Zacharovannyy strannik Reading Order

Zacherovanny strannik (The Enchanted Wanderer, 1873) by Nikolai Leskov is the most unusual of the great Russian novels — a picaresque spiritual biography in which Ivan Flyagin, a serf who has a gift for horses, wanders through a series of extraordinary adventures (selling a man's horse out from under him, serving ten years as a slave among the Kirghiz steppe nomads, becoming a monk after a life of violence and passion) without ever seeming to understand what is happening to him or why. Flyagin is Leskov's version of the Russian national character: spontaneous, excessive, endlessly capable of survival and adaptation, constitutionally unable to resist the impulse of the moment, and somehow charmed — enchanted — by the force of life itself. Leskov is the least-known great Russian novelist in the West — partly because his work depends so thoroughly on the specific textures of Russian speech (his narrators are always telling stories in voices that belong to specific social and regional registers) and partly because his work refuses the systematic moral and philosophical frameworks of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev. He is the novelist of Russian folk culture, Russian Orthodoxy at the popular level, and Russian eccentricity — his gallery of characters includes a lefthanded Tula armorer who shoes a steel flea, a provincial lady-killer who seduces himself into ruin, and Ivan Flyagin, who cannot stop doing the next thing that happens to him. The Enchanted Wanderer is the best single-volume entry to Leskov's world.