Styling Russia: Multiculture in the Prose of Nikolai Leskov

Knut Andreas Grimstad. Styling Russia: Multiculture in the Prose of Nikolai Leskov. Bergen: Slavica Bergensia, 2007. 256 pp. Bibliography. Index. NOK 27.00, cloth.

Nikolai Semenovich Leskov (1831-1895), a contemporary of so many famous Russian classics, seems to have been dropped from the list of writers that is commonly studied in Russian literature. One reason why Leskov's name appears so rarely on the roster, or in course outlines of nineteenth-century Russian literature, might be that his literary style is so radically different from the likes of Gogol', Goncharov, Turgenev, Dostoevskij, and Tolstoi. Most of these writers used the literary language of cultivated society, which …