The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

Introduction

Leskov is a writer who yields enormous pleasure, breaking past sectarian literary and ideological premises. But more: we live in a moment of lowered cultural and emotional expectations, after the fall of modernism but with nothing very strong to replace it. To go back to certain earlier writers is to regain a sense of human possibility. To go back to Leskov is to regain a sense of the passion, sometimes the joy, that can be part of the human enterprise.

IRVING HOWE, “JUSTICE FOR LESKOV”

I

Nikolai Leskov, a younger contemporary of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and one of the great masters of Russian fiction, is a writer who keeps being discovered. The first to discover him was Leskov himself. He was in his late twenties and working as a business agent for his uncle, a Russianized Scotsman named Alexander Scott, whose firm managed the vast estates of two noble Russian families. Leskov later described those years, from 1857 to 1859, as the best period of his life. He traveled all over Russia, “from the Black Sea to the White and from Brod to Krasny Yar,” and sent back reports in the form of letters to his uncle. “I had no need to clear myself a path to the people through books and ready-made ideas,” he later wrote. “I studied them in place. Books were a precious help to me, but I was the helmsman. Hence I’m not rooted in any school, because it was not in school that I learned, but on Scott’s barges.” These travels gave him a great store of impressions that he drew upon all his life. Scott was struck by the literary quality of Leskov’s reports and used to read them aloud to his neighbors, one of whom praised them so highly that it gave Leskov the idea of becoming a writer. As he commented rather drily in a third-person “Note on Himself” thirty years later: “His writing began by chance.”

He was born in the village of Gorokhovo, near the town of Orel (pronounced “Oryól”), in 1831. Orel, located in the Russian heartland, the so-called “wooden Russia,” some two hundred and twenty miles southwest of Moscow, is the setting of five of the seventeen stories in the present collection. Another is set in Mtsensk, which is in the Orel region, and five more take place in other provincial Russian towns. This preponderance of the provincial is typical of Leskov’s work as a whole, though, as the reader will see, he could also tell sophisticated and witty stories set in Petersburg, Moscow, Vienna …

On his father’s side, Leskov came from several generations of priests serving the village of Leski, which gave them their family name. His father, too, received a seminary education, but he broke with tradition and entered government service in the Orel courts, eventually attaining the rank of collegiate assessor, which conferred hereditary nobility. His mother was from an impoverished aristocratic family: her father, a Moscow nobleman who had lost everything during the French invasion in 1812, worked as an estate manager in Gorokhovo; her mother, of whom Leskov gives us a fine portrait in the last chapter of “Deathless Golovan,” was of Moscow merchant stock and, as Leskov says, “was taken in marriage into a noble family ‘not for her wealth, but for her beauty.’ ” Leskov thus combined in himself the three estates—noble, mercantile, and clerical—but in oddly mixed and attenuated forms.

He first came to know the fourth estate, the peasants (serfs at that time), in 1839, when his father gave up his position as a magistrate in Orel and bought the small country estate of Panino, in the Kromy district, twenty miles from Orel. This move and some of the experiences it led to are described in the opening chapters of his story “The Spook.” The knowledge of peasant life he acquired then, later enriched by his travels for Alexander Scott, differed greatly from the abstractions of radical social theory that were becoming fashionable in Moscow and Petersburg.

Leskov’s formal schooling was limited to the five years, from 1841 to 1846, he spent at the secondary school in Orel. He later wrote that he was “terribly bored but studied well,” but in fact he was a mediocre student, and at the age of fifteen he left school without finishing and went into civil service as a clerk in the Orel criminal court. In 1848 his father died during an outbreak of cholera, leaving his mother to manage the little estate at Panino and raise seven children, of whom he was the eldest. In 1849 his maternal uncle, Sergei Petrovich Alferiev, a doctor in Kiev and a professor at the university, invited him to visit. Leskov was greatly impressed by the city and decided to stay. He took a leave from his post in Orel and by February of 1850 had been accepted as a junior clerk in the Kiev military recruitment office. This close experience of the workings of Russian bureaucracy and of the fate of conscripts (the term of military service at that time was twenty-five years) would reappear again and again in his writing.

