Bøger af Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov

The protagonist, Ivan Flyagin, a bogatyr-type of a character has been "promised to God" by his mother but refused to join the monastery as a young man, ignoring all the "signs," allegedly pointing him the way. The rest of his life he sees as a "punishment" for this, and after all becomes a monk, driven though not by spiritual motives, but rather by poverty and having nowhere else to go.

The novel tells the story of young and naïve European Socialist Vasily (Wilhelm) Rainer who comes to Russia to somehow apply his rootless, artificial ideas to the local reality. The action takes place in houses of state officials and merchants, in literary circles of Moscow and Saint Petersburgh, in editorial rooms, Polish revolutionaries' headquarters. Among those surrounding Rainer are some honest people (like Liza Bakhareva, another character who's been shown by Leskov with great sympathy), but in general the 'nihilist' community is being portrayed in the novel as a bunch of amoral crooks for whom high ideals serve as mere means to their own ends; such characters (Arapov, Beloyartsev, Zavulonov, Krasin) the author treated with open disgust.

Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District is an 1865 novel by Nikolai Leskov. It was originally published in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's magazine Epoch. Among its themes are the subordinate role expected from women in 19th-century European society, adultery, provincial life (thus drawing comparison with Flaubert's Madame Bovary) and the planning of murder by a woman, hence the title inspired by the Shakespearean character Lady Macbeth from his play Macbeth. The title also echoes the title of Turgenev's story Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District (1859).