SOURCE: "Folk Stylization in Leskov's Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo uezda" in The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 67, No. 2, April, 1989, pp. 169-82.

[In the following excerpt, Wigzell examines the influence of folklore and other traditional and popular forms in one of Leskov's best-known stories.]

When Henry Gifford declares that 'Leskov was a writer who loved the pigments of language almost for their own sake,'¹ he is focusing on the facet of Leskov's work most attractive to the contemporary reader: his linguistic virtuosity. As Gifford continues: 'Nearly always he invests himself in a speech disguise; either choosing a narrator, some experienced man with much local and unaccustomed lore whose idiom he can enter; or . . . reflecting the consciousness—and the vocabulary—of his protagonists.'² This feel for the linguistic idiom of individuals and groups,whether reflected in the speech of his characters or in a highly distinctive skaz, lends a peculiarly Russian flavour to Leskov's writing. Tolstoi was disapproving of the exuberance of Leskov's language, which he felt swamped both message and material, but from the Formalists onwards Leskov's language, particularly in its contribution to an obviously stylized narrative texture, has undergone a reevaluation.³ Critical attention as a consequence has tended to be directed towards the works with the most colourful skaz, at the expense of those works which do not possess a so obviously stylized narrative texture, such as "Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo uezda." And yet, stories such as this also have a pungent Russian flavour, not explicable merely by reference to their provincial Russian setting, and even less to fabula. It is unfortunate that emphasis on Leskov's selection of his raw material on the one hand, and the use of a highly coloured narrative style (perhaps within a frame) on the other, has obscured the pervasive presence in his work of elements taken from traditional Russian verbal culture: folklore, popular literature and, less frequently, medieval Russian literature. These may affect not only language and the choice of fabula, but, more dramatically, the treatment of the siuzhet and presentation of the characters. While the influence of folklore and medieval literature is readily discernable in, for example, 'Ocharovannyi strannik' or 'Zapechatlennyi angel,' the importance of folklore for early stories such as 'Ledi Makbet' has been largely ignored.

Written in 1865, this, the best known of Leskov's early stories, tells of a young provincial woman married to a middle-aged merchant, who forms a liaison with one of her husband's employees. When discovery threatens, she kills first her father-in-law, next her husband, then a potential heir, her lover's new mistress and finally herself. Lacking psychological analysis of the homicidal heroine, the tale might well have been no more than a catalogue of gruesome crimes, were it not for a pervasive but subtle folk stylization conveying the stifling atmosphere of provincial Russia.

Initial choice of subject matter was dictated, however, by other literary factors, the most obvious evidenced in the Shakespearean title. Here Leskov was following Turgenev, whose Gamlet Shchigrovskogo uezda had presented a Russian Shakespearean type. Leskov's intention was not to imitate the archetypal portrayal of a woman who murders for political gain, but to express a conviction that Russian provincial life could produce its own examples of tragedy, distinctively Russian, but none the less genuine. This view bore a direct relationship to current controversy over Ostrovskii and Pisemskii, who had both been attacked for sullying literature with pictures of vulgar crime.⁴ Pisemskii, like Leskov, had a taste for dramatic stories set in the Russian provinces, featuring realistic characters, while Ostrovskii concentrated on the corrupt world of merchants. In depicting crime in a merchant setting, Leskov was thus expressing his general support for their choice of subject matter.

At the same time, in his choice of name for his heroine, Leskov was disputing the verisimilitude of Ostrovskii's Katerina in Groza, which had appeared in printed form six years earlier. Leskov's Katerina is likewise a young girl who has married into a wealthy provincial merchant family, but in other respects is unlike Ostrovskii's heroine, who is endowed with a sensitive and poetic nature and yearns for affection and spiritual freedom. She is hounded to commit suicide by guilt and the censure of her tyrannical mother-in-law. Leskov's Katerina is neither sensitive nor spiritual; rather she is bored, and it is this that makes her respond to the flirtatious attentions of Sergei, her husband's steward. Her habitual lethargy is then swept away by an all-consuming sexual passion, which bears little resemblance to Katerina's and Boris's tender and short-lived affair in Groza, not least in the consequences of adultery. Leskov's heroine commits suicide only after four murders, and then not out of penitence, but because she has been jilted. Leskov admired Ostrovskii for his intimate knowledge of Russian merchant life, but felt that in giving his Katerina an honest and sensitive nature, he had idealized her.⁵ In his own story he was issuing a corrective, suggesting that reality was much more sombre.