Leskov spent eight years in Kiev, made friends with students and professors at the university through his uncle, sat in on courses, read widely, learned Ukrainian and Polish, and incidentally witnessed the building of the famous Nikolaevsky Chain Bridge over the Dniepr River, designed by the Anglo-Irish engineer Charles Blacker Vignoles. This was the first multi-span suspension bridge in Europe and at the time the longest in the world. The workers and the work on the bridge have a central place in his story “The Sealed Angel” (1873), and though he deliberately avoids naming the city, the setting is vividly evoked. The directors of the actual project were English, as in Leskov, and Vignoles’s letters and papers (which, of course, Leskov never saw) describe the same natural disasters, the floods and ice damage, that play such a major part in the story. In 1853, the year that the bridge was officially opened, Leskov married Olga Smirnova, the daughter of a Kiev merchant.

The suffering and the corruption Leskov witnessed daily in the system of military conscription under the emperor Nicholas I were counterbalanced by the intellectual breadth and moral idealism he met with in the people of his uncle’s circle. He was profoundly influenced by a number of them, in particular by a man he refers to in an autobiographical note as “the well-known statistician-abolitionist Dmitri Petrovich Zhuravsky.” Zhuravsky (1810–1856) was an economist who not only advocated the abolition of serfdom in theory but also practiced it in reality, buying out house serfs and setting them free. At his death, he left his small inheritance for the continuation of that practice. Writing to his friend the Slavophile publicist Ivan Aksakov on December 2, 1874, Leskov said of Zhuravsky: “he was all but the first living person who, in the days of my youth in Kiev, made me understand that virtue exists not only in abstractions.”

Another of his Kievan acquaintances, and one closer to him in age, had an even stronger influence on the young Leskov. This was Stepan Stepanovich Gromeka (1823–1877), a nobleman from Poltava who was attached to the governor-general’s staff when they met in 1852. Gromeka had a rather strange career. Politically he began as a liberal, advocating reform rather than revolution. He defended the monarchy while hoping to improve it. In 1857–1858 he published a series of satirical articles on the police in the prominent Moscow journal The Russian Messenger. He also contributed to the liberal Petersburg monthly Notes of the Fatherland, and to the radical journal The Bell, edited in London by the expatriate Alexander Herzen. But his journalistic career was confined to some five or six years. By 1862 he had turned against Herzen, and in the later 1860s he went back into government service, ending as governor of Siedlce province in Russian Poland, where he campaigned for the absorption of the Uniate (Eastern Roman Catholic) Church into the Russian Orthodox Church and was notorious for his brutal treatment of peasants who resisted.

Leskov followed a very different path from Gromeka’s, but in his “Note on Himself” he acknowledged that their friendship during his years in Kiev “had a decisive influence on Leskov’s subsequent destiny. The example of Gromeka, who abandoned his government service and went to work for the Russian Society of Shipping and Trade, induced Leskov to do the same.” So it was that Leskov left his position in the recruiting office and went to work for Alexander Scott. But in 1860 Scott’s firm suffered reverses and he could no longer keep his nephew employed. Leskov returned to Kiev, and here the influence of Gromeka again proved crucial. Gromeka had preceded Leskov into business; he had also preceded him into journalism. In the early 1860s it was Gromeka who connected Leskov with such prominent Moscow and Petersburg editors as Mikhail Katkov of The Russian Messenger, Stepan Dudyshkin and Andrei Kraevsky of Notes of the Fatherland, Mikhail and Fyodor Dostoevsky of Time and Epoch (“The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” was first published in Epoch in 1865). In the same “Note on Himself,” he confessed that “Leskov’s decisive enslavement to literature was again the work of that same Gromeka. He has been writing ever since.”

