In the Lap of Nature

Leykin, Nikolai Alexandrovich—Russian writer and journalist. Born into a merchant family. Studied at the Petersburg German Reformed School. Began publishing in 1860. Worked with the journals “Biblioteka dlya chteniya” (Library for Reading), “Sovremennik” (The Contemporary), “Otechestvennye zapiski” (Notes of the Fatherland), and “Iskra” (The Spark). A major influence on L.’s writing was the brothers V. S. and N. S. Kurochkin. From the early 1870s, L. was a staff member of the “Petersburg Gazette.” From 1882 to 1905 he was editor-publisher of the humorous magazine “Oskolki” (Fragments), for which he recruited many former employees of “Iskra”—V. V. Belibin (I. Grek), L. I. Palmin, L. N. Trefolyev, and others.

The main theme of L.’s numerous novels, novellas, plays, and several thousand stories and sketches is the manners of St. Petersburg’s merchant class. However, the humor with which L. depicted the drabness of merchant-bourgeois everyday life was only superficial in character. L.’s main genre was sketches. Even his novels (“Stuking and Khrustalnikov,” 1886; “Satir and Nymph,” 1888, etc.) are a series of scenes connected by the unity of characters and plot.

L. attracted A. P. Chekhov to “Oskolki,” who under the pseudonym “Antosha Chekhonte” published more than two hundred stories there over 5 years (1882–1887). “Oskolki” was, in Chekhov’s words, a literary “crucible,” and L. was his “godfather-batyushka” (see Chekhov’s letter to L. dated December 27, 1887), whose advice prompted him to begin writing “short little sketch stories.”