The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

Leskov’s earliest article, “Sketches of the Distilling Industry (Penza Province),” was published in April 1861 in Notes of the Fatherland

. By then the thirty-year-old author had moved to Petersburg himself. It was his first taste of life in the capital, and it was a heady moment for Russian society. In 1855 the repressive emperor Nicholas I had died and his son, Alexander II (1818–1881), had taken the throne. In March 1861, Alexander II released a manifesto proclaiming the emancipation of the serfs, for which he became known as the “tsar-liberator.” In 1864 came a far-reaching judicial reform, for the first time establishing open courts, trial by jury, and a bar association. There were also military reforms shortening the length of service and eliminating corporal punishment, among other things. But this was also the time of the nihilists, the so-called “new people,” who were not satisfied with Alexander’s reforms or with liberalism in general and called for far more radical changes. The term “nihilist” first entered Russian literature in a novel by another writer from Orel—Ivan Turgenev. In his Fathers and Sons

, published in 1862, it is applied to Evgeny Bazarov, whom Turgenev conceived as “a new type of hero.” Arkady Kirsanov, a close friend of Bazarov, explains the meaning of the term to his father: “A nihilist is a man who does not bow down before any authority, who does not take any principle on faith, whatever reverence that principle may be enshrined in.” The radical journalist Dmitri Pisarev (1840–1868) put it more bluntly: “Whatever can be smashed, must be smashed.” It was a time of fierce polemics, clandestine publications, the first experiments with communes, and also of several attempts to assassinate the tsar-liberator, the last of which, in March 1881, was successful.

With his move to Petersburg, Leskov was caught up in the contradictions of the time, and as a journalist he quickly found himself embroiled in them. Writing about “Leskov’s Literary Beginnings,” the French scholar Jean-Claude Marcadé observed: “Leskov’s articles are interesting because they show the same temperament in the publicist as would be that of the writer throughout his career. It was impossible for him to compose accommodating works, to hide the truth as he felt it.”^*

Near the end of his life, in an interview with V. V. Protopopov, Leskov said of himself:

I love literature as a means enabling me to express what I hold to be true and good. If I cannot do that, literature is of no value to me: looking upon it as art is not my point of view. I absolutely cannot understand the concept of “art for art’s sake.” No, art must be useful. Only then does it have a precise meaning. I do not acknowledge the art of painting naked women. It is the same for literature. If one cannot serve the true and the good by means of art, it is useless to write, and one ought to abandon the occupation.^†

He was a prolific journalist and remained one all his life, producing over six hundred articles in all. But in 1862 he also published his first fiction in The Northern Bee, which, in tune with the times, had turned from a reactionary to a liberal journal.

The progressives were divided into two camps, the “gradualist” and the “impatient.” Leskov remained with the gradualists, he said, because he found their moderation more trustworthy. Besides, he was somewhat older than most of the “new people” and had behind him a much deeper and more varied experience of Russian realities. But he had a number of good friends among the “impatient,” and when student unrest broke out in Petersburg and then in Moscow in 1861–62, he sympathized with their cause. From them he arrived at the notion, to be embodied in his polemical novel No Way Out (1864), that there were good nihilists and bad nihilists, and that the good would soon distinguish themselves from the “nihilizing babblers.”