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“... to put the volume aside after reading it you would be misled. The young Anton Chekhov described Leskov as his favourite writer, and you can see a line leading from ‘Lady Macbeth’ to a possible future of Chekhovian prose. A pessimistic-realistic view of human behaviour, transcending class stereotypes; beauty, brutality and banality incised with precision ...”

“... In his essay on Nikolai Leskov, Walter Benjamin observes, almost in passing, that the novel inevitably brings about the end or storytelling. Like many of Benjamin’s paradoxes, this insight is very unsettling to the received idea – oh dear no, the novel doesn’t tell a story after all. Benjamin’s reasoning runs thus: the story (the only current example would be the dirty joke, I imagine) has no identifiable single author and is transmitted face to face ...”

“... to our feet.’ Walter Benjamin, in his essay ‘The Story-teller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’, has an appealing remark: ‘There is nothing that commends a story to memory more effectively than that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis.’ It comes to mind when one reads the most famous of Hebel’s ...”

“... knowledge of Russian Orthodoxy that surfaces again and again in his works and that perhaps only Nikolai Leskov could match. Chekhov called Leskov ‘my favourite writer’ in a letter after the two had first met, and quotes the half-drunken Leskov as having said: ‘Thee I anoint ...”

“... of poems, spattering the page like Dada scores. I was reminded of a gleefully absurdist story by Nikolai Leskov called ‘The Steel Flea: The Tale of the Cross-Eyed Left-Handed Gunsmith from Tula in Russia’, which first appeared in 1881. When English armourers present the Russian emperor with a microscopic steel flea that dances, the Russians surpass ...”

“... happiness. There are eight rules by which ‘well-bred people’ live, he told his brother Nikolai in a long letter. You restrain yourself sexually; you do not brag. ‘The truly gifted are always in the shadows, in the crowd, far from exhibitions.’ The last line of this letter has always been soothed into English as ‘You have to relinquish your ...”