Eileen Battersby introduces the work of Nikolai Leskov, a contemporary of Tolstoy who is “often referred to as Anton Chekhov’s favourite writer”:
“Storyteller” is the most apt word for Leskov. He does not invent so much as relate. His yarns are
inspired by things he saw and heard while spending an intense two years travelling throughout old Russia as a young man. He was a natural sponge, eyes out onstalks, missing nothing and grasping the essential ambivalence of life and art. Structure and form did not interest him; his impulse was to hold an audience. … Leskov was religious yet detested ecclesiastical bureaucracy just as he resented political oppression. When his travelling came to a[n] abrupt end – he had been working for his uncle, who could no longer afford to employ him – Leskov moved to St Peterburg and became a prolific journalist.
Never the reactionary he was considered to be, he was very outspoken – as are his characters, none more so than the eponymous narrator of The Enchanted Wanderer, a sinner doomed to be dying without the relief of death. That title piece dominates this astutely chosen selection because of its novella length and its unforgettable narrative voice of a giant man who, having killed an elderly monk by mistake when he was a boy, has endured a picaresque nightmare of a life. Best read at a single sitting, it offers a fabulous entry not only into Leskov’s work but also into the Russia that produced him. All the energy, hunger and chaos created by the vast underbelly of a peasant population still existing within the hardship of serfdom festers though the narrative.
(Portrait of Leskov by Valentin Serov, 1894, via Wikimedia Commons)
The Dish 
