Everyone has read Nikolai Leskov's prose, but they know him from two or three texts. Russian Russian writer of the future, named by Leo Tolstoy, the most underrated Russian classic of the XIX century and a man of scandal, made his way away from the well-trodden roads of Russian literature and deliberately broke out of the usual schemes, as if he purposely did everything to close the doors of living rooms and editorial offices before him, and his books did not meet the reader. With Krestovsky, he visited the slums of St. Petersburg, with Chekhov-the seedy places. The under-educated high school student went through the civil service from a clerk to a member of the ministerial Academic committee, hated both nihilists and the chief prosecutor of the Synod of Pobedonostsev. His contemporaries suspected him of having ties with the secret police, and the Soviet proletarians considered him their own. Loving everything strange and bright both in life and in literature, he constructed his own juicy lexicon, working with the language anticipated the avant-garde experiments of the early twentieth century. Maya Kucherskaya's book, written on the verge of documentary and fiction prose, is in tune with the works of her hero — an unsurpassed storyteller, essayist, writer, a charmed wanderer of Russian literature.