The story is worth telling - new Leskov translations in The Hudson Review

A couple of Nikolai Leskov stories are featured in the Summer 2011 issue of The Hudson Review, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.  The stories are early signs of a fat Leskov collection that P&V are assembling, due who knows when.  It will, of course, include redundant versions of “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” and The Enchanted Wanderer and the bizarre faux folk tale “The Steel Flea,” but it should also have new, or at least rare, stories.  Once the book is available, we can also expect to enjoy more of Richard Pevear’s usual misplaced contempt for other translators.

The two stories in The Hudson Review are of a different character than the standard Leskov classics I looked at yesterday.  They are anecdotes, really, stretched and decorated and adapted to the standards of magazine fiction.  They are cousins of the stories of contemporaries like Maupassant and the young Chekhov, compact, light, set in a recognizable, nominally “realistic” world.

“The Pearl Necklace” (1885) does have a curious introduction, in which Leskov and his friends briefly discuss the “perceived impoverishment of literature” caused by “the multiplication of railroads,” which leads them to the praise of Dickens, and to a criticism of the monotonous, formulaic nature of his Christmas stories.  A Christmas story follows, presented as a perfect example of the form, a twist-ending piece about a father who is skeptical of his daughters’ choices of husbands.  The necklace in the title is his questionable wedding and New Year’s gift to his youngest daughter:

He deserved to be reprimanded for the gift of pearls, because pearls signify and foretell tears.  And therefore pearls are never used as New Year’s gifts.
However, Nikolai Ivanovich deftly laughed it off.  (227)

That’s the loving husband; his reaction is the moral of the story, embedded in the middle.  Marry for love, don’t worry too much about money, tread lightly in the world, laugh off worry.  “The Pearl Necklace” presents a light and active model for his great theme of humility and resignation to the cares of the world.

“A Flaming Patriot” (1881) is surprising for its setting (Vienna) and its guest star:

Franz Joseph took the mug in his hand but didn’t drink from it; while the dance lasted, he went on holding it in his hand, but when the czardas was finished, the emperor silently held out his mug to his neighbor.  The man understood at once what he must do: he clinked with his sovereign and, immediately turning to his other neighbor, exchanged clinks with him.  Thereupon, as many people as were there, they all stood up, all clinked with each other, and breathed out over the whole lawn a concerted unanimous “Hoch!”  This “hoch” is not shouted loudly and boomingly there, but like a good, heartfelt sigh.

The emperor drained his mug in one breath, bowed, and left. (237)

I typed this out because I like it, and because the story is actually about a group of Russians who witness the scene and disagree about its meaning.  It’s not a big story, but “[t]he story is worth telling,” Leskov declares.  Worth reading, too.

After that things began to move fast, just as in a fairy tale. - Leskov doesn't tell his stories right

The most famous story of Nikolai Leskov, thanks, I suppose, to the Shostakovich opera, is the 1865 “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District,” a tale that readers with less of a cold-fish temperament than me might actually find harrowing.  The bored rural Russian Lady Macbeth falls in love with her husband’s clerk; anyone who gets in the way of their love is murdered, at least until their crimes are discovered and the murderers are sent to Siberia.

A reader with a keener eye than me might notice that this story does not sound much like Macbeth at all.  The woman inveigling her husband into crime is from Macbeth, except here the husband ends up buried in the basement, and the motive is love, not ambition.  I was on the alert for parallel scenes – Banquo’s ghost at the banquet, or the Three Witches – and with some stretching I can find some, but the exercise is basically futile.  The sad part is that Leskov had warned me not to bother, that the name was “first invented for her on the spur of the moment by someone or other.”  This is from the first page of the story.

