Slovene (Dec 2020)
Nikolai Leskov on Sanctimonious Rhetoric: The “Notes of the Unknown” Series
Abstract
Nikolai Leskov is known for his love of language game, puns, rarely used words and word creation — he usually employs all these tactics for constructing a narrator’s image. One of his most poorly studied works is of particular interest in this regard. Notes of the Unknown (1884) is a collection of short anecdotes, mainly from the life of the clergy. In this particular series, Leskov, while imitating someone else’s speech, also bares the narrator’s hypocrisy and turns his clerical rhetoric into an object of parody, the purpose of which is to indicate the need for the transition from state Orthodoxy to “spiritual Christianity” and for the revitalization of a dead word. DOI: 10.31168/2305-6754.2020.9.2.10
