Analysis
Nikolai Leskov, early in his career, developed a characteristic form for his short stories: the “memoir”—half fiction, half fact—with a narrating “I” who regales the reader with tales of the colorful personalities and unusual events that he has experienced in his adventurous life. The border between “fiction” and “fact” is left intentionally blurred—an adroit illusionistic stratagem in an age that claimed the label “realism.” In “Ovtsebyk” (“The Musk-Ox”), for example, the narrator is presumably to be equated, at least by unsophisticated readers, with the actual author. Indeed, the story contains, in a lengthy digression, a lyrical account of what are believed to be the actual pilgrimages to monasteries on which the real Leskov as a boy accompanied his grandmother. The main focus of the story, however, is on the mature narrator’s encounters with a character who illustrates Leskov’s conviction of the futility of the radical intellectuals’ efforts to stir the peasantry to revolt.
“The Stinger”
“Iazvitel’nyi” (“The Stinger”) evokes a theme Leskov touched on many times later, the difficulties encountered by the foreigner in Russia. An Englishman working as an estate manager in Russia comes to grief and brings disaster on his peasant charges through his inability to understand their mentality. The story avoids the impression of chauvinism, however, by the narrator’s clear recognition that the downfall of the humane Englishman is caused not by any Russian superiority of soul but by the peasants’ stubborn barbarism and backwardness.
“The Amazon”
“Voitel’nitsa” (“The Amazon”) remains one of the classic examples of what the Russians call skaz, in which a frame narrator, more or less identifiable with the author, hears and records an inner, oral narrative, which is related in picturesque, “marked” language by a folk character. In this case, the inner narrator is one of Leskov’s most colorful literary offspring, a Petersburg procuress. Catering to the secret sexual needs of the capital, she has entrée into all levels of society, and her language is a mixture of correspondingly disparate layers, the substratum of local dialect being overlaid with upper-class words, often of Western origin, but not always perfectly understood or accurately reproduced. Her motley language is in perfect harmony with her personality: vulgar, down-to-earth, cynical, yet endlessly vital.
“Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”
“Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo uezda” (“Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”), though somewhat atypical in technique, remains one of Leskov’s most famous stories; it was the basis for the libretto of Dmitry Shostakovich’s opera. Like Turgenev’s earlier “Gamlet Shchigrovskogo uezda” (“Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District”), the title oxymoronically situates a regal Shakespearean archetype in a maximally unromantic, provincial Russian setting; the story itself demonstrates that such human universals know no boundaries of place, time, or class. Presented in a more conventional omniscient-author format than the pseudo-memoirs, “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” is a lurid tale of adultery and murder in a provincial merchant milieu.
In 1866, Leskov began the most ambitious literary enterprise of his career: to encapsulate in a single artistic work, class by class, the provincial Russia he knew so well. The life of a single town would serve as its microcosm. The huge project was never completed, but the section dealing with the clergy eventually emerged in 1872 as a full-length book, the celebrated novel The Cathedral Folk. This volume opened up for Russian literature a hitherto unexplored social territory, the provincial clergy, presented in a highly attractive form, with a winning mixture of sentiment and humor. Leskov insisted that The Cathedral Folk was not a novel, a genre he considered hackneyed in form and limited in content to man-woman “romance,” but rather...
(This entire section contains 2006 words.)
Unlock this Study Guide Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
a “chronicle,” a genre already made classic in Russian literature by Sergei Aksakov. The chronicle had the advantage for Leskov of legitimizing almost unlimited structural looseness, since its only explicit guiding principle is the sequence of events in time.
Leskov sustained a high level of narrative art through his works of the early 1870’s.
“The Sealed Angel”
“Zapechatlennyi angel” (“The Sealed Angel”) is one of his most virtuoso performances in the art of skaz. Its narrator is a former Old Believer whose speech combines two highly marked linguistic stocks: the religious jargon of the “ancient piety” and the technical language of icon-painting. In this picturesque language, he relates a stirring, skillfully paced tale of his comrades’ struggle to recapture a confiscated icon. “Ocharovannyi strannik” (“The Enchanted Pilgrim”) is the life story of a monk purportedly encountered by the “author” on a steamer plying Lake Ladoga. This character, Ivan Severyanovich Flyagin, a former serf whose life has been a kaleidoscopic series of extraordinary adventures, is made to epitomize some of the essential qualities of the Russian national character as Leskov perceived it. These generalizations, however, are incarnated in a vivid sequential narrative that grips the reader from beginning to end.
“At the Edge of the World”
In “Na kraiu sveta” (“At the Edge of the World”), Leskov explored in fictional form an issue concerning which he had strong personal opinions: the missionary activities of the Orthodox Church among primitive tribes in Siberia. It was a risky subject, but Leskov cleverly camouflaged his subversive message by having his tale told by a sympathetic and unimpeachably Orthodox bishop. Intense experiences in Siberia convince the bishop that there is more natural Christianity among the heathen tribesmen than among all the lazy clerics and rapacious, hard-drinking officials then engaged in bringing “civilization” to Siberia. The bishop’s tale includes one of the most powerful blizzard stories in Russian literature.
“Iron Will”
Religious subjects did not occupy Leskov exclusively. “Zheleznaia volia” (“Iron Will”) again takes up the theme of the difficulties of the foreigner working in Russia. This time, a German engineer who carries Teutonic discipline and self-control to the point of absurdity is vanquished by the “doughy” formlessness of Russian life. Again, Leskov avoids any impression of chauvinism by showing that it is Russian weaknesses—insouciance, irresponsibility, and hedonism—that bring the German to his doom.
