Styling Russia: Multiculture in the Prose of Nikolai Leskov

Abstract

In response to the clichéd view of Nikolai Leskov as an exceptionally gifted stylist and “the most Russian of writers,” this book explores a nineteneeth-century storyteller who was a patriot and believer in the spiritual uniqueness of the Russian people, yet who also represented, or styled, ethnic identity as unstable and permeable. By combining key concepts from modern literary theory and semiotics, as well as from anthropology and the theory of culture, it investigates the image of human life as portrayed in five of Leskov’s most celebrated works, amongst them Cathedral Folk and The Enchanted Wanderer. Here the lay theological attitudes that inform them can be said to challenge the idea of the multiethnic Empire as a culturally unified nation state.