Everyone has read Nikolai Leskov’s prose, but they know him from two or three texts. Called by Leo Tolstoy a writer of the future, the most underrated Russian classic of the 19th century and a scandalous man made his way away from the well-trodden roads of Russian literature and deliberately broke out of the usual patterns, as if he was deliberately doing everything so that the doors of drawing rooms and editorial offices would be closed in front of him, and his books did not meet the reader. With Krestovsky he visited the slums of St. Petersburg, with Chekhov - the hot spots. The high school dropout went through the civil service from clerk to member of the ministerial Academic Committee, hated both the nihilists and the Chief Prosecutor of the Synod, Pobedonostsev. Contemporaries suspected him of having connections with the secret police, and the Soviet proletarians considered him one of their own. Loving everything outlandish and bright both in life and in literature, he constructed his own rich vocabulary, and in his work with language he anticipated the avant-garde experiments of the early 20th century. Maya Kucherskaya’s book, written on the verge of documentary and fictional prose, is consonant with the works of its hero - an unsurpassed storyteller, essayist , writer, enchanted wanderer of Russian literature. The publishing layout is saved in PDF A4 format.