Leskov was Chekhov's favorite writer and was greatly admired by Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky. His short stories--innovative in form, richly playful in language, now tragic, now satirical, now wildly comic in subject matter--exploded the prevailing traditions of nineteenth-century Russian fiction and paved the way for such famous literary successors as Mikhail Bulgakov. These seventeen stories are visionary and fantastic, and yet always grounded in reality,...