Leskov’s earliest article, “Sketches of the Distilling Industry (Penza Province),” was published in April 1861 in Notes of the Fatherland. By then the thirty-year-old author had moved to Petersburg himself. It was his first taste of life in the capital, and it was a heady moment for Russian society. In 1855 the repressive emperor Nicholas I had died and his son, Alexander II (1818–1881), had taken the throne. In March 1861, Alexander II released a manifesto proclaiming the emancipation of the serfs, for which he became known as the “tsar-liberator.” In 1864 came a far-reaching judicial reform, for the first time establishing open courts, trial by jury, and a bar association. There were also military reforms shortening the length of service and eliminating corporal punishment, among other things. But this was also the time of the nihilists, the so-called “new people,” who were not satisfied with Alexander’s reforms or with liberalism in general and called for far more radical changes. The term “nihilist” first entered Russian literature in a novel by another writer from Orel—Ivan Turgenev. In his Fathers and Sons, published in 1862, it is applied to Evgeny Bazarov, whom Turgenev conceived as “a new type of hero.” Arkady Kirsanov, a close friend of Bazarov, explains the meaning of the term to his father: “A nihilist is a man who does not bow down before any authority, who does not take any principle on faith, whatever reverence that principle may be enshrined in.” The radical journalist Dmitri Pisarev (1840–1868) put it more bluntly: “Whatever can be smashed, must be smashed.” It was a time of fierce polemics, clandestine publications, the first experiments with communes, and also of several attempts to assassinate the tsar-liberator, the last of which, in March 1881, was successful.

With his move to Petersburg, Leskov was caught up in the contradictions of the time, and as a journalist he quickly found himself embroiled in them. Writing about “Leskov’s Literary Beginnings,” the French scholar Jean-Claude Marcadé observed: “Leskov’s articles are interesting because they show the same temperament in the publicist as would be that of the writer throughout his career. It was impossible for him to compose accommodating works, to hide the truth as he felt it.”^* Near the end of his life, in an interview with V. V. Protopopov, Leskov said of himself:

I love literature as a means enabling me to express what I hold to be true and good. If I cannot do that, literature is of no value to me: looking upon it as art is not my point of view. I absolutely cannot understand the concept of “art for art’s sake.” No, art must be useful. Only then does it have a precise meaning. I do not acknowledge the art of painting naked women. It is the same for literature. If one cannot serve the true and the good by means of art, it is useless to write, and one ought to abandon the occupation.^†

He was a prolific journalist and remained one all his life, producing over six hundred articles in all. But in 1862 he also published his first fiction in The Northern Bee, which, in tune with the times, had turned from a reactionary to a liberal journal.

The progressives were divided into two camps, the “gradualist” and the “impatient.” Leskov remained with the gradualists, he said, because he found their moderation more trustworthy. Besides, he was somewhat older than most of the “new people” and had behind him a much deeper and more varied experience of Russian realities. But he had a number of good friends among the “impatient,” and when student unrest broke out in Petersburg and then in Moscow in 1861–62, he sympathized with their cause. From them he arrived at the notion, to be embodied in his polemical novel No Way Out (1864), that there were good nihilists and bad nihilists, and that the good would soon distinguish themselves from the “nihilizing babblers.”

