Abstract: The study is devoted to an analysis of censorial editing of Russian writer of the 19th century Nikolai Leskov’s artistic creativity. At the beginning the study notes types of artistic works editing for the ideological reasons: falsification of the original by a translator; the author’s self-editing; lifetime editing by censors; posthumous editing by textual critics. Further we consider the editing cases which are conducted by textual critics during Soviet times in N. Leskov’s texts on the ideological reasons and it is noted that this type of editing is first of all characteristic for Church lexicon and phraseology. It is also noted that dictionary notes as a special case of the explanatory dictionary were also exposed to adjustment for the ideological reasons. These corrections (both in texts and in notes) are also in new reprintings of N. Leskov’s works (even in thirty-volume complete works of N. Leskov which is published since 1996) that testifies that not all texts are compared with lifetime publications and not all comments are checked on dictionary sources. Posthumous ideological editing of N. Leskov’s texts of art during Soviet times is not obvious: separate lexical and phraseological units are here and there refreshed but when the material is collected together, it is visible how the work was purposefully conducted. On the last kind of editing of texts we will concentrate having addressed to N. Leskov’s modern editions which are earlier not studied from this point of view.