Motif of struggle in the chronicles "The Cathedral Clergy" by Nikolai Leskov

The author of the article addresses history of the publication of the chronicles "The Cathedral Clergy" by Nikolai Leskov; she notes that the subject and the core conflict of the work collided with its publication in a number of magazines, and that only Mikhail Katkov realised the chronicle's importance and accepted it in his magazine "The Russian Messenger". In "The Cathedral Clergy", Nikolai Leskov looks at the world from a special perspective which opens his point of view as an eternity look, whereas what becomes the core conflict in the work, is confrontation of belief and unbelief of global, if not universal, scale. Realisation of one of the book's most significant motifs – motif of struggle – is analysed in the article. It is considered how Nikolai Leskov on a set of examples illustrates the heroes' active and energetic strength that is shown in advocacy of belief, in resistance to meanness and premeditated deception. The writer very thinly and skillfully shows that fight is not an intrinsic basis of righteous people, that all of them live under the law of love, however they cannot be passive observers in the world where the truth is profaned.