In Moscow, on May 18, 1862, a clandestine proclamation entitled “Young Russia” appeared, calling upon the radical youth to “pick up their axes” and “strike the imperial party” wherever it might be—“in the public squares … the streets, the fields, the villages”—and with each blow to cry: “Long live the social and democratic Republic of Russia!” The “imperial party” meant not only the emperor and his family, but the nobility, the merchants, the functionaries, the landowners—they were all to be included in the bloodbath. Copies of the proclamation were handed out in the streets and courtyards, sent by mail, stuffed into coat pockets, distributed in churches, pasted up on walls. It caused great alarm among the inhabitants of both capitals, and all sorts of rumors began to spread. In the midst of that agitation, towards the end of May, a series of fires broke out in Petersburg. The conservatives immediately blamed them on the students and revolutionaries. The progressives countered by saying they had been set by the police as a provocation. (Some also suggested they were simply the work of property owners who wanted to collect on their insurance. To this day, in fact, no one knows whether the fires were deliberate or accidental.) The fire in the Apraksin and Shchukin markets on May 28 caused the greatest panic and destruction. Two days later Leskov published an editorial in The Northern Bee responding to the rumors about arson, noting that “the public also points to what sort of people the incendiaries are, and hatred of that sort of people [he carefully avoids mentioning students] is growing with unheard-of speed.” He voiced his concern about the danger “the members of that body” might face as a result of the rumors. He did not presume to judge how well-founded the suspicions were and to what extent they might be connected to “the latest abominable and revolting proclamation calling for the overthrow of the entire civil order of our society.” But to avoid worse disorders, he called on the police to make public at once all the solid information they had. “They should boldly say whether the rumors circulating in the capital about the fires and the incendiaries have the least substance. The ignoble villains must not be spared; but neither is it fitting to risk a single hair on a single head living in the capital and exposed to the accusations of a totally frightened population.”

The editorial is somewhat awkwardly worded, but it is clear that Leskov wanted to get at the truth, so that the rumors would not continue to grow and threaten innocent people. He did not believe the students were responsible for the fires. He condemned the “Young Russia” proclamation in the strongest terms and meant to separate it from the majority of the students, but to the minds of the radicals, he was in fact connecting them with the fires and even inciting the police against them. The violence of their reaction astonished Leskov and wounded him deeply. He was accused of being a government agent and, worse than that, a turncoat. Dmitri Pisarev, the spokesman of the nihilists, anathematized him, calling him both reactionary and dishonest, and virtually banned him from the pages of the liberal press. What was more, the emperor was also said to be displeased with the editorial. Though he never recanted, and in fact had nothing to recant, Leskov’s attempts to explain himself in subsequent articles only made matters worse both on the right and on the left. He even received death threats. On September 6, 1862, to escape the turmoil and clear his head, Leskov went abroad as foreign correspondent for The Northern Bee. Choosing to travel by stagecoach rather than train,^‡ he passed through the Ukraine, Poland, Bohemia, and finally settled in Paris, where he spent four months, returning to Russia only the next March.

Among the liberal intelligentsia Leskov bore the totally misplaced stigma of a reactionary all his life, and it lingered on into Soviet times. In a letter to his friend Pyotr Shchebalsky dated November 10, 1875, he mimicked the general editorial opinion of him: “He has marked himself off so clearly … and besides they say he’s close to the Third Section” (i.e., the secret police). A reviewer who praised the language of “The Sealed Angel” in 1873 added, “Leskov has such a reputation that it takes a sort of audacity to praise him.” As a result, though he always had readers, more and more of them as time went on, he suffered during his lifetime from an almost total critical neglect. Even his admirers among the critics were reluctant to write about him because of the suspicions he aroused. He was considered a minor writer, and the great originality of his work was overlooked. He remained, in that sense, undiscovered.

