Nikolai (Semyonovich) Leskov | Biography

Author of a few tendentious novels and a vast number of newspaper articles, reviews, government reports, and letters, Nikolai Semenovich Leskov is more admired and discussed a century after his death than he was in his own time. He developed a signature style in his stories and novellas, creating memorable characters, often from the lower classes, the clerical estate, or minority ethnicities or religions. Each character speaks in a carefully crafted, distinctive language rather than in standard literary Russian. For most of Leskov's intellectual contemporaries, his complex prose was a distraction from the progressive ideology that, they thought, motivated worthwhile literature. For the Formalist critics of the early twentieth century, however, his prose style exemplified skaz, the device an author uses to convince a reader that the voice reproduced on the page is genuine. In the 1890s a few critics began to recognize Leskov's achievements, but an ill-deserved reputation as...
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