Pisemskii was also interested in the theme of women and extramarital love: in Boiarshchina, a novel published in 1858, he depicted an unhappily married woman from the provincial gentry who is ruined by a love affair, and in 'Krasavets,' a story written about the same time as 'Ledi Makbet,' he describes a young Russian noblewoman who leaves her husband for a Guards officer, follows him into penal servitude (he has committed murder), and is betrayed by him on their journey east. Unlike Katerina, she recovers and falls in love again. Despite obvious similarities with Leskov, it is inappropriate to talk of influence—'Krasavets' and 'Ledi Makbet' were written at approximately the same time. Where there are parallels, they should be interpreted as a reflection of Leskov's belief that crime was a suitable subject for literary treatment.

Despite the literary allusions and parallels, Leskov himself said that the real impetus for his plot came from an incident that occurred in his youth:

Once a neighbour, an old man who clung to life despite his more than seventy years, went one summer's day to take a rest beneath a black-currant bush. His impatient daughter-in-law poured boiling sealing-wax into his left ear . . . I remember him being buried, his ear had dropped off. . . Later, on Il'inka (the public square), she was flogged by the hangman. She was young, and everyone was surprised at how white her skin was.⁶

Certainly there are some parallels, most notably in the murder of an elderly man by his daughter-in-law, the public whipping of the criminal and the mention of her lily-white skin.⁷ Although the class origins of the family are not described in Leskov's memoirs, the emphasis on skin pallor may suggest that like Katerina she was of merchant origin, since it was merchants who traditionally prized this as an indication of female beauty. However, there are sufficient differences, not least in the motive, to seek other sources. In the story Katerina L'vovna kills her father-in-law to stop him telling her husband of her adultery, not simply as in the memoir because she is 'impatient' for his death presumably because he stands in the way of her husband and his inheritance. Nor does Katerina pour boiling sealing-wax into her father-in-law's ear, although this was precisely the sort of detail to appeal to Leskov. Instead he is poisoned. Nor is her father-in-law decrepit. Old he may be, but energetic still—and determined to expose his daughter-in-law's shameful behaviour; a far cry from the image of the doddery old man snoozing under a black-currant bush.⁸

Thus neither literary debate nor childhood reminiscence explain much about the form of the story, and they certainly do not account for its distinctive Russian flavour. Although the obvious source of this would be Russian folk tradition, little attention has been paid to this aspect. Even N. G. Mikhailova, whose thesis represents the bravest attempt to tackle the complex topic of Leskov and folklore, specifically excludes early works like 'Ledi Makbet' from her statement that folklore permeates his stories 'in artistically indirect forms, the links being detected through an analysis of the dieas, images, genre, siuzhet and style of each work'.⁹ The early writing however, she believes, simply reflects the contemporary modish interest in ethnography, which stimulated Leskov to depict customs like matchmaking in "Zhitie odnoi baby" (1863).¹⁰ Although she notes en passant that in this story the hero and heroine bear similarities to the hero and heroine of the lyric folk song, she does not pursue the matter, devoting her attention almost entirely to the more obviously rewarding of the later stories. In fact what she says is equally valid for 'Ledi Makbet.' Mikhailova is not alone in paying little attention to folk influence in 'Ledi Makbet.' Some critics, notably those writing in English, ignore this aspect entirely: even one so knowledgeable as Hugh McLean remarks that there is no folksy language except in the speech of the lower-class characters.¹¹ Vladimir Semenov is alone in connecting Leskov's characters with the figures of the Russian lyric folk song, where it is commonplace for the young wives of elderly husbands to hanker after dashing young lads.¹² However, Semenov does not point out that lyric songs are expressions of mood about a given situation. Usually presenting the woman's point of view, they here evoke the sorrow of a girl condemned to a loveless marriage, forced to part with her beloved. Alternatively, songs on the same subject may be lighthearted, describing the girl's delight at deceiving her grumpy old husband, but in neither case is there ever any hint of a solution, whether legal or otherwise. As an explanation of the siuzhet Semenov repeats, as do other Soviet scholars, Valentina Gebel's conclusions, published in a valuable study in 1945. She suggests that there are links with lubok literature.¹³ These woodcuts and copper engravings, widely popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were primarily illustrations of subjects taken from the Bible, saints' lives, translated literature, folklore and history. They might be serious or satirical, moralistic, or comic—even bawdy, and are marked by a distinctive primitivism and bright colours. They were accompanied by texts of varying length, ranging from captions to full-length stories, in which case the illustrations were secondary. Lubok pictures and books were immensely popular, though in the latter part of the nineteenth century they were bought mainly by the peasantry,¹⁴ often passing into oral circulation. Lubok literature may thus reasonably be said to occupy a half-way position between literature and folklore. Gebel' declares that the siuzhet of 'Ledi Makbet' is based on the popular lubok text O kupecheskoi zhene i prikazchike.¹⁵ This suggestion has never been subjected to critical scrutiny.