In the 1880s that situation began to change. A younger generation of writers, artists, and thinkers, who had themselves rejected the violent and doctrinaire judgments of nihilism, turned to Leskov as a master. This was his second discovery. In 1881 the new weekly humor magazine Fragments published Leskov’s story “The Spirit of Madame de Genlis.” Two years later the same magazine published “A Little Mistake.” Meanwhile, the stories of the young Anton Chekhov had begun to appear there. Chekhov was in medical school and earned his living by placing comic sketches wherever he could (Fragments published two hundred and seventy of them between 1882 and 1887). In 1883 he met Leskov in Moscow. “Leikin brought along with him my favorite writer, the famous N. S. Leskov,” he wrote in a letter to his brother. He was twenty-three, Leskov fifty-two. After a night of carousing, they wound up in a cab together. “Leskov turns to me half-drunk,” Chekhov wrote in the same letter, “and asks: ‘Do you know what I am?’ ‘I do.’ ‘No, you don’t. I’m a mystic.’ ‘I know.’ He stares at me with his old man’s popping eyes and prophesies: ‘You will die before your brother.’ ‘Maybe so.’ ‘I shall anoint you with oil as Samuel did David … Write.’ The man is a mixture of an elegant Frenchman and a defrocked priest. But he’s considerable.” Chekhov took this consecration by Leskov more seriously than it sounds. And in fact they had much in common: they shared a broad experience of Russia and Russian life and an unidealized knowledge of the people. And something more important as well. In his biography of Chekhov,^§ Donald Rayfield speaks of “a mystic side of Chekhov—his irrational intuition that there is meaning and beauty in the cosmos,” which “aligns him more to Leskov than to Tolstoy in the Russian literary tradition.”

Another new discoverer of Leskov was the painter Ilya Repin (1844–1930), one of the major Russian artists of the later nineteenth century. He had met Leskov and had illustrated some of his stories. In September 1888, in a letter asking permission (unsuccessfully) to paint Leskov’s portrait, he wrote: “Not only I but the whole of educated Russia knows you and loves you as a very outstanding writer of unquestionable merits, and at the same time as a thinking man.” The poet and philosopher Vladimir Soloviev (1853–1900), a central intellectual figure then and now, also championed Leskov’s work. They became personal friends in 1891 and met frequently. Soloviev hand-carried the manuscript of Leskov’s novella “Night Owls” to M. M. Stasyulevich, editor of the liberal, pro-Western Messenger of Europe, who had declared once that Leskov was “someone I will never publish,” and persuaded him to change his mind. When Leskov died in February 1895, Soloviev published an obituary notice:

In his will, Leskov wrote: “I know there was much bad in me; I deserve no praise and no pity. As for those who want to blame me, they should know that I have already done so myself.” But it is impossible to fulfill such wishes when it is a question of such a remarkable man. Therefore I will conform myself to the spirit rather than the letter of this will, and allow myself to express in a few words what I think of the person of the dead man and of his work.

What was striking above all in Nikolai Semyonovich was his passionate nature; at an advanced age, and though seemingly inactive, he was still prey to a constant seething of the soul. He needed a quite uncommon spiritual force to keep his ardent character within bounds. Besides, in his works one felt a passionate and restless attitude towards the things he described, which, if his talent had been less, might have turned into an obvious partiality. But in Leskov, as in every great writer, that passion is tempered and betrays itself only secretly, though here and there in his writings there still remains some trace of ideological engagement …

It is likely that Leskov’s compositions will elicit critical judgments as serious as they are profound; and then, despite what is written in his will, the late writer will become the object of much praise and much blame. But they will all certainly acknowledge in him the brilliance and extraordinary originality of a talent that never remained buried, like the keen yearning for the truth that ruled his being and his work.

II

In 1889–90 the first collected edition of Leskov’s works was published in ten volumes, seen through the press by the author himself. An eleventh volume was added in 1893, and a twelfth in 1896, posthumous but prepared by Leskov. This edition was reprinted twice, with the addition of an interesting, somewhat hagiographic preface by Rostislav Sementkovsky. In 1902–03 a thirty-six-volume Complete Collected Works (also not complete) was published and became the standard edition. Twenty years later the formalist critic Boris Eikhenbaum (1886–1959) finally accorded Leskov his rightful place in Russian literature, looking at his writing in itself rather than in its ideological context, and showing that the attempt to set his work beside that of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev was mistaken, because he equaled them not by resembling them, but by being totally unlike them. In a tribute published in 1945, on the fiftieth anniversary of Leskov’s death, Eikhenbaum wrote:

