Nikolai Leskov wrote Russian prose that sounds like someone talking, and paid for it with a century of critical neglect. His signature technique, skaz, hands the narration to a garrulous, socially marked speaker whose idiom, prejudices and digressions become the story's real substance — a method Russian formalists later dissected and modernists borrowed. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1865) follows a bored merchant's wife through adultery and four murders in ninety pages of appalling forward motion; Shostakovich made it an opera and Stalin walked out of it. The Enchanted Wanderer sends a runaway serf through horse-trading, captivity among the Tatars and a monastery. "Lefty" tells of a cross-eyed Tula gunsmith who shoes a mechanical flea. Leskov worked for years as an estate agent travelling the empire, which gave him a range of provincial speech no other Russian writer of the period commanded. His early attacks on the radicals made him unpublishable in the progressive journals; his later attacks on the church cost him the rest. Chekhov and Gorky learned from him. He died in 1895.