Nikolai Leskov and Wincenty Korotyński: Toward a History of the Creative Dialogue

Abstract

This article focuses on a virtually unstudied episode in Nikolai Leskov’s literary apprenticeship under the Polish writer Wincenty Korotyński. Leskov dedicated his early novella The Life of a Peasant Woman (1863) to Korotyński, which, in our view, was not merely a friendly gesture but an acknowledgment that Korotyński’s poem Tomilo (1858) had influenced Leskov’s work and helped the budding author develop key features of his own poetics. The article identifies plot, compositional, and stylistic parallels between the two works. Particular attention is paid to how Leskov’s engagement with the poetics of Tomilo — specifically, its use of a folk narrator and song-like elements — served as a crucial impulse for his mastery of the skaz technique. It was in The Life of a Peasant Woman that this device, which later became one of Leskov’s trademarks, was first employed. A structural similarity in narrative construction is also observed between Korotyński’s poem and Leskov’s novella: the complex narrative frame with two narrators in Tomilo (Borživoj and the author, who appears in the introduction to present the narrator’s manuscript to the readers) closely resembles and, in all likelihood, determined the system of narrators in Leskov’s work (a folk narrator and an autobiographical character in the epilogue). Ultimately, this research allows for a significant refinement of Leskov’s literary genesis and situates his early work within a Russian-Polish literary context.