This paper focuses on the development and formalisation by the Russian writer Nikolaï Leskov (1831-1895) of a type of story-telling called skaz, or oral tale, which puts orality at the heart of the written text. If originally this appropriation of oral forms of story-telling enabled the author to forge an authorial strategy establishing him as a heretic within the Russian literary world, going against the grain of modernity, it put him, at the start of the 20th century, at the cross-roads of different critical approaches that, from Boris Eichenbaum to Walter Benjamin, consider Leskov a major figure in the analysis of the formal characteristics of the written text and its relationship to its reader/auditor. Like the « antimoderns » and thanks to his reinvesting in oral story-telling, Leskov belongs among those who, while protesting loudly against cultural, technical, industrial and economic modernity, have become the tutelar figures of modernism in art.