colleagues have taken their toll. "Men of letters seem to recognize my writing as a force, but find great pleasure in killing it; in fact they have all but succeeded in killing it off altogether. I write nothing – I just can't!", he wrote to Pyotr Schebalsky in January 1876. In October 1881 Rus magazine started publishing "The Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea", which is seen in retrospect as Leskov's finest piece of work, bringing out the best in him as an ingenious storyteller and stylistic virtuoso whose skaz style is rich in word play and full of original neologisms, each carrying not only humorous but satirical messages. In Lefty the author's point of view is engaged in lively interplay with that of the main (grotesquely naive, simple-minded) character. "Some people argued that I had done little to distinguish between the good and the bad, and that it was difficult to make out who was a helper and who put wrenches in the works. This can be explained by the intrinsic deceitfulness of my own character," Leskov later wrote. Most deceitful (according to critic B. Bukhstab) was the author's treatment of the character ataman Platov, whose actions, even as they are described in a grotesquely heroic manner by the simple-minded protagonist, are openly ridiculed by the author. What would later come to be seen as one of the gems of Russian literature was fiercely attacked both from the left (who accused Leskov of propagating jingoistic ideas) and the right, who found the general picture of the common people's existence as depicted in the story a bit too gloomy for their taste. "Leftie" premiered publicly in March 1882 at the literary and musical evening of The Pushkin Circle; on 16 April it came out in book form. The collection of sketches called Pechersky Antics was written in December, and published by Kievskaya Starina, in its February and April issues. By this time a large Russian Antics cycle began to take shape, in which Leskov implemented, as he saw it, Nikolai Gogol's idea (formulated in the Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends) of "extoling modest working men." "It is wrong and unworthy to pick out the worst in the soul of the Russian man, so I embarked on my own journey looking for virtuous ones. Whoever I asked would reply to the effect that they knew no