Without him our literature of the nineteenth century would have been incomplete, first and foremost because it would not have captured to an adequate degree the depths of Russia with its “enchanted wanderers,” it would not have revealed with sufficient fullness the souls and fates of the Russian people with their daring, their scope, their passions and misfortunes … Neither Turgenev, nor Tolstoy, nor Dostoevsky could have accomplished this as Leskov did.^‖

Here Eikhenbaum was looking back at Leskov in his own time. In 1924, looking at the present and the writers of the early twentieth century, in an article entitled “In Search of a Genre,” Eikhenbaum wrote: “The influence of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky has been replaced in an unexpected way by the influence of Leskov, as much in stylistic tendency as in that of genre.” By way of example, he cites the “memoirs and autobiographical stories” of Maxim Gorky, who declared himself Leskov’s disciple, then the major figures of the new Russian prose—Alexei Remizov, Andrei Bely, Evgeny Zamyatin, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Boris Pilnyak, Isaac Babel, and others. (Incidentally, in 1926 Evgeny Zamyatin made a stage version of what may be Leskov’s most famous story, “Lefty,” entitling it “The Flea.”) Their work showed the influence of Leskov’s art in two seemingly contradictory things: an “ornamentalism” of style, giving value to words, wordplay, puns, popular etymology; and a return to the primitive sources of storytelling, to speech, the voice of the storyteller, the act of telling. “We often forget,” Eikhenbaum wrote, “that the word in itself has nothing to do with the printed letter, that it is a living, moving activity, formed by the voice, articulation, intonation, joined with gestures and mimicry.”

Tolstoy once remarked cryptically, “Leskov is a writer for the future, and his life in literature is profoundly instructive.” Eikhenbaum shows that Leskov’s storytelling was indeed not a return to the past, a nostalgic imitation of old ways, but a new joining of past and future, a synthesis and interpenetration of old and new. In his preface to the critical anthology Russian Prose (1926), he refers to this fusion of archaism and innovation as “the dynamic of traditions”: “We must become aware of the historical dynamic of traditions. We have forgotten far too many things and have blindly accepted far too many things. We have need of culture.”

This third discovery of Leskov, by the modernist writers and then by the new criticism, also reached beyond the borders of Russia. We feel the same sense of excitement in Walter Benjamin’s well-known essay, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” published in 1936, and in the fine chapter on Leskov in D. S. Mirsky’s History of Russian Literature, written in English and first published in 1926, the same year as Russian Prose. Mirsky ends with an admonition to his readers:

The Anglo-Saxon public have made up their mind as to what they want from a Russian writer, and Leskov does not fit in to this idea. But those who really want to know more about Russia must sooner or later recognize that Russia is not all contained in Dostoevsky and Chekhov, and that if you want to know a thing, you must first be free of prejudice and on your guard against hasty generalizations. Then they will perhaps come nearer to Leskov, who is generally recognized by Russians as the most Russian of Russian writers and the one who had the deepest and widest knowledge of the Russian people as it actually is.^a

It is true that we meet people, see places, and witness events in Leskov’s work that we do not find anywhere else in Russian literature. It is also true that, fantastic as they may often seem, they are almost always grounded in reality. In an open letter to his friend P. K. Shchebalsky, editor of the Warsaw Journal, dated December 10, 1884, Leskov wrote:

In the articles in your newspaper it is said that I have mainly copied living persons and recounted actual incidents. Whoever the author of those articles is—he is perfectly right. I have a gift for observation and perhaps a certain aptitude for analyzing feelings and motives, but I have little fantasy. I invent painfully and with difficulty, and therefore I have always needed living persons whose spiritual content interested me. They would take possession of me, and I would try to incarnate them in stories, which I also quite often based on real events.