In fact, the similarities between the lubok text and Leskov's story are fairly superficial. True, there are the same three main characters from the same social milieu; the merchant with a young wife, who has one eye on his money and the other on his young steward, ponezhe mlat i soboiu krasnolichen,¹⁶ but their personalities have nothing in common with those of the trio in 'Ledi Makbet.' The husband is kind and loving if somewhat naive, and the steward hard-working, honest and chaste. It is the wife who is cunning (lukavaia), a standard epithet in medieval literature and later in lubki for women who are seen as temptresses. The story, which is set in France, tells how the wife, who has attempted to distract the steward from his work, is piqued to be told that he is busy writing about feminine wiles (bab'i uvertki), and determines to give him some practical experience of them. First she entices him into her room while her husband is out hunting. Hearing him return, she hides the steward behind a picture, and then suggests to her husband that he use the picture for target practice. At the last minute she jogs his arm, reproving him for his irresponsible attitude to valuable property. When the husband goes off to see a friend, the shaken steward emerges to a consoling glass of vodka. On the unsuspecting husband's return, she hides the steward in a cupboard, and then lies in bed feigning illness. She begs her worried spouse to fetch her medicine from the cupboard, but just as he is about to comply, she jumps up, kisses him and tells him that she was merely testing his love for her. In the third demonstration of feminine wiles, the steward is persuaded to undress and go into the bathhouse with the wife. When her husband arrives home, she invites him in to see what is going on. As he rushes forward angrily, she chucks a tub of cold water over him, telling him she was only joking, and orders a dry kaftan for him. As the husband goes off to get changed, she tells the young man that thanks to her feminine wiles, they can now become lovers, for henceforth her husband will believe anything she tells him. He complies. When the old man dies, they marry, but the steward never forgets his lesson: that his wife is capable of deceiving him at any time.

Despite words like kaftan, the work betrays its French origin in its treatment of the characters; the husband and steward are unrealistically virtuous—the sole source of trouble is the coquettish and mischievous wife. The erotic motifs and the element of light-hearted moralizing also point to a foreign origin. What is more relevant for consideration of the story as a source for 'Ledi Makbet' is that disposal of the husband by violent means is not even contemplated though, to be fair, the caption to the seventh picture indicates that the Russian illustrator read violence into the text. The steward and wife are shown on the right in the bath-house with the wife, the tub in her hands, advancing on her husband on the left. The caption reads: zhena kuptsa ublazhaet smert' emu zhelaet.¹⁷ None the less Leskov's siuzhet shares little even with this interpretation of the wife's intentions; Katerina is not scheming but bored. Even so, it is the dashing and cocksure Sergei (who has already had to leave the employ of another merchant for making advances to his wife) who makes all the initial moves. Although Leskov similarly makes Sergei a young steward,¹⁸ he in particular is more closely linked to the dobroi molodets who appears with the unhappily married young girl and old husband in the lyric folk song. There are even closer parallels: Semenov notes that the characterization of Sergei goes far beyond the sketchy figure of the songs, owing much more to the bold hired hand, the batrak of the folk tale who outwits his master;¹⁹ but, as will be seen, the bold seducer of rich men's wives as well as the adulterous wife are even more fully developed in other folk genres.

