such saints, and that all of us were sinful, but they had met some decent men... and I just started writing about them," he wrote in the preface to one such story ("Singlethought", Odnodum, 1879). A similar cycle of short stories involved legends of early Christianity, with plot lines taken from the "prologues" and Byzantine stories of the 10th and 11th centuries. The fact that some of these pieces ("Pamphalone", "Beautiful Azu") were translated into German and praised by publishers, made Leskov immensely proud. What was new to the Russian reader in them was, as Mirsky noted, "a boldly outspoken treatment of sensual episodes"; some critics accused the author of "treating his moral subjects as nothing but pretexts for the display of voluptuous and sensual scenes." Later years In February 1883 the essay "Leap-frog in Church and Local Parish Whimsies" (based on an officially documented episode concerning the outrageous behaviour of a drunken pastor and deacon at a church in a provincial town) was published by Istorichesky vestnik. It caused a scandal and cost its author his job at the Ministry of Education. Minister Delyanov suggested that Leskov should sign a retirement paper, but the latter refused. "What do you need such a firing for?" the Minister reportedly asked. "For a decent obituary," Leskov retorted. In April he informed the director of the Oryol lyceum that he was sending him a gold medal he had received from the Ministry "to be given to the poorest of that year's graduates." By this time the Russian Orthodox Church had become the major target of Leskov's satire. In an 1883 letter, remembering The Cathedral Folk, he confessed: "These days I wouldn't do them, I'd rather have written Notes of a Defrocked Priest... to show how all of the Crucified One's commandments are being corrupted and falsified... [My position] would be defined as Tolstoyan these days, while things that have nothing to do with Christ's teaching would be termed Orthodoxy. I wouldn't oppose the term, I'd just say, Christianity this is not." Leskov's religious essays of the early 1880s continued the same line of sympathetically supporting poor clergymen and ridiculing the hypocrisy of the Russian Orthodoxy's higher ranks. In "Count Tolstoy and F. M. Dostoyevsky as Heresiarchs" and "The Golden Age", both 1883) he defended both from the criticism of Konstantin Leontiev. Leskov never became a Tolstoyan, but his later works were impregnated with