In 1862, during his stay in Paris, away from the troubles that had overwhelmed him in Petersburg, Leskov wrote “The Musk-ox.” He dated it very precisely on the final page: “Paris, November 28, 1862,” as if he were marking an important moment in his life. In it for the first time he found his way as an artist; that is, he found his own manner of constructing and narrating a story, “perching it,” as Hugh McLean has written, “neither solidly in the realm of reality nor in that of fiction, even realistic fiction, but in the no-man’s-land between them.”^b The story portrays people from Leskov’s own past (his maternal grandmother appears here for the first time and under her real name; the hero is modeled on a school friend from Orel); it includes seemingly irrelevant digressions, and is told in the first person by a narrator who may or may not be the author.

Leskov wrote other important stories during the sixties, among them his first real masterpiece, “The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” which in its single focus and sustained objectivity is unique among his works. But he gave most of his time to writing three long and more conventional novels, No Way Out (1864), The Bypassed (1865), and At Daggers Drawn (1870–71). All three were anti-nihilist and entered into the polemics that had begun with the editorial of 1862, so that while they are by far the longest of Leskov’s works, they are also the most limited—“hasty, journalistic jobs,” as he acknowledged later. Leskov’s genius was not suited to the genre of the novel and he knew it, or he came to know it after At Daggers Drawn. While he was writing this last novel, he was already at work on something very different, a “novelistic chronicle,” as he first called it, entitled Cathedral Folk, which was published in 1872. After Cathedral Folk, Leskov went on steadily producing works in his own genre, or genres, for the rest of his life.

The form of the chronicle appealed to Leskov because of its freedom from the artificial restrictions of plot, its seemingly unselective inclusiveness, its way of unrolling like a ribbon or a scroll. In a letter to the philologist and art historian Fyodor Buslaev, on June 1, 1877, he spoke of this “expanded view of the memoir form as a fictional work of art. To tell the truth, this form seems very convenient to me: it is more alive, or, better, more earnest than depicting scenes, in the grouping of which, even in such great masters as Walter Scott, the forcing is obvious—which is what simple people mean when they say, ‘It happened just like in a novel.’ ”

The free form of the chronicle allowed Leskov to bring all sorts of materials into Cathedral Folk, including the notes of one of the book’s heroes, the elderly archpriest Father Savely Tuberozov, written in his own churchly, slightly old-fashioned, but forceful style. In one passage, Father Savely “involuntarily” recalls reading The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, by “the very witty pastor Sterne,” and jots down his conclusion that, “as our patented nihilism is coming to an end among us, Shandyism is now beginning …” (“Shandyism,” as Sterne himself defined it, is “the incapacity for fixing the mind on a serious object for two minutes together.”) Laurence Sterne was one of Leskov’s favorite writers, and the narrative form of many of his works besides Cathedral Folk is indebted to Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey. At the end of his life, discussing his last story in a letter to Stasyulevich (January 8, 1895), he says: “I’ve written this piece in a whimsical manner, like the narrations of Hoffmann and Sterne, with digressions and ricochets.”

The form of the journey as a narrative structure is embodied most fully in “The Enchanted Wanderer,” which Leskov began in 1872, after journeying himself around Lake Ladoga, an area of ancient monasteries, fishing villages, and isolated peasant communities north of Petersburg. The full title in its first magazine publication in 1873 was “The Enchanted Wanderer: His Life, Experiences, Opinions, and Adventures,” which clearly echoes the titles of works in the picaresque tradition, but in its “opinions” also gives a nod to Tristram Shandy. Here again Leskov chose a loose, accumulative form of storytelling, looped together by the “enchantment” that leads his hero in his wanderings from one chance encounter to another and one part of Russia to another, until it finally brings him to the place he was intended for by his mother’s prayers before he was born. The story is told by the hero himself in response to questions from his fellow passengers as they sail across Lake Ladoga to the monastery of Valaam.

