N. S. (Nikolai Semenovich) Leskov

Born in 1831, this Russian writer grew up in the Oryol region and later drew heavily on what he had seen of provincial life, religion, and the many kinds of people moving through the Russian Empire. Before fully turning to literature, he worked in jobs that exposed him to a wide range of social worlds, and that firsthand knowledge became one of the great strengths of his fiction.

He became known for stories and novels that sounded unlike anyone else: lively, conversational, and rich with the rhythms of speech. Again and again, he wrote about ordinary people placed in morally tangled situations, mixing humor, tragedy, and satire in ways that could be both entertaining and unsettling.

Today he is widely remembered as one of the most distinctive voices in Russian literature. Readers often come to him for Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, The Enchanted Wanderer, and "The Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea," but his lasting appeal lies in the way he turned storytelling itself into an art.