{"id":11913,"date":"2021-02-21T12:20:20","date_gmt":"2021-02-21T11:20:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11913"},"modified":"2021-02-25T15:26:43","modified_gmt":"2021-02-25T14:26:43","slug":"nikolai-leskov-lady-macbeth-of-mtsensk-selected-stories-of-nikolai-lesko-reviewed-by-livi-michael","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11913","title":{"rendered":"Nikolai Leskov | Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: Selected Stories of Nikolai Leskov<\/em> | reviewed by Livi Michael"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nikolai Leskov |\u00a0Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: Selected Stories of Nikolai Leskov<\/em> | New York Review of Books: \u00a314.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

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The New York Review Books has published a selection of the stories of one of Russia\u2019s lesser known writers, Nikolai Leskov. This beautifully presented volume contains six lengthy stories or novellas, and an excellent introduction by Donald Rayfield, who has also translated four of these stories. The other translators are Robert Chandler and William Edgerton.<\/p>\n

Leskov, who has been described as \u2018one of Russia\u2019s greatest writers\u2019 and a significant influence on Chekhov, has been largely overlooked in the West, although in 2016 a film was made of the title novella which transposed the setting to Yorkshire, England.<\/p>\n

This same novella was first published by Dostoevsky in the literary magazine, Epoch<\/em>, in 1865. Like Dostoevsky, Leskov was progressive and experimental in his approach to fiction, and, like Dostoevsky, Leskov uses European tropes to suggest the difference, or otherness, in Russian identity. In 1880, Dostoevsky gave a keynote speech at the great Pushkin Celebrations in 1880. There is a description of the response to Dostoevsky\u2019s speech In Joseph Frank\u2019s monumental biography of Dostoevsky. We are told that the storm of applause went on more than an hour, with \u2018stamping weeping hugging kissing\u2026 at least one person lost consciousness\u2026\u2019<\/p>\n

The subject of that speech was the Russian nation, \u2018a new and wonderful phenomenon in the history of mankind\u2019 and the kind of literature that might do justice to it. Dostoevsky claimed that Pushkin\u2019s role in the creation of such a literature was \u2018extraordinary and prophetic,\u2019 assimilating and transcending the work of European writers, to create a \u2018unique manifestation\u2019 of the Russian spirit in literature. He concluded:<\/p>\n

\u2018In the course of time I believe that we — not we, of course, but our children to come — will all without exception understand that to be a true Russian does indeed mean to aspire finally to reconcile the contradictions of Europe.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

Dostoevsky\u2019s own literary project resonates with the recognition that 19th<\/sup> century European realism is not adequate to express Russia\u2019s vast territories, multiple ethnicities, its population of (recently liberated) serfs, its wandering, impoverished princes. Such works as The Double, <\/i>or Notes From Underground<\/i> anticipate existentialist and absurdist fiction and his longer novels contain elements of modernism and the surreal. Similarly, in Leskov\u2019s work, there is a range of genre, narrative technique and subject matter that suggests the breadth of his project.<\/span><\/p>\n

Reviewing an earlier collection in The Spectator, Robert Chandler wrote that ‘the scope of Leskov’s work is vast,’ and this collection introduces us to that scope.\u00a0The selected stories draw on fable (<\/span>the Steel Flea), <\/i><\/span>documented legal histories <\/span>(The Unmercenary Engineers<\/i><\/span>), classical tales translated from the Greek (<\/span>the Innocent Prudentius<\/i><\/span>) and of course, Shakespearean tragedy.<\/span><\/p>\n

Leskov was not the first Russian author to transpose the setting of a Shakespearean tragedy. Six years earlier, Turgenev published <\/span>his Hamlet of the Shchigrovksy District<\/i> – a portrayal of the psychological effects of superfluity, and solipsism. Turgenev uses the soliloquies or monologues that characterise Shakespeare\u2019s play, but the setting of his story, a tiny damp bedroom in a rural location, removes at a swift stroke the grandeur and portent of the original. The setting is central to the satire, which is directed against the landowning classes.<\/p>\n

Similarly, the transposition of Leskov\u2019s story alters the genre from tragedy to gothic thriller with elements of dark satire. It also accounts for some of the differences between Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk\u00a0<\/i>and the recent film of that title, set in England. In the original, the Ismailov estate is in an outlying rural area of Mtsensk, which is itself some distance from the capital. It is not the site of a national conflict, although there is certainly the suggestion that it is lonely and bleak. Katerina Ismailov is not of the royal court, although she marries a man who owns land and serfs; her husband is no threat to the Tsar.<\/p>\n

