ABSTRACT
Belinsky’s moral earnestness had behind it a long line of village priests-his ancestors. The family of Nikolay Leskov for generations provided the village priests of Leski in central Russia. Like Belinsky, Leskov cared passionately for ‘righteousness’; unlike Belinsky he held that ‘we need not good institutions but good people’. His search for the righteous man led him to the minor clergy and the sectarians or Old Believers. Leskov was endlessly curious about Russian priests. His classic study Details from Episcopal Life investigates an order of men shielded in their personal life from the public eye. Innocent or crafty, gentle or imperious, sometimes the prisoners of their own grandeur, these Orthodox prelates meet his coolly discerning gaze. Cathedral Folk might easily have become sentimental, a ‘reactionary’ book hallowing the fictitious past. However crude Leskov’s first intention, to glorify the Orthodox Church as a bulwark against Poles and nihilists, Father Savely is no party to the plot.