“Righteous” People
Even when not dealing directly with religious themes, Leskov took very seriously his responsibility to teach morality through literary art. He produced a whole cycle of portraits of pravedniki or “righteous ones,” people who demonstrate that moral beauty and even sainthood are still possible in the tainted modern world. For all their differences of form and style, these stories are intended to function much like medieval hagiography: While entertaining the reader, they inculcate ideas of virtue. Among the most successful are “Odnodum” (“Singlethought”), “Nesmertel’nyi Golovan” (“Deathless Golovan”), and “Chelovek na chasakh” (“The Sentry”). Leskov took pugnacious pride in his ability to depict virtuous characters. “Show me another writer who has such an abundance of positive Russian types,” he demanded. In some of these latter-day moralities, to be sure, artistic performance far overshadows morality. The left-handed hero of the famous “Levsha (Skaz o tul’skom kosom lefshe i o stal’noy blokhe)” (“Lefty: Being the Tale of the Cross-eyed Lefty of Tula and the Steel Flea”) is indeed a “righteous one”—not only a craftsman of extraordinary skill but also an (unappreciated) patriot. Yet the principal impact of this classic skaz comes from its manner, not its message—its marvelous display of verbal acrobatics. “The Sentry,” on the other hand, is cast in a more somber key. There, an omniscient author, moving through a series of terse chapters, builds up extraordinary tension by focusing on the hour-by-hour movement of the clock.
The Memoir Form
The memoir form employed in many of his stories had many advantages for Leskov. It at least ostensibly transposed a “story” from the realm of fiction to that of history or fact, thus not only enhancing the illusion of reality but also avoiding the charge of deception and even lying that troubled such creators of imaginary realities as Tolstoy. Furthermore, reminiscences of the past provide both philosophical perspective and didactic impetus. The memories Leskov resurrects are drawn mainly from the period of his youth, the reign of Nicholas I. It was not only enlightening to show Russians how far their country had evolved since those dark days, largely through the reforms of Czar Alexander II, but also disturbing to reveal how dangerously reminiscent of the tyrannies of Nicholas’s time were the reactionary tendencies prevalent under Alexander III. Finally, the ultimate paradox of the memoir form lies in the nature of art: Concrete images, even explicitly dated memories of a vanished past, may be a vehicle for universal, timeless truths about human nature and fate.
“The Toupee Artist”
From Leskov’s memoir tales of the era of Nicholas I, one could construct a comprehensive sociology of Russia as it was then. Its most egregious evil was serfdom, and in “Tupeinyi khudozhnik” (“The Toupee Artist”) Leskov created one of the most searing evocations in Russian literature of the horrors of that institution, especially its corrupting effect on both master and slave. For all his abhorrence of serfdom, however, Leskov never succumbed to the populist tendency to idealize the “people.” From the beginning of his career to the end, he demonstrated again and again the “darkness” of the peasant world. Characteristically, the terrible famine of 1891-1892 inspired Leskov to recollect, in “Iudol” (“Vale of Tears”), the equally terrible famine of 1840. The comparison revealed that society had measurably advanced in that interval: Relief measures were now open, energetic, and public. Yet the peasants were as benighted as ever, superstitious, and prone to senseless violence. By no means all of Leskov’s memoir pieces, however, are so somber. One of the most humorous is “Grabezh” (“A Robbery”), another superb example of skaz, which evokes the atmosphere of the prereform provincial merchant class as a setting for comedy.
Didacticism
After his “conversion” to Tolstoyanism, Leskov placed even greater stress on the didactic function of literature. He plumbed a medieval Russian translation of the ancient Greek text Synaxarion for materials for an entire cycle of moralistic stories, slyly doctoring their plots to fit Tolstoyan specifications. The most substantial of these stories is “Gora” (“The Mountain”). In another Synaxarion-based fable, “Povest’ o Fedore-khristianine i o druge ego Abrame zhidovine” (the story of Theodore the Christian and his friend Abraham the Hebrew), Leskov preached a much-needed sermon of tolerance and fraternity between Christians and Jews, thus demonstratively reversing the anti-Semitic tendency of some earlier stories.
Satire
Perhaps the most memorable and artistically most successful works of Leskov’s late years were his satires of contemporary Russian society, which he viewed with deep pessimism, seeing little but corruption and folly among the elite and savagery in the masses. “Polunoshchniki” (“Night Owls”) ridicules as a fraud (though without naming him) the highly touted Orthodox thaumaturge, Father Ioann of Kronstadt; the contrasting figure is a saintly Tolstoyan girl. In “Zimnii den”’ (“A Winter’s Day”), Leskov depicts another pure-hearted Tolstoyan girl alone in a degenerate milieu of police informers, extortionists, and sexual delinquents. Perhaps the greatest of these satires, Leskov’s swan song, is “Zaiachii remiz” (“The March Hare”). Here, beneath a humorous camouflage—the narrator is a lovable Ukrainian lunatic who relates muddled memories of his adventurous youth—Leskov ridicules the “police paranoia” so pervasive in Russia (and elsewhere) at that time and later, the mentality that sees a subversive plotter lurking behind every bush. The camouflage, however, proved insufficient; no magazine editor could be found brave enough even to submit the story to the censors.
In his depiction of nineteenth century Russian life, Leskov’s sociological range is broader than that of any other writer before Anton Chekhov. For those who can read him in Russian, his verbal pyrotechnics are simply dazzling, and his skaz technique has inspired many twentieth century imitators, notably Aleksei Remizov, Yevgeny Zamyatin, and Mikhail Zoshchenko. For non-Russians, such as Walter Benjamin, Leskov remains the storyteller par excellence, a practitioner of pure, uncontaminated narrative art. This description would doubtless have surprised and perhaps annoyed Leskov, who set greater store by his efforts as a moralist, but it seems to be the verdict of history.