Like Lady Macbeth, Katerina is more ruthless and ambitious than either her lover or her husband, but she is more actively participatory than her original in the play. She doesn\u2019t merely instigate, but perpetrates the murders, and without, apparently, much reflection or internal argument. Also, unlike Lady Macbeth, Katerina apparently suffers no remorse. Katerina has been compared to Madame Bovary, because like Emma, Katerina is married to a man she can\u2019t love, and is bored by her situation, but she does not have Emma\u2019s interiority \u2013 her memories, yearning, or conflict. We don\u2019t at any point feel the extent of a suffering that might instigate murder. Unlike the protagonist of Turgenev\u2019s Hamlet, <\/i>Katerina is not given to introspection at all.<\/p>\n

There are points of comparison with Macbeth<\/i> – surreal and hallucinatory episodes for instance, but these serve to associate Katerina with animal symbolism, and to take the place of a more detailed psychological study. The story ends, for instance, with an image that suggests she has become a wholly predatory animal.<\/p>\n

The ending is significantly different from both the play and the film. Leskov\u2019s novella does not end with a cataclysmic battle and reported suicide. Katerina and her lover are sent to Siberia, that uniquely Russian penalty, and the details of imprisonment are vividly realised. Katerina is betrayed and whipped by her lover. she gives birth in a prison hospital and wants nothing to do with her child. Lady Macbeth knows \u2018how tender \u2018tis to love the babe that milks me\u2019, Katerina, apparently, has no such feeling. If Lady Macbeth\u2019s famous cry of \u2018unsex me here\u2019 shifts her into the monstrous, Katerina is dehumanised in a different way, as she kills the woman her lover has betrayed her with by dragging her off the ferry. \u2018Sonetka had disappeared. A few seconds later, as the current swept her away from the ferry, she flung her arms up in the air again, but just then Katerina Lvovna appeared from another wave, rose almost waist-high above the water, and flung herself at Sonetka like a powerful pike attacking a roach. Neither of them was seen again.\u2019<\/p>\n

It is unsurprising, therefore that the transposition of the story to England in the film necessitated a different ending, one that develops the theme of female power as opposed to degradation. What Leskov achieves by the shift in setting is partly directed against the place of women within that setting. Katerina is certainly transgressive, and punished for it. She is primitive, in much the same way as the rural culture within which she exists is primitive; Leskov could not at any point be accused of bucolic sentiment.<\/p>\n

The third novella in this volume <\/span><\/span>the Enchanted Wanderer <\/i><\/span>suggests the geographical scope and compass of Leskov\u2019s work. The hero \u2018relates his entire life\u2026taking in almost all Russia and its people, from the Arctic to the Black Sea.\u2019 This is <\/span>Rus <\/i><\/span>rather than European Russia, the vast swathe of territory which, as Orlando Figes has said in his monumental cultural history of Russia, tended to be ignored or disparaged as barbaric by proponents of the \u2018westernising influence\u2019 of European literature.<\/span><\/p>\n

The eponymous wanderer is certainly barbarous (he demonstrates his love of horses by punching them in the head so that their brains fall out of their nostrils) immune to love and (almost) immune to the extremity of his own suffering. He inhabits his own barbarism without apology or concession. There is an ironic distance in his narration, rather than introspection or interiority, which allows for sweeping changes in identity and role as he passes through a range of rural or urban territories, all of which appear equally alien and bizarre.<\/p>\n

Much of Leskov\u2019s satire in this story is directed at religion. The narrator, for instance, is captured by nomadic Tatars, crippled and enslaved by them for eleven years. When two missionary clergymen finally arrive with the intention of converting the Tatars, he begs them to take him with him, but they refuse for fear of offending the Tatars.<\/p>\n

\u2018Does that mean,\u2019 (he asks) \u2018that because of your politics I have to spend the rest of my useless life with them?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Well, does it matter, son, where you spend your useless life?\u2019 they reply.<\/p>\n

They advise him to pray, because God is merciful, and might save him. They remind him that he is a slave and the apostle Paul said that slaves must submit, and with this unsatisfactory answer he has to be content.<\/p>\n

The Tatars\u2019 treatment of the missionaries is summary; one is found floating in a lake, beheaded and flayed. \u2018the Tatars are very good at that,\u2019 the narrator observes. Later, using fireworks to convince the Tatars of his supernatural powers, he manages to escape on foot across the steppes, where he meets no one for 3 days. And when he finally meets a Chuvash man, he is reluctant to accept the offer of a horse, because the Chuvash \u2018seems like an infidel\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u2018Who is your god?\u2019 he asks,<\/p>\n

and the Chuvash replies,<\/p>\n

\u2018Everything is god to me: the sun\u2026the moon\u2026the stars.\u2019<\/p>\n

