Leskov's Novel-Chronicle Cathedral Folk: Literary Representations of the Clergy and Genre

Leskov's Cathedral Folk is considered to be the first and most successful example of a 19th-century Russian novel that did justice to clergy. The novel's main character, Tuberozov, is a priest who understands the difficulty of writing about clergy, who were often criticized and satirized in 19th-century Russian literature. As if to refute this reality, Tuberozov's diary is filled with the details of a priest's daily life, conflicts, and human emotions. But his diary is only one chapter of the whole work. Thus, Leskov recreates the world of the clergy as a moment in which it breaks its silence and gains a voice, and the sermon, awaiting completion in Tuverozov's solitary and anxious inner parallels the fate of the story about clergy as a whole. Leskov devised the narrative of the characters’ becoming worthy of priests in such a way that the ideal of preaching and the narrative of the clergy could be advanced side by side in the work. The tragedy of Tuberozov, which the narrator refers to as the most dramatic, encompasses both the Bildung of Tuberozov and Akhila, who share the journey to priesthood by consoling each other's woes. The journey of the two priests, reminiscent of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, provides an appropriate frame for explaining the unique identity of this work, which is somewhere between novel and chronicle. The narrator, who has the perspective of an omniscient author with his access to Tuberozov's diary, is reduced to a chronicler when depicting the religious experience of the two priests. What the chronicler can do as a mere observer, mediating between the characters and the reader, is to fill each moment with silence so that the reader can share in the mystical experience of the two priests. The experience of silence creates a sense of religious reverence without any profession of faith and leads them to Life(Vita). However, Leskov's recreation of a positive clerical world is not simply borrowing hagiography or epic that idealizes Russia's past. It is the Life of Akhila , the least priestly of the clergy, that completes the story. Akhila 's “vivid denial of death” is the realization of Tuberozov's dream of “living words,” as the former will able to quote the Bible in his own words, demonstrating that priests are needed for the pious Russian people.