Nikolai Leskov, author of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and The Enchanted Wanderer, was born in the Oryol region and is honoured with a dedicated museum in the city centre. Leskov is less celebrated internationally than Turgenev or Tolstoy, but Russian readers regard him as one of the great stylists of the language — a writer whose ear for regional dialects and whose sympathy for outsiders and eccentrics gives his fiction an unmistakable flavour.
The museum occupies a merchant-era building and covers Leskov's life, works, and the Oryol milieu that shaped his imagination. The room reconstructions, with period furniture and household objects, help conjure the mid-19th-century provincial world he wrote about so precisely. A statue of Leskov stands in a small garden in front.