In such ways, obliquely or directly, Leskov exposes the contradictions in religion and religious belief. It is not surprising, therefore, that he frequently ran in to trouble with the censors. In his introduction Donald Rayfield tells us that some of Leskov\u2019s work was not available until after the revolution. Yet Leskov reserves most of his satire for the hypocrisy of the established church and government. In the Unmercenary Engineers<\/i>, for instance, the integrity of the protagonist means that he is destroyed by a politico\u2014religious system that demands conformity. Elsewhere, Leskov is sympathetic to the wide spectrum of beliefs found in Russia\u2019s various territories.<\/p>\n

Anti-Semitism features in these stories, but on more than one occasion the narrator is sympathetic to Jewish people, and to other oppressed groups such as the Roma. Most strikingly, The Sealed Angel <\/i>contains an empathetic portrayal of Old Believers. Old Believers were frequently persecuted or forcibly converted to the established church, for adhering to a form of Eastern Orthodoxy that predated the 17th<\/sup> century reforms of the Patriarch Nikon of Moscow, yet in this story the focus is on their integrity and artistry. Leskov goes into great detail about the painting of icons. He is as knowledgeable about the artistic process and its spiritual significance as he is about nomadic culture and the taming of wild horses: the level of attention he brings to these forgotten worlds does not merely add an extra layer of authentication or interest for the reader; it suggests respect. It is a presentation of otherness or ostranenie that differs from writers such as Gogol, or Babel where the narrator accentuates the shock of the routine atrocity or outrage<\/span><\/span><\/span>. Leskov invites the reader to accept without comment the strangeness of character, action and ideology in his stories, in a way that extends the internal boundaries of the reader. In this sense the stories reflect Chekhov\u2019s ideal of objectivity and audacity, although perhaps with less compassion and more cynicism.<\/p>\n

Leskov\u2019s stories are characterised by a unique combination of immersive experience and ironic distance, and by a range of narrative techniques. The Unmercenary Engineers<\/i>, for instance, is hedged by disclaimers. Although based on a factual case It draws attention to the gaps in historical documentation and casts doubt on itself in a way that anticipates the work of later, post-modern writers. The linguistic inventiveness and wit of The Steel Flea<\/i> attracted the attention of the censors, who saw it as an \u2018attack on Russian language norms\u2019. Today, we might read it as playfully dense and allusive, rich in wordplay\u2013 \u2018the \u2018calumnist on the Daily Telegraft<\/i>\u2019. The neologisms and wordplay drawing attention to the surface texture of the language itself, disrupting the linear connections between language and reality in a way worthy of Borges or Barth. It is a tribute to William Edgerton, that he manages to translate these convincingly. In the\u00a0Spectator<\/em>, Robert Chandler says Leskov’s shifts of register are hard to reproduce. ‘In some respects, he is an archaic writer, less a novelist than a storyteller; in other respects he is a modernist, a pet whose focus is on the behaviour of words themselves.’<\/p>\n

Leskov\u2019s characters are outcast, barbaric, and necessarily transgressive, they extend across a spectrum of Russian society although they are, on the whole, lower class. \u201cNo one,\u201d VS Pritchett maintained, \u201ccatches so truthfully the diversity of national character in his time.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

It is probably also true to say that few writers employ such variety of technique or linguistic virtuosity. There is the ingenious wordplay and inventiveness of the The Steel Flea<\/i>, the adaptation of classical Greek tropes, chorus and epithets in The innocent Prudentius<\/i>, and other embedded forms of intertextuality. Turgenev, for instance, had an estate in the district of Mtsensk where the title novella, recalling Turgenev\u2019s Hamlet of the Shchigrovksy District, <\/i>is set.<\/p>\n

In <\/span>Natasha\u2019s Dance, <\/i><\/span>Figes describes the proliferation of travel writing in the late 18<\/span>th<\/sup><\/span> and 19<\/span>th<\/sup><\/span> centuries, particularly deriving from the popular European tour. One might say that <\/span>The Enchanted Wanderer <\/i><\/span>is a different kind of travel writing, taking in the steppes, the Mongolian plains, and the darker haunts of remote towns; the kind of tour the cultural elite were less willing to undertake.<\/span> And this could be said to be at the heart of Leskov\u2019s project; he adopts European tropes and genres and makes them his own, breaking away from what Orlando Figes has called <\/span>\u2018the intellectual empire of the French\u2019. The literary allusions, intertextuality and wordplay are used to invert the established relationship between Russian and European literature and expose the gaps and contradictions. Leskov has been described as the most \u2018quintessentially Russian of writers\u2019 and in these pages an image of Russia emerges that is multiple and polyphonic, uncontainable by the narrative strategies of 19th<\/sup> century realism. In an era when Russia was energetically rewriting itself, Leskov foregrounds the narratives, settings and voices left out of the script.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

by Livi Michael<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nikolai Leskov |\u00a0Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: Selected Stories of Nikolai Leskov | New York Review of Books: \u00a314.99 The New York Review Books has published a selection of the stories of one of Russia\u2019s lesser known writers, Nikolai Leskov. 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