Nikolai Leskov

Leskov grew up in Oryol province and, unlike most of his literary peers, spent years working as a commercial agent for a British-run estate management firm, traveling deep into the Russian provinces and picking up the dialects, trades, and folk speech that would fill his fiction with a documentary richness no desk-bound novelist could match.

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, his most enduring work, follows a merchant's wife whose affair with a hired hand escalates from adultery into a string of casual, appalling murders, narrated in the same vivid, colloquial storytelling voice (skaz) that Leskov made his signature; Shostakovich's opera adaptation was later denounced by Stalin's regime and banned for decades.

An early satirical novel mocking radical nihilists cost him standing with the progressive critics who controlled Russia's literary reputation, and Leskov spent much of his career as a genuine outsider, championed only after his death by Chekhov and Gorky, who recognized in his restless wanderers a folk imagination no one else in Russian prose had captured.