The Sealed Angel () is a story by Nikolai Leskov, written in 1872 and first published in the No.1, January 1873 issue of The Russian Messenger. The story concerns a group of Old Believers whose revered icon of an angel is confiscated by officials and sealed with wax.
Background Nikolai Leskov developed a great interest in the Raskol history and movement in the early 1860s. His attitude towards it changed over time from very cautious to openly appreciative, as he came to see the Old Believers as keepers of old Russian artistic traditions which otherwise would have disappeared without a trace, lacking governmental support. Leskov got interested in the art of icon-painting after having met the iconographer Nikita Racheiskov (d. 1886), whom he commemorated later by the posthumous essay "Of the Artist Man Nikita and Those Brought up by Him" (Novoye vremya, 1886, December 25).Serman, I. Commentaries. The Works by N. S. Leskov in 6 volumes. Pravda Publishers, Moscow, 1973. Vol. 3. Pр. 399-400. It was in Racheiskov's studio that Leskov, while studying Ikonopisny podlinnik (a hand-written manual of icon-painting), wrote The Sealed Angel. The story which came out at the time when the academic studies of icon-painting began, influenced and contributed to the process, according to scholar I. Serman.
Leskov remarked later that The Sealed Angel was his only work that avoided any editorial cuts, explaining this by Mikhail Katkov's men being "too busy to pay much notice".The Works by N. S. Leskov in 11 volumes. Moscow, 1956—1958. Vol. Х, р. 362 Apparently, there was another reason. The Sealed Angel, being close to a Christmas story in style and form, was warmly received at the Russian Court. Empress consort Maria Alexandrovna and Tsar Alexander II reportedly liked it, which must have kept both editors and censors off.
Finale The story's finale, where the Old Believers' community all of a sudden return to mainstream Orthodoxy, was criticized as being unnatural. Ten years later Leskov conceded that, while the story itself was mostly based on real facts, the ending was made up. What happened in reality he revealed in Chapter 41 of The Pechersk Antics set of memoir sketches.
English translations The Sealed Angel from Russian Sketches, Chiefly of Peasant Life. Translated by Beatrix Tollemache. K. A. Lantz (1984) David McDuff (1988) Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2013) Donald Rayfield (2020)
Music
The story became the basis for the 1988 Russian-language choral work The Sealed Angel, by Rodion Shchedrin. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Russian Culture 1136787852 Smorodinskaya, - 2013- Page 556 "16 December 1932, Moscow Composer Shchedrin graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1955 and taught ... Zapechatlennyi angel (The Sealed Angel, 1988, from text by Nikolai Leskov) for mixed choir and reed pipe...
References
External links Запечатленный ангел. The original Russian text.