The Cathedral Folk, also translated as The Cathedral Clergy, is a novel by Nikolai Leskov, a series of "romantic chronicles" of the fictional town of Stargorod. It is his only full-length novel translated into English. It was first published in 1872 in The Russian Messenger magazine and formed a trilogy with Old Years in Plodomasovo (1869) and A Decayed Family (1874).

Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov was a Russian novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and journalist, who also wrote under the pseudonym M. Stebnitsky. Praised for his unique writing style and innovative experiments in form, and held in high esteem by Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky among others, Leskov is credited with creating a comprehensive picture of contemporary Russian society using mostly short literary forms. His major works include Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1865), The Cathedral Folk (1872), The Enchanted Wanderer (1873), and "The Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea" (1881).