Tula Lefty, who glorified his homeland with the artistic prowess of his incomparable skill, is widely known for the wonderful "Tale of the Tula Oblique Lefty and the Steel Flea" by N. S. Leskov. In the first separate edition of Skaz (1882), it bears the subtitle "Guild Legend". In the preface, the author pointed out that he wrote it down in Sestroretsk "from an old gunsmith, a native of Tula", which led some reviewers to reduce the role of Leskov to "simple shorthand". Therefore, in June of the same year, on the pages of Novoye Vremya, Leskov stated:: "I wrote this whole story in May of last year, and Lefty is a person I made up"2 (that is, a literary image created by him). This did not exclude the connection of the "Tale" with Russian folklore, especially since, according to the writer himself, his idea came from a folk joke: "The British made a flea out of steel, and our Tula people shod it and sent it back to them." At the same time, the pages of "Skaz" clearly reflected some actual events. In the early 1900s, Colonel S. A. Zybin, while researching the history of the Tula Arms Factory, discovered in its archive the case of the departure of gunsmiths Alexey Surnin and Yakov Leontiev to England in 1785 .3 What did the documents tell us? Gunsmiths were sent to England by order of the President of the Military College, Field Marshal G. A. Potemkin, to improve the production of artistic metal products .4 They arrived in London in November 1785 and were placed under the care of the Russian Ambassador, Prince S. R. Vorontsov. At first, the gunsmiths had to master the English language, but since the money for their maintenance was transferred irregularly, the training was delayed. Only in the summer of 1787 did A. Surnin and Y. Leontiev go to Birmingham and Sheffield "to inspect the manufactories and the machines used in them." Upon returning to London, Vorontsov determined the direction of their future studies. He acknowledged that "it will be much more useful for the f ... Read more