1923 N. S. Leskov essay which became the object of lively academic discussion. The 11-volume 1956-1958 (and then 6 volume 1973-1974) Complete Leskov editions were obviously incomplete: his political novels, No Way Out and At Daggers Drawn, were missing, with the included essays and letters being carefully selected. Yet, in fifty years time things changed radically. While in 1931, on Leskov's 100th Anniversary, critics wrote of the "scandalous reputation which followed Leskov's literary life from beginning to the end", by 1981 Leskov, according to the critic Lev Anninsky, was regarded as a first rank Russian classic and academic essays on him had found they're place in Moscow University's new course between those on Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy. In 1989 Ogonyok re-issued the 12-volume Leskov collection in which At Daggers Drawn appeared for the first time in the USSR. In 1996 the Terra publishing house in Russia started a 30 volume Leskov series, declaring the intention to include every single work or letter by the author, but by 2007 only 10 volumes of it had come out. The Literaturnoye nasledstvo publishers started the The Unpublished Leskov series: book one (fiction) came out in 1991, book two (letters and articles) - in 2000; both were incomplete, and the volume six material, which had been banned a century ago and proved to be too tough for the Soviet censors, was again neglected. All 36 volumes of the 1902 Marks Complete Leskov were re-issued in 2002 and Moshkov's On-line Library gathered a significant part of Leskov's legacy, including his most controversial novels and essays.