SOURCE: "Paradigmatic Aspects of Leskov's 'The Enchanted Pilgrim'," in Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 20, No. 4, 1976, pp. 371-78.

In the following essay, Wehrle discusses one of Leskov's most popular stories, asserting that it illustrates two original elements in Leskov's works: anecdotism and the weaving together of apparently disparate elements.

In his correspondence N. S. Leskov mentioned Dead Souls, Don Quixote, and Fénelon's The Adventures of Telemachus in connection with his work on "A Telemachus of the Black Earth" ("Černozemnyj Telemak"), which is now known as "The Enchanted Pilgrim" ("Očarovannyj strannik") (1873).¹ Each of these works treats a series of adventures connected by the personality of a wandering hero. Leskov's use of this method in "The Enchanted Pilgrim" is only one illustration of the dominant principle of his poetics, his "anecdotism." According to Ejxenbaum: "The anecdote (mainly verbal) is the atom, as it were, in the nature of...