Nikolai Leskov’s Eccentric Wanderers and the Tradition of Religious Wandering in Russia

Abstract

The motif of travel has always been popular, and the metaphor of life as a path remains extremely powerful. Both seem to be especially important within Christian culture because of the image of Christ the Wanderer, who “has no place to lay his head”, an image that influenced the growing popularity of pilgrimages and religiously motivated wandering. The latter became particularly widespread in Russian culture and resulted in numerous representations of wandering people in Russian art and literature. In my article, I focus on literary representations of wanderers in the oeuvre of Nikolai Leskov, whose works are abundant with these types of characters. I argue that the writer portrays his wanderers as ambivalent eccentrics who combine elements characteristic of diverse types of travelers, both religious and secular. To prove my hypothesis, I combine traditional literary analysis of Leskov’s texts with the examination of cultural and religious practices of Russian wandering. As I demonstrate, the complexity and multifacetedness of the writer’s wanderers correspond with Russian reality, where the boundary between pilgrims and vagrants was also blurred.