had to be published in the odd October and November issues of the Russky mir newspaper . In December 1873 Leskov took part in Skladchina, the charity anthology aimed at helping victims of famine in Russia. Having severed ties with The Russian Messenger, Leskov found himself in serious financial trouble. This was relieved to an extent by his invitation in January 1874 to join the Scholarly Committee of the Ministry of Education (for this he owed much to the Empress consort Maria Alexandrovna who was known to have read The Cathedral Folk and spoke warmly to it), where his duty was to choose literature for Russian libraries and atheneums for a meager wage of one thousand rubles per year. In 1874 Leskov began writing Wandering Lights: A Biography of Praotsev which was soon halted and later printed as Early Years: From Merkula Praotsev’s Memoirs. It was during the publication of this work that the author made a comment which was later seen as his artistic manifesto: "Things pass by us and I'm not going to diminish or boost their respective significance; I won't be forced into doing so by the unnatural, man-made format of the novel which demands the rounding up of fabulas and the drawing together of plotlines to one central course. That's not how life is. Human life runs on in its own way and that's how I'm going to treat the roll of events in my works." In the spring of 1875 Leskov went abroad, first to Paris, then to Prague and Dresden in August. In December his novella "At the Edge of the World" was published in Grazhdanin (1875, No. 52). All the while he continued to work on a set of stories which would later form his cycle Virtuous Ones. Some critics found Leskov's heroes virtuous beyond belief, but he insisted they were not fantasies, but more like reminiscences of his earlier encounters. "I credit myself with having some ability for analyzing characters and their motives, but I'm hopless at fantasizing. Making up things is hard labour for me, so I've always felt the need for having before me real faces which could intrigue me with their spirituality; then they get hold of me and I infuse them with new life, using some real-life stories as a basis," he wrote later in the Varshavsky Dnevnik newspaper. Years of confrontation with critics and many of his