writer and as a thinking man." The sittings early the next year were aborted: Leskov was unwilling to have his portrait seen at a forthcoming exhibition of Repin's works. In September 1888 Pyotr Bykov published a full bibliography of Leskov's works (1860–1887) which intrigued publishers. In 1889 Alexei Suvorin's publishing house began publishing the Complete Leskov in 12 volumes (which contained mostly fiction). By June 1889, the fourth and fifth volumes had been issued, but in August volume six, containing some anti-Eastern Orthodox satires was stopped. On 16 August, Leskov suffered his first major heart attack on the stairs of Suvorin's house, upon learning the news. The publication of his works continued with volume seven, generating considerable royalties and greatly improving the author's financial situation. A different version of volume six came out in 1890. In January 1890 the publication of the novel The Devil Dolls (with Tsar Nikolai I and Karl Bryullov as the prototypes for the two main characters) started in Russkaya Mysl, but was stopped by censors. In 1891 Polunochniki (Night Owls), a thinly veiled satire on the Orthodox Church in general and Ioann Kronshtadsky in particular, was published in Severny vestnik and caused an uproar. The 1894 novella The Rabbit Warren about a clergyman who'd been honoured for reporting people to the authorities and driving a police official into madness by his zealousness (one of "his most remarkable works and his greatest achievement in concentrated satire," according to Mirsky) was also banned and came out only in 1917 (in Niva magazine). The process of having his works published, which had always been difficult for Leskov, at this late stage became, in his own words, "quite unbearable". In his last years Leskov suffered from angina pectoris and asthma. There were also rumours, whose accuracy and substantiation have been questioned, that he had been diagnosed with male breast cancer. In early 1894 he caught a severe cold; by the end of the year his general condition had deteriorated. Responding to Pavel Tretyakov's special request, Leskov (still very ill) agreed to pose for Valentin Serov, but in February 1895, when the portrait was exhibited in the Tretyakovskaya Gallery, he felt utterly upset both by the portrait and the black frame. On 5 March 1895, Leskov died, aged 64. The funeral service was held in silence, in accordance with the writer's December 1892 will, forbidding any speeches to be held