Leskov made use of various other forms of storytelling, giving them names like memoir, potpourri, paysage and genre, rhapsody, sketch, stories apropos (“I very much like this form of story about what ‘was,’ recounted ‘apropos,’ ” he once wrote to Leo Tolstoy), and sometimes subtitling them “a story told on a grave,” “a Moscow family secret,” “a fantastic story,” “a spiritualistic occurrence.” Later in life, when he allied himself with Tolstoy, he wrote fables for publication by the Tolstoyan popular press, The Mediator, and he also wrote a series of legends set in the ancient Near East, Egypt, Byzantium, in early Christian times. He wrote a number of Christmas stories, and also a series of what he called “stories of righteous men,” several of which are included in this collection (“Singlemind,” “Deathless Golovan,” “The Spook,” “The Man on Watch,” “The Enchanted Wanderer,” “Lefty”). Leskov considered these last the most important part of his work. “The real strength of my talent lies in the positive types,” he boasted in a letter to a friend. “Show me such an abundance of positive Russian types in another writer.”^c As Walter Benjamin says in “The Storyteller”: “The righteous man is the advocate for created things and at the same time he is their highest embodiment.”

All of these forms are based essentially on the anecdote, which serious critics tend to scorn. Mirsky enthusiastically defends Leskov’s practice:

His stories are mere anecdotes, told with enormous zest and ability, and even in his longer works his favorite way of characterizing his characters is by a series of anecdotes. This was quite contrary to the traditions of “serious” Russian fiction and induced the critics to regard Leskov as a mere jester. His most original stories are packed with incident and adventure to an extent that appeared ludicrous to the critics, who regarded ideas and messages as the principal thing.

Boris Eikhenbaum, in his essay “An ‘Excessive’ Writer,” published in 1931 in honor of Leskov’s hundredth birthday, says: “the anecdote … can be considered a sort of atom in Leskov’s work. Its presence and action are felt everywhere.” The anecdote is the most elementary form of story, told for its own sake or apropos of some more general topic of discussion in a group of friends, at a Christmas party, or among travelers stranded at an inn during a blizzard.

This last is the occasion for the telling of “The Sealed Angel,” a fine example of Leskov’s composition at its most complex. The story is held together by the event of the title, the official “sealing” of an old icon, but it includes much else besides. The storyteller, who is also the central character, is an orphaned peasant who has worked all his life as a stonemason; the action, as I have already mentioned, involves the construction of the Nikolaevsky suspension bridge in Kiev, which Leskov witnessed in the early 1850s. The masons who build the bridge belong to the Old Believers, a group that separated from the official Russian Orthodox Church in 1666, in protest against the reforms of the patriarch Nikon. The Old Believers were anathematized by the Church and deprived of civil rights; they were often persecuted and tended to live in the more remote parts of the empire. They had their own ways of speaking, which had fascinated Leskov since his youth in Kiev, and which he captures in his narrator’s voice. In 1863, soon after his return to Petersburg from Paris, Leskov was sent on an official mission to inspect the schools of the Old Believers in Riga, an experience that deepened his knowledge of and sympathy for their condition. The masons he portrays in “The Sealed Angel” are very devout, but have no priests or sacraments; their piety is centered on their collection of old icons, the most beautiful of which is the angel of the title. Leskov himself had become interested in icon painting, and particularly in the icons of the Old Believers, in the later 1860s. At around that time he made the acquaintance of an icon painter and restorer by the name of Nikita Sevastianovich Racheiskov, who was an Old Believer himself and lived in a shabby quarter of Petersburg inhabited mainly by Old Believers. Leskov visited him often, and in a tribute to him written after Racheiskov’s death in 1886, he claimed that “The Sealed Angel” had been “composed entirely in Nikita’s hot and stuffy workroom.”^d The icon painter who comes to help the masons in the story is named Sevastian, from Racheiskov’s patronymic; he has enormous hands like Racheiskov’s, and yet, like Racheiskov, he sometimes paints with brushes made of only three or four hairs. Much of the discourse on icon painting that plays so important a part in the story was noted down by Leskov from his talks with the master.

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.