The construction of the Nikolaevsky bridge, the ways and speech of the Old Believers, the icon painter Racheiskov and his art—these are the realities Leskov builds on. And yet the story has nothing of the documentary about it. On the contrary, the storyteller’s voice transforms it all into an intensely personal, human story, with touches of the visionary and fantastic. What calls up the story is a question one of the guests at the inn asks tauntingly at the beginning: “So you saw an angel, and he led you—is that it?” “Yes, sir,” the stonemason replies, “I saw him, and he guided me.”
In his letter to Shchebalsky, Leskov wrote of his need for living persons whose spiritual content interested him. That content is revealed in the spoken word. This sort of “oral writing” is known in Russian as skaz, from the verb skazat, to speak or tell. A story in Russian is a rasskaz, a folktale is a skazka. Skaz includes the teller in the tale, so that we do not simply read the printed word, but also hear the speaking voice; we listen to the telling and even begin to mouth the words ourselves. George Orwell’s dictum “Good prose is like a window pane” does not apply here. On the contrary, language becomes physically present in skaz; we are as conscious of it as we are of the events it narrates. In “The Sealed Angel,” the author, who places himself among the listeners, creates the frame setting; other listeners occasionally interrupt to ask questions; but the story itself is told by the stonemason in his own particular language. Skaz is not merely an imitation of old-fashioned storytelling; it is a new form of written expression, even a “modern” one, which draws on the qualities of oral recitation.
Leskov’s comic masterpiece, “Lefty,” is subtitled “The Skaz of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea.” Its speech is the most richly and playfully misspoken Leskov ever invented. The first separate edition of the story, published in 1882, included a preface in which Leskov declared:
I wrote this legend down in Sestroretsk from the skaz of an old gunsmith there, a native of Tula, who had moved to the Sestra River back in the reign of the emperor Alexander I. Two years ago the storyteller was still of sound body and fresh memory; he gladly recalled the old days, greatly honored the sovereign Nikolai Pavlovich, lived “by the Old Belief,” read sacred books, and bred canaries. People treated him with respect.
This was a mystification, meant simply to introduce his narrator, but readers and critics took him seriously. Whether they admired his “stenography” or thought he might have distorted the language somewhat in copying it down, they all believed the story was an actual transcription, and even said it was a well-known legend, heard long ago. But “Lefty” had cost him a lot of work (in a letter to Sergei Shubnitsky of September 19, 1887, he confessed: “This language … does not come easily, but with much difficulty, and only love of the task can make a man take up such mosaic work”), and Leskov decided to clarify things and reclaim his story by publishing an explanation in a prominent journal, declaring: “I made up the whole story last May, and Lefty is a character of my own invention.” He insisted on it several more times in various places, but that did little to dispel the illusion. Finally, when he prepared the story for his collected works in 1889, he cut the preface, leaving the fictional Tula gunsmith out entirely. But he is still there, because the whole adventure of the steel flea is told in his voice. The author himself appears only in the brief final chapter.
The question of the author’s presence in Leskov’s stories is a complicated one, because Leskov most often screens himself behind the figure of a narrator who stands for the author. We meet this “author” among the guests at the snowbound inn in “The Sealed Angel,” on the boat with the enchanted wanderer, or taking down the story of the steel flea from the old gunsmith’s dictation. There is no direct authorial commentary, no analysis, no psychological interpretation in Leskov’s work (“it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free of explanation,” as Walter Benjamin observed). Yet Leskov insisted that art must serve the true and the good and that art for art’s sake did not interest him at all. And in fact the real author’s point of view does come through quite forcefully, though it takes some discernment to see what he sees. The conservative Slavophiles praised “Lefty” as a paean to deep Russia and the noble Russian craftsman. The scathing commentary on the conditions of Russian life passed them by. But it is not a matter of either/or: both are there.
Not all of Leskov’s stories are composed in the language of skaz, but they are all told, as memoirs, stories apropos, or simply amusing and sophisticated anecdotes like “The Spirit of Madame de Genlis,” “The Pearl Necklace,” or “A Flaming Patriot,” which are also far from simple. He always includes the situation of their telling, and they all share the complex relation of author and teller. In “The Spook,” for instance, we see everything simultaneously through a boy’s eyes and a man’s. “The Voice of Nature,” inconsequential as it might seem, prompted Benjamin to exclaim: “The way the profundity of this story is hidden beneath its silliness conveys an idea of Leskov’s magnificent humor.” “The White Eagle” has been interpreted in various ways: as a mockery of the vogue of spiritualism in Russia of the late 1870s, as an unmasking of an ambitious bureaucrat driven to hallucinations by his desire for a new decoration, as an exposure of deceit and conspiracy among provincial government officials. But the fantastic keeps evolving in this “fantastic story”; it refuses to be reduced to political satire or psychodrama, and ends in an almost mystical irresolution, as the hero admits in his last words. Even the clipped, objective report of “The Man on Watch” shifts in its brief chapters from one point of view to another, one character to another, setting them side by side—again with no commentary, no single resolving voice, until the author steps in at the end.
