as to contribute to a magazine that adorns itself with novels and novellas by Stebnitsky?" The social democrat-controlled press started spreading rumours that No Way Out had been 'commissioned' by the Interior Ministry's 3rd Department. What Leskov condemned as "a vicious libel" caused great harm to his career: popular journals boycotted him, while Mikhail Katkov of the conservative The Russian Messenger greeted him as a political ally. Major works Leskov's novel, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (written in Kiev in November 1864 and published in Dostoevsky's Epoch magazine in January 1865) and his novella The Amazon (Otechestvennye zapiski, No.7, 1866), both "pictures of almost unrelieved wickedness and passion", were ignored by contemporary critics but were praised decades later as masterpieces, containing powerful depictions of highly expressive female characters from different classes and walks of life. Both, marked by a peculiar "Leskovian" sense of humour, were written in the skaz manner, a unique folk-ish style of writing, which Leskov, along with Gogol, was later declared an originator of. Two more novellas came out at this time: Neglected People (Oboydyonnye; Otechestvennye Zapiski, 1865) which targeted Chernyshevsky's novel What's to Be Done?, and The Islanders (1866), about the everyday life of Vasilyevsky Island's German community. It was in these years that Leskov debuted as a dramatist. The Spendthrift (Rastratchik), published by Literaturnaya biblioteka in May 1867, was staged first at the Alexandrinsky Theatre (as a benefit for actress E. Levkeeva), then in December at Moscow's Maly Theater (with E. Chumakovskaya in the lead). The play was poorly received for "conveying pessimism and asocial tendencies." All the while Leskov was working as a critic: his six-part series of essays on the St. Petersburg Drama Theater was completed in December 1867. In February 1868 Stories by M.Stebnitsky (Volume 1) came out in Saint Petersburg to be followed by Volume 2 in April; both were criticized by the leftist press, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin in particular. In 1870 Leskov published the novel At Daggers Drawn, another attack aimed at the nihilist movement which, as the author saw it, was quickly merging with the Russian criminal community. Leskov's "political" novels (according to Mirsky) were not among his masterpieces, but they were enough to turn him into "a bogey figure for all the radicals in literature and made it impossible for any of the influential critics to treat him with even a modicum of objectivity." Leskov would later refer