the idea of "new Christianity" which he himself identified with Leo Tolstoy, whom he became close with in the mid-1880s and was inevitably influenced by. On 18 April 1887, Leskov wrote a letter to Tolstoy asking for permission to visit him in Moscow so as to fulfill a "long-standing desire." On 25 April the two authors met. "What a bright and original man," Tolstoy later wrote in a letter to Chertkov. Leskov spent January 1890 with Chertkov and Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, where Tolstoy read to them his own play The Fruits of Enlightenment. In July 1883 the first four chapters of the novel As the Falcon Flies were published by Gazeta Gatsuka, followed by chapters five through eight, then chapters nine and ten; at this point the publication ceased due to interference by the censors. In January 1884 the publication of Notes of a Stranger began in Gazeta Gatsuka (No. 2) to be stopped in April, again by the censors. In the summer of 1884, while Leskov was on a trip through Warsaw, Dresden, Marienbad, Prague and Vienna, a special censorship order came out, demanding withdrawal of 125 books from Russian libraries, Leskov's collection Trifles from the Life of Archbishops (1878–79) included. In November 1884, Nov magazine began publishing the novel The Unseen Trail: it was banned after chapter 26 and has never been completed. In November 1888 the novella Zenon the Goldsmith was written for Russkaya mysl and promptly banned. By this time, according to Bukhstab, Leskov found himself in isolation again. The right treated him as a dangerous radical, while the left, under pressure from the Russian government, were too scared to publish radical prose. Leskov himself referred to the stories of his later years as "cruel". "The public doesn't like them because they're cynical and in your face. But I don't want to please the public, I want to torture it and flog it," he wrote. In August, November and December 1887 respectively, the first three volumes of the collection Novellas and Short Stories by N. S. Leskov were published. At the 1888 New Year party at Alexei Suvorin's, Leskov met Anton Chekhov for the first time. Soon Ilya Repin became Leskov's friend and illustrator. Several months later in a letter, asking Leskov to sit for him, Repin explained his motives: "Not only me but the whole of enlightened Russia loves you as an outstanding, distinguished