June 1847 Leskov joined the Oryol criminal court office, where Sergey Dmitrievich had once worked. In May 1848 Leskov's family's property was destroyed by a fire. In July of the same year Leskov's father died from cholera. In December 1849 Leskov asked his superiors for a transfer to Kiev, where he joined the local government treasury chamber as an assistant clerk and settled with his maternal uncle, S. P. Alferyev, a professor of medicine. In Kiev he attended lectures at the University as an auditor student, studied the Polish and Ukrainian languages and the art of icon-painting, took part in the religious and philosophical circles of the students, and met pilgrims, sectarians and religious dissenters. Dmitry Zhuravsky, an economist and critic of serfdom in Russia, was said to be one of his major influences. In 1853 Leskov married Olga Smirnova; they had one son, Dmitry (who died after only a year), and a daughter, Vera. In 1857 Leskov quit his job in the office and joined the private trading company Scott & Wilkins (Шкотт и Вилькенс) owned by Alexander Scott, his aunt Polly's Scottish husband. Later he wrote of this in one of his short autobiographical sketches: "Soon after the Crimean War I was infected with a then popular heresy, something I've been reproaching myself for since. I abandoned the state official career which seemed to be starting promisingly and joined one of the newly-born trade companies." In May 1857 Leskov moved with his family to Raiskoye village in Penza Governorate where the Scotts were based, and later that month embarked upon his first business trip, involving the transportation of the Oryol-based serfs of Count Perovsky to the Southern Russian steppes, not entirely successfully, as he later described in his autobiographical short story "The Product of Nature". While working for this company, which, in Leskov's words, "was eager to exploit whatever the region could provide," he derived valuable experience, making him an expert in numerous branches of industry and agriculture. The firm employed him as an agent envoy; while travelling through the remote regions of Russia, the young man learned local dialects and became keenly interested in the customs and ways of the different ethnic and regional groups of Russian peoples. Years later, when asked what the source of the endless stream of stories that seemed to pour out of him ceaselessly was, Leskov said, pointing at his forehead: "From