The Steel Flea

The Steel Flea is the celebrated tale by Nikolai Leskov (1831-1895), the Russian master whom Tolstoy and Chekhov ranked among the very greatest of their nation’s writers. In this skaz, told in the voice of a folk narrator, Tula gunsmiths out-craft the English by shoeing a tiny mechanical flea, a comic and bitter parable of Russian genius wasted by its rulers. Leskov’s ear for living speech made him the most distinctively Russian of the great prose writers. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.