The invocation of Shakespeare in the title, as strong a sign of “literariness” as Leskov could find, is a distraction but also a nod to his method, his blend of the literary and folk traditions.  The novella-like The Enchanted Wanderer (1872), for example, is a picaresque in the style of Lazarillo de Tormes, with the simple but tough hero touring Russia, moving from profession to profession and place to place, from the stable to a nomadic camp to a monastery, all with no discernible effect on his personality.  What a charming way to take a tour of 19th century Russia.  Bizarre elements intrude into the hero’s narration, though, dreams and prophecies and hallucinations:

For, as I swam, I saw Grusha flying above me and she was now a girl in her teens, just about sixteen, I should say, and she had large wings already, bright wings, spanning the whole river, and she protected me with them. . . (Ch. 19, 195)

Curious ellipses in the original.  The wanderer is in the army here, and under fire; he is forced out of the military because of his insistence that he was protected from harm by a ghost fairy.  By the end of the novella, The Enchanted Wanderer has become enjoyably scrambled, with no way to sort the true from the false, even in the story’s own terms.

David Auerbach emphasizes the surprises in the structures of Leskov’s stories – Leskov’s “narrative strangeness.”  What at first looks like an epilogue to “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District,” the punishment of Lady Macbeth and her lover, their journey to Siberia, turns out to fill a quarter of the text, and the events of the episode deepened, or perhaps upended, my understanding of Lady Macbeth’s character.  The Enchanted Wanderer has a slightly different device.  The wanderer repeatedly insists that his adventures will end in a monastery, but the monastery turns out to be only the latest episode in the bizarre string.

The central story of “Lady Macbeth,” and a number of the episodes of The Enchanted Wanderer, would be worth reading if told in a more straightforward way.  That’s part of the fun of Leskov, that his stories are strong.  The other part, though, is that he doesn’t tell them correctly.

Translations by David Magarshack.  My context-damaged title is from The Enchanted Wanderer, Ch. 16, 181.

The great Nikolai Leskov

I want to spend a few days writing about Nikolai Leskov, a contemporary of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and a second-rater compared to those two, which is hardly a wounding criticism.  Leskov’s best work, anecdotes and tales and longish stories, is excellent, an effective blend of Gogol and Pushkin with some unique contributions from his own voice.  His voice is not a strong one, which might well be a relief to readers who find the voices of T. and D. to be strong in the manner of anchovies and beef liver.    Leskov’s authorial personality is mild and amiable.  He was raised by an aunt who was English, and a Quaker.  I’m just throwing that out there.

Leskov became a genuinely popular writer.  He is a tale-teller, writing stories with strong beginnings and endings.  I am comparing him here with Chekhov, with Chekhov’s ordinary people and quivering, ambiguous endings.  Leskov tells a complete story about something extraordinary.  I always enjoy pointing out how this or that unlikely 19th century writer prefigures this or that key aspect of Modernism.  Nikolai Leskov does not.

Am I belittling Leskov?  I am in good company.  V. S. Pritchett, in the introduction to David Magarshack’s translation (Selected Tales, 1961, in print now as The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories) writes:

He is not, in the least, a literary writer.  He appears to burst upon the reader without art in a rambling, wily, diffuse, old-fashioned way.  He shambles into his tales without embarrassment, indifferent to technique.  (ix)

Pritchett then proceeds, in the rest of his essay, to contradict most of this.  Shambles!  Indifferent to technique – nonsense!  There are better and worse, duller and more lively ways to tell tales.  Leskov is better, more lively, and best of all, weirder, full of surprises.  But I know what Pritchett is getting at.  First, delicate reader of 1961, do not expect the penetrating soul-plumbing  anguish of T. and D.; second, the tales as such, the stories, really are quite good.

A wiser book blogger than I would have skipped most – all – of the above and simply pointed curious readers to David Waggish Auerbach’s fine overview at The Quarterly Conversation, excellent except for the inaccurate title, which I note Waggish tactfully corrects at his own site.  I will, or at least should, refer to Auerbach’s piece again over the next day or two; I may well have nothing to add to what he has already written.  Such is life on the internet.