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Leskov and Tolstoy: Two Literary-Heretics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2017

William B. Edgerton
William B. Edgerton*
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State College
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Extract

“We are not sectarians, but heretics….”

Leskov to Lidija Veselitskaja, about himself and Tolstoy.

Probably no other writer in pre-Revolutionary Russian literature ever suffered so much at the hands of politically-minded critics as Nikolaj Leskov. He once said that the role of the writer is to struggle against the prevailing current of his time, and his own career illustrates both the application of that principle and its consequences. His independent attitude toward all intellectual fashions, whether nihilism in the 1860's or conservatism in the 1880's, led single-minded Russians of various political colors to suspect him of hypocrisy and duplicity. Doctrinaire Russian critics of the right and the left, accustomed to classifying all writers in such tidy categories as “religious reactionary” or “atheistic liberal,” were even more bewildered by Leskov's own kind of non-conformity than by the Christian anarchism of his great associate Tolstoy. Tolstoy, after all, had the virtue of pushing his convictions to their logical extreme, in the best tradition of Russian maximalism; whereas Leskov, though he acknowledged himself to be a devoted follower of Tolstoy, refused to become doctrinaire even in his Tolstoyanism.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Slavic and East European Review , Volume 12 , Issue 4 , December 1953 , pp. 524 - 534
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1953

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References

1 Veselitskaja, Lidija, “Pis'ma N. S. Leskova,” Literaturnaja Mysl’. Al'manakh (Leningrad, 1925), III, 297.Google Scholar

2 Faresov, A. I., Protiv tečenij. N. S. Leskov. Ego žizn’ sočinenija, polemika i vospominanija o nem (Petersburg, 1904), p. 398.Google Scholar

3 Zajačij remiz. English translation: The March Hare, in Nikolai S. Leskov, The Amazon and Other Stories, tr. by David Magarshack (London, 1949). (Works that have been published in English translation are cited hereafter with the English title preceding the Russian.)

4 Faresov, p. 71.

5 Ibid., p. 307.

6 Veselitskaja, op. cit., p. 272.

7 Mirsky, D. S., A History of Russian Literature, Whitfield, Francis J., ed. (New York, 1949), p. 320.Google Scholar

8 Leskov, N. S., “O ‘kvakerejakh’ (Post-scriptum k ‘Judoli’),” Polnoe sobranie sočinenij (3rd ed., Petersburg, 1903), XXXIII, 98 Google Scholar. Hereafter cited as Poln. sobr. soč.

9 Ibid., XXXIII, 99.

10 Aunt Polly's real existence has never been questioned in the literature about Leskov; but since this article went to press, the piecing together of numerous bits of biographical information from Leskov's works and letters makes it almost certain that she was actually a composite character, whom Leskov no doubt drew mainly from his mother's sisters Aleksandra Petrovna, the wife of Alexander Scott, and Natal'ja Petrovna, the wife of the wealthy eccentric, Mikhail Andreevič Strakhov, on whose estate Leskov spent much of his childhood.

11 Ibid., XXXIII, 99–100.

12 A. N. Leskov, “Žizn’ Nikolaja Leskova,” in N. S. Leskov, Izbrannye sočinenija (“Ogiz,” 1946), p. xxix.

13 “Letter from Leskov to P. K. Ščebal'skij, June 8, 1871, Šestidesjatye gody (sbornik) (Moscow-Leningrad, 1940), p. 320.

14 Poln. sobr. soč., VI, 27, 168.

15 Readers who are familiar with Zakhudalyj rod (A Family in Decline), Poln. sobr. soč., XVII, may wonder why no mention is made here of this work, which was originally published in 1874—years before Tolstoy's conversion—and contains an important character, the schoolteacher Červev, who is a thoroughgoing Tolstoyan. Having originally been misled here myself, I offer this as striking evidence of the pitfalls awaiting the unwary in Leskov scholarship. If one compares the version in Poln. sobr. soč., XVII, with the original version published in Russkij Vestnik, CXII–CXIII (July, August, October, 1874) and with the first edition in book form (Petersburg, 1875), it becomes clear that Leskov inserted most of the Tolstoy an element in the story years after its first publication—probably in 1889 when he prepared it for the first edition of his collected works, in which it formed a part of the ill-fated Volume VI that was burned by order of the censors soon after its publication.

16 Istoričeskij Vestnik, XXVI (November, 1886), 249–80. Leskov's letter of June 14, 1886, to S. N. Šubinskij, the editor of the Istoričeskij Vestnik, shows that he had finished the article by that date (Faresov, op. cit., p. 178).

17 Istoričeskij Vestnik, XXVI, 276.

18 Protopopov, M. A., “Bol'noj talant,” Russkaja mysl', XII, No. 12 (1891), 258–78.Google Scholar

19 December 23, 1801. Published in Šestidesjatye gody, p. 381.

20 The editor of Šestidesjatye gody (p. 352) identifies this name (spelled Nevil' in the published Russian text of the letter) as “a French theologian.” Leskov's frequent references in the ensuing months to the writings of the Protestant Swiss philosopher Jules-Ernest Naville indicate rather that the person he met was a younger member of the scholarly Naville family of Geneva, probably Adrien, the professor of philosophy, or Edouard, the archaeologist.

21 Šestidesjatye gody, p. 330–31.