Leskov "the wizard of wording"), and was re-issued in the USSR in early 1941. For decades after his death the attitude of critics toward Leskov and his legacy varied. Despite the fact that some of his sharpest satires could be published only after the 1917 Revolution, Soviet literary propaganda found little of use in Leskov's legacy, often labeling the author a "reactionary" who had "denied the possibility of social revolution," placing too much attention on saintly religious types. For highlighting the author's 'progressive' inclinations "Leftie" (a "glorification of Russian inventiveness and talent") and "The Toupee Artist" (a "denunciation of the repressive nature of Tsarist Russia") were invariably chosen. "He is a brilliant author, an insightful scholar of our ways of life, and still he's not being given enough credit", Maxim Gorky wrote in 1928, deploring the fact that after the 1917 Revolution Leskov was still failing to gain ground in his homeland as a major classic. The inability of the new literary ideologists to counterbalance demands of propaganda with attempts at objectivity was evidenced in the 1932 Soviet Literary Encyclopedia entry, which said: "In our times when the problem-highlighting type of novel has gained prominence, opening up new horizons for socialism and construction, Leskov's relevancy as a writer, totally foreign to the major tendencies of our Soviet literature, naturally wanes. The author of "Lefty", though, retains some significance as a chronicler of his social environment and one of the best masters of Russian prose." Nevertheless, by 1934 Dmitry Shostakovich had finished his opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which caused a furore at home and abroad (to be eventually denounced in 1936 by Pravda). Before that, in 1929, Ivan Shyshov's opera The Toupee Artist (after Leskov's story of the same name) had been published and successfully staged. In the post-World War II USSR the interest in Leskov's legacy was continually on the rise, never going, though, beyond certain censorship-set limits. Several scholarly essays came out and then an extensive biography by the writer's son Andrey Leskov was published in 1954. In 1953 the Complete Gorky series featured his 1923 N. S. Leskov essay which became the object of lively academic discussion. The 11-volume 1956–1958 (and then 6 volume 1973–1974) Complete Leskov editions were obviously incomplete: one of his political "anti-nihilistic" novels At Daggers Drawn, was missing, included essays and letters carefully selected. Yet, in fifty years' time things changed