Thus, though Leskov might have been acquainted with the lubok entitled O kupecheskoi zhene i prikazchike, it seems unlikely that he could have taken from it more than the trio of characters, and there were alternative sources for them. The influence of the prose style of the lubok novel is, however, felt in Sergei's sentimental and vulgar declarations of love to Katerina:

This yearning, Katerina L'vovna, is, I swear, so painful for my heart, that I might take it upon myself to cut it out with a knife of tempered steel, and cast it at your feet.'²⁰

A much more likely source of the siuzhet is in folklore,more specifically in folk ballads. These are narrative songs distinguished from the much better known byliny and historical songs both by subject-matter and treatment. Lacking the epic hyperbole of the byliny, they tell of the fates of relatively ordinary individuals caught up in a conflict, often of a domestic kind. Unlike byliny, they frequently focus on the tragic lot of women, though without any overt sympathy or condemnation, recounting stories of illicit or hopeless love, jealousy, poisonings, suicides, executions and incest, all in a stark style which pares details to the dramatic minimum. Ballads plunge straight into the action, almost entirely without an introduction or any explanation of situation or motivation. Perhaps because of their subject matter, which was closer to the lives of ordinary people than that of byliny or historical songs, and their concentrated brevity, which made them easier to commit to memory, ballads were known over a much wider area in the nineteenth century than the other two genres, though they too were very much on the decline.²¹

Among the ballads there is one, 'Zhena muzha zarezala,'that bears a striking resemblance to 'Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo uezda.' This ballad was very well known all over central Russia. Leskov might well have learnt it in his youth in Orel province, or on his extensive travels. It seems to have originated on the Volga, possibly in Saratov.²² As is typical for oral literature, each variant of the story differs. . . .

Parallels with Leskov's story are striking: the husband in both ballad and story is a wealthy merchant, whose wife is young (this is sometimes only implied in the ballad). Katerina kills her husband, just like the wife of the ballad, though the methods differ: stabbing in the ballad, stangulation followed by a heavy blow to the temple with a candlestick in 'Ledi Makbet.'. . . Though the details of the murder of Katerina's husband are somewhat less gruesome than in the ballad, the accumulation of murders creates a picture no less horrifying. In most versions of the ballad, as in 'Ledi Makbet,' the body is buried in the cellar. . . . It is not, however, Katerina who buries her husband but, more realistically, Sergei. . . .

Of course there are major differences between the ballad and the story; there is only one murder in the ballad, and three before the criminal is caught in 'Ledi Makbet,' and there is no figure of a lover. In the ballad the wife, admitting guilt, requests that her head be cut off. This is a stereotyped ending which could not have been used with conviction by Leskov. Instead, he used the contemporary motif of public whipping, taken from the incident recorded in his memoir, continuing the story to cover Sergei's and Katerina's banishment to Siberia. There are no parallels for this part of the story and the folk stylization virtually disappears here.²⁷ The changes are easily explicable in terms of the literary requirements of the genre and Leskov's aims. He was not, of course, merely rewriting a ballad, but creating a story with a specific purpose in mind, basing it on childhood memory and combining it with a folk ballad on a similar theme. So, whereas in most variants of the ballad, no reason is offered for the wife's actions, Leskov presents them as the natural consequence of an overwhelming passion, building up the tension through the series of murders.²⁸ To have treated Katerina as a psychological study would have destroyed the folk flavour of the story, which depended upon it being told at a narrative distance without comment or intrusion.

