The Enchanted Wanderer [antikvár]

Translators Preface IjjP^'ü^it^! Nikolai Leskov was bom in the village of Gorokhovo, Oiyol Province, on February 16, 1831. He was the son of a poor civil servant. As a child, he came in close contact with the common people, his grandmother, Alexandra Alferyev, taking him with her to the different monasteries she used to visit regularly (these early memories of Russian ecclesiastical life he was to use later with telling effect in Cathedral Folk, the most famous of his novels). His nurse, Anna Kalandin, also helped to instili in him a love for the colloquiai Russian speech and a regard for the il-literate and often inarticulate peasant. Many years later he ac-knowledged it himself by declaring that, unlike many another Russian writer, he did not learn to know the Russian people "from conversations with Petersburg cabbies," but that he had grown up among the common people who accepted him as one of them.