Leskov. An opened genius

Everyone read the prose of Nikolai Leskov, but they know him on two to three texts. Called by Leo Tolstoy writer of the future, the most underestimated Russian classic of the 19th century and the scandal man paved his way away from the comparted roads of Russian literature and consciously broke out of the usual schemes, as if he had done all the doors of living rooms and editorial offices, and his books We did not meet the reader. With Krestovsky, he visited Petersburg slums, with Chekhov - golden places. The unfinished gymnasium student went in the public service the path from the writer to a member of the ministerial scientist of the committee, hated both the nihilists and the chief prosecutor of the Synod Pobedonostsev. Contemporaries suspected him of relations with the secret police, and the Soviet proletarians considered their own. Loving everything outlandish and bright in life and in literature, he designed his own juicy vocabulary, and the work with the language anticipated the avant -garde experiments of the early twentieth century.
The book of Maya Kucheskaya, written on the verge of documentary and artistic prose, is consonant with the works of her hero - an unsurpassed storyteller, essayist, writer, enchanted wanderer of Russian literature