This is why Semenov's parallel between Sergei and the bold and enterprising batrak of the folktale is better than with the dobroi molodets of the folk song, who is seen through the prism of the singer's emotions. None the less the closest parallel must be with another ballad, the most popular of all the classical (i.e. pre-Petrine) Russian ballads, Kniaz' Volkonskii i Vania-kliuchnik, which was frequently published in eighteenth-century songbooks, was known to Pushkin and was even given a literary reworking in the nineteenth century.²⁹ It depicts the consequences of Prince Volkonskii's discovery that his wife has long been having an affair with his steward (kliuchnik is an archaic word similar in meaning to prikazchik). Told of his wife's infidelity, Prince Volkonskii interrogates Vania who denies everything. He then bravely submits to torture, taunting the prince before he is hanged. Vania has the same devilmay-care character and sexual allure as Sergei, though the initial denial of guilt and subsequent jibes come not from him, but from Katerina when she calmly produces him from hiding. His portrait is naturally more complex than that of Vania, but the similarity with this handsome seducer of rich men's wives is too close to ignore.

In one of the variants of this ballad, Vania taunts his master as follows:

'It is already the third year that I, my lord, have known the princess. Many the time have I lain on your feather bed, many the time have I clutched her white breasts; oft, my lord, have I cursed your honoured person.'³⁰

This passage bears a striking resemblance to the descrip-tion of the first week of Katerina and Sergei's affair:

'On these nights up in Zinovii Borisych's bedroom freely flowed the wine drawn from her father-in-law's cellar, many the time were the lady's sweet lips kissed, and her black curls on the soft pillow teased.'³¹

There is little reason to doubt that Leskov knew these ballads, though it is not possible to establish a precise link with any of the variants cited, since their first publication, though not necessarily their collection, post-dates the story. It is entirely credible that Leskov, as a man with a considerable knowledge of folklore, would have chosen to make artistic use of these popular ballads in his writing.

The quotation above is an example of the use of folk-poetic style, not in the siuzhet or characterization of 'Ledi Makbet,' but in skaz. Although Leskov does not give his narrator a clear personality or highly personalized manner of speaking, he makes it clear he is a man from the Mtsensk district, prone to folk expressions as well as provincialisms. Folk-poetic style would be inappropriate in the dialogue, but skilfully used it can and does work effectively in passages of third-person narrative, not surprisingly, mainly in the sections devoted to the idyllic first weeks of Katerina's love. Thus the narrator describes how life continues after the sudden death of Katerina's father-in-law from 'a dish of poisonous mushrooms' (in fact, from a dose of rat poison): 'Meantime Sergei grew strong and tall, and once more boldly swooped around Katerina L'vovna like a living gerfalcon, and once more their sweet life went on'.³² Folk influence, that of the lyric song, is also strongly felt in the use of the poetic symbol of the apple tree in blossom. In folk songs this is always connected with young girls and usually has implicit sexual connotations. The young maiden traditionally sits beneath the curly-headed apple tree (pod iablon 'iu pod kudriavoiu) on the green grass (travka-muravka) surrounded by blue flowers, awaiting her beloved or lamenting his absence. Here too goes Katerina on a sultry evening, summoning Sergei to her, so that they can laugh and love as night falls and the blossom floats gently down from the tree above them: The young white blossom kept falling, falling on them from the curly-headed apple-tree'.³³

Parallels with the heroine of the lyric song are felt elsewhere, in the twice repeated description of Katerina sitting by the high window (u sebia na vyshke pod okoshechkom) like a folk song heroine ( krasnaia devitsa) who sits in her vysok terem usually by the window (pod okoshechkom) awaiting her beloved.³⁴ It is clear that, contrary to McLean's view, 'Ledi Makbet' makes use of folksy language in the skaz of the provincial narrator at least in the part of the story up to the departure of Katerina and Sergei into exile. More than this, in wishing to recreate the atmosphere of a merchant milieu in a small provincial town, Leskov, in this story just as in some of his later work, drew extensively on Russian folklore and to a lesser extent, popular literature, not only to flavour the skaz, but more particularly in the characterization and details of plot.³⁵

Notes

¹The Novel in Russia, London, 1964, p. 75.

² Ibid., pp. 77-78.

³ Notably by B. M. Eikhenbaum, Literatura. Teoriia. Kritika. Polemika, Leningrad, 1927, reprinted Russian Study Series no. 66, Chicago, 1969, pp. 210-25.