We have arranged the stories chronologically. The earliest, “The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” was written in 1864; the latest, “A Robbery,” in 1887. We have not included works dealing with specifically churchly subjects, fine as they are, or the parables and legends of the 1890s, or any of the last darkly satirical stories, which were admirably translated (along with “Lefty,” “Singlemind,” and others) by William Edgerton and Hugh McLean, in Satirical Stories of Nikolai Leskov (New York: Pegasus, 1969). Our aim has been to bring together in one volume a broad and representative selection of Leskov’s best work, so that a new generation of English-speaking readers may discover him for themselves.
RICHARD PEVEAR
* “Les débuts littéraires de Leskov,” in Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique, vol. 22, no. 1 (1981).
† The Petersburg Gazette, November 27, 1894.
‡ See the opening of “The Pearl Necklace.”
§ Chekhov: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1997).
‖ Quoted in The Organic Worldview of Nikolai Leskov, by Irmhild Christina Sperrle (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002), p. 6 (slightly revised).
a A History of Russian Literature from Its Beginnings to 1900 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926, 1927, 1949, 1958; Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), p. 333.
b Nikolai Leskov: The Man and His Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 110.
c See note 26 to “Singlemind” for Leskov’s account of how he came to write the stories of righteous men.
d Quoted in McLean, Nikolai Leskov, p. 233.
Translators’ Note
Leskov is notoriously difficult to translate. He wrote to his German translator: “ ‘The Flea’ is much too Russian and hardly translatable (on account of its language)” (October 26, 1888). A month later he softened a little: “If you translate ‘Lefty,’ you’re the ‘foremost magician.’ ” But a few days later he cautioned: “You will have a hard time with ‘Lefty and the Flea.’ A knowledge of colloquial German is not enough. What will you do with the sound effects and the plays on words?” In the face of these warnings, we have tried all the same to keep the whole story, including its sound effects and plays on words. And we have done the same with all the stories in this collection. That is
not only the challenge, but also the delight of translating Leskov. The philosopher Jacques Maritain wrote to Pope Paul VI about a new French translation of the Bible (which he did not like): “The first duty of a translator … is always to respect the word itself that the author has used … and to seek its exact equivalent.” He was not advocating a slavish literalism; he was defending the full meaning, meaning also the way of meaning, of the original.
The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
A Sketch
The first song brings a blush to the cheek.
A SAYING
I
In our parts such characters sometimes turn up that, however many years ago you met them, you can never recall them without an inner trembling. To the number of such characters belongs the merchant’s wife Katerina Lvovna Izmailova, who once played out a terrible drama, after which our gentlefolk, in someone’s lucky phrase, started calling her “the Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.”
Katerina Lvovna was not born a beauty, but she was a woman of very pleasing appearance. She was only twenty-three years old; not tall, but shapely, with a neck as if carved from marble, rounded shoulders, a firm bosom, a fine, straight little nose, lively black eyes, a high and white brow, and very black, almost blue-black hair. She was from Tuskar in Kursk province and was given in marriage to our merchant Izmailov, not out of love or any sort of attraction, but just so, because Izmailov sent a matchmaker to propose, and she was a poor girl and could not choose her suitors. The house of Izmailov was not the least in our town: they traded in white flour, kept a big rented mill in the district, had orchards outside town, and in town had a fine house. Generally, they were well-to-do merchants. Besides, the family was very small: the father-in-law, Boris Timofeich Izmailov, was already nearly eighty, a longtime widower; his son, Zinovy Borisych, Katerina Lvovna’s husband, was a little over fifty; then there was Katerina Lvovna, and that was all. In the five years of Katerina Lvovna’s marriage to Zinovy Borisych, she had had no children. Nor did Zinovy Borisych have children from his first wife, with whom he had lived for some twenty years before becoming a widower and marrying Katerina Lvovna. He thought and hoped that God might grant an heir to his merchant name and capital from his second marriage; but in that he was again unlucky with Katerina Lvovna.
This childlessness greatly distressed Zinovy Borisych, and not only Zinovy Borisych, but also old Boris Timofeich, and even Katerina Lvovna herself was much grieved by it. For one thing, exceeding boredom in the merchant’s locked-up tower, with its high walls and watchdogs running loose, had more than once filled the merchant’s young wife with pining, to the point of stupefaction, and she would have been glad, God knows how glad, to nurse a little child; and for another thing, she was also sick of reproaches: “Why marry, what’s the point of marrying; why bind a man’s fate, barren woman?”—as if she really had committed some crime against her husband, and against her father-in-law, and against their whole honorable merchant family.
