The Sealed Angel
The Sealed Angel is a short story by Nikolai Leskov, written in 1872 and first published in January 1873 in The Russian Messenger. It tells of a group of Old Believers whose beloved icon of an angel is confiscated by officials and sealed with wax. During Easter Matins, the icon’s rightful owners replace it with another, and a man even crosses the Dnieper on a stretched chain to help recover it. The story blends drama with a sense of old Russian religious life.
Leskov became interested in the Raskol (Old Believer) history in the 1860s and grew to admire Old Believers as guardians of ancient Russian artistic traditions that risked disappearing without state support. He began exploring icon painting after meeting the iconographer Nikita Racheiskov, and he wrote The Sealed Angel in Racheiskov’s studio while studying Ikonopisny podlinnik, a manual for icon painting. The tale is notable for being one of his works that went without editorial cuts, a fact he attributed to editors being too busy to notice.
The story was well received at court, reportedly pleasing Empress Maria Alexandrovna and Tsar Alexander II, which helped avoid censorship. The ending, in which the Old Believers return to mainstream Orthodoxy, was later criticized as unlikely; Leskov admitted ten years later that the ending was largely his invention, though the general outline drew on real events described in his memoir sketches.
In reality, the chain-walking incident that inspired the tale involved a Kaluga stonemason who crossed the Dnieper during Easter, not to fetch an icon but vodka. He walked the chain with a barrel hanging from his neck, crossing to the Kiev side where his cargo was consumed in celebration. The Sealed Angel remains connected to real history, while remaining a work of fiction.
The story later inspired Rodion Shchedrin’s 1988 Russian-language choral work, also titled The Sealed Angel.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 16:07 (CET).