For all its ease and plenty, Katerina Lvovna’s life in her father-in-law’s house was most boring. She went visiting very little, and if she did go with her husband to call on his merchant friends, that was also no joy. They were all strict people: they watched how she sat, and how she walked, and how she stood. But Katerina Lvovna had an ardent nature, and when she had lived in poverty as a young girl, she had been accustomed to simplicity and freedom, running to the river with buckets, swimming under the pier in nothing but a shift, or showering sunflower husks over the garden gate on some young fellow passing by. Here it was all different. Her father-in-law and husband got up as early as could be, had their tea at six o’clock, and went about their business, while she dilly-dallied from room to room alone. It was clean everywhere, it was quiet and empty everywhere, icon lamps shone before the icons, and nowhere in the house was there a living sound, a human voice.
Katerina Lvovna would wander and wander about the empty rooms, start yawning with boredom, and climb the stairs to her marital bedroom in the small, high mezzanine. There, too, she sat, looked at how they hung up hemp or poured out flour by the storehouse—again she would start to yawn, and she was glad of it: she would doze off for an hour or two, then wake up—again the same Russian boredom, the boredom of a merchant’s house, from which they say you could even happily hang yourself. Katerina Lvovna was not a lover of reading, and besides there were no books in their house except for the lives of the Kievan saints.1
Katerina Lvovna lived a boring life in the rich house of her father-in-law during the five years of her marriage to her unaffectionate husband; but, as often happens, no one paid the slightest attention to this boredom of hers.
II
In the sixth spring of Katerina Lvovna’s marriage, the Izmailovs’ mill dam burst. At that time, as if on purpose, a lot of work had been brought to the mill, and the breach proved enormous: water went under the lower sill, and to stop it up slapdash was impossible. Zinovy Borisych drove people to the mill from all around and sat there constantly himself; the business in town was managed by the old man alone, and Katerina Lvovna languished at home for whole days as alone as could be. At first she was still more bored without her husband, but then it came to seem even better to her: she felt freer by herself. Her heart had never really gone out to him, and without him there was at least one less commander over her.
Once Katerina Lvovna was sitting at the window on her upper floor, yawning, yawning, thinking of nothing in particular, and she finally felt ashamed to be yawning. And the weather outside was so wonderful: warm, bright, cheerful, and through the green wooden lattice of the garden various birds could be seen flitting from branch to branch in the trees.
“What in fact am I yawning for?” thought Katerina Lvovna. “I might at least get up and go for a walk in the yard or a stroll in the garden.”
Katerina Lvovna threw on an old damask jacket and went out.
Outside it was so bright and the air was so invigorating, and in the gallery by the storehouses there was such merry laughter.
“What are you so glad about?” Katerina Lvovna asked her father-in-law’s clerks.
“You see, dearest Katerina Lvovna, we’ve been weighing a live sow,” an old clerk replied.
“What sow?”
“This sow Aksinya here, who gave birth to a son, Vassily, and didn’t invite us to the christening,” a fine fellow with a handsome, impudent face framed in jet-black curls and a barely sprouting beard told her boldly and merrily.
At that moment the fat mug of the ruddy cook Aksinya peeked out of a flour tub hung on a balance beam.
“Fiends, sleek-sided devils,” the cook swore, trying to catch hold of the iron beam and climb out of the swinging tub.
“Weighs two hundred and fifty pounds before dinner, and once she’s eaten a load of hay, there won’t be weights enough,” the handsome young fellow again explained, and, overturning the tub, he dumped the cook out onto the sacking piled in the corner.
The woman, cursing playfully, began putting herself to rights.
“Well, and how much might I weigh?” Katerina Lvovna joked, and, taking hold of the ropes, she stepped onto the plank.
“A hundred and fifteen pounds,” the same handsome young Sergei said, throwing weights onto the balance. “Amazing!”
“What’s amazing?”
“That you weigh over a hundred pounds, Katerina Lvovna. I figured a man could carry you around in his arms the whole day and not get tired out, but only feel the pleasure it gave him.”
“What, you mean I’m not a human being or something? You’d get tired for sure,” Katerina Lvovna replied, blushing slightly, not used to such talk and feeling a sudden surge of desire to loosen up and speak her fill of merry and playful words.
“God, no! I’d carry you all the way to happy Araby,” Sergei replied to her remark.
“Your figuring’s off, young fellow,” said the little peasant doing the pouring. “What is it makes us heavy? Is it our body gives us weight? Our body, my dear man, means not
hing in the scales: our strength, it’s our strength gives us weight—not the body!”
The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories Page 3