⁴ B. M. Drugov, N. S. Leskov, Ocherk tvorchestva, Moscow, 1957, pp. 30-31.

⁵ Valentina Gebel', N. S. Leskov. V tvorcheskoi laboratorii, Moscow, 1945, p. 20; V. Guminskii, 'Organicheskoe vzaimodeistvie (Ot Ledi Makbet k Soborianam)', in V mire Leskova. Sbornik statei, ed. V. Bogdanov, Moscow, 1983, pp. 243-44.

⁶ From the autobiographical reminiscence Kak ia uchilsia prazdnovat' quoted by (among others) Leonid Grossman, N. S. Leskov. Zhizn'—tvorchestvo—poetika, Moscow, 1945, p. 129, and Gebel', op. cit., p. 86.

⁷ 'Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo uezda,' p. 96 of vol. 1 of N. S. Leskov, Sobrante sochinenii, 11 vols, Moscow, 1956-58. Subsequent references to the text are to this edition.

⁸ In Britain blackcurrant bushes are much too low to the ground for this, but in countries where they are never pruned, they do grow tall enough to provide space and shade for a pleasant afternoon snooze. In any case, the bush in question is not, as H. McLean, Nikolai Leskov. The Man and His Art, Cambridge and London, 1977, p. 147 mistakenly suggests, a blackberry—only a masochist would choose a bramble for a nap!

⁹ N. G. Mikhailova, N. S. Leskov i ustnoe narodnoe tvorchestvo.Avtoreferat dissertatsii na soiskanie uchenoi stepeni kandidata fílologicheskikh nauk, Moscow, 1970, p. 3.

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 4.

¹¹ McLean, op. cit., p. 146; K. A. Lantz, Nikolay Leskov, Boston, MA., 1979 is one who does not discuss this aspect at all.

¹²Nikolai Leskov. Vremia i knigi, Moscow, 1981, p. 58. While this article was awaiting publication, a very valuable discussion of folklore in Leskov's writings by A. A. Gorelov appeared (Russkaia literatura i fol'klor. Konets XIX veka, ed. A. A. Gorelov, Leningrad, 1987). Gorelov also draws parallels with folk ballads, especially with Kniaz' Volkonskii i Vania kliuchnik, in his discussion of Ledi Makbet. I have incorporated references to and comments on Gorelov's work into my footnotes whenever they might be useful.

¹³ Op. cit., p. 20.

¹⁴ For an account of the distribution and readership of lubokliterature, especially in the seventy years before the Revolution, see Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read. Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917, Princeton, NJ, 1985, pp. 59-108.

¹⁵ Gebel', op. cit., pp. 206-07. For details of the lubok story, pictures and captions, see D. Rovinskii, Russkie narodnye kartinki(Sbornik ORIaS, 23-27), St Petersburg, 1881, 1, p. 222.

¹⁶ 'For he was young and fair of face'.

¹⁷ 'The wife ministers to the husband but desires his death.'

¹⁸ 1, pp. 112, 118.

¹⁹ Semenov, op. cit., p. 57. Note also that Leskov underlines the links between Sergei and the folk-song hero by repeatedly calling him krasnyi molodets in the scene in which he is introduced to Katerina and the reader.

²⁰ 1, p. 102, quoted by Gebel', p. 207, who cites a number of parallels.

²¹ On the evolution and characteristics of folk ballads, see D. M. Balashov's introductory article to his edition of Narodnye ballady,Moscow-Leningrad, 1963, pp. 7-40.

²² Balashov, Narodnye ballady, p. 389. Gorelov, op. cit., p. 157 notes that Pushkin, Kireevskii and P. I. Iakushkin all recorded variants.

²⁷ Gebel', op. cit., p. 206. Much later in a letter to D. A. Lin'ev, quoted by Grossman, op. cit., p. 129, and Gebel', op. cit., p. 86, Leskov observed that he knew very little about the life of convicts at the time. This is reflected in the style of this section which lacks the confident touch in the rich folk stylization of the first part of the story. However, Gorelov, op. cit., pp. 103-04, is able to point out a few folk parallels.

²⁸ McLean, op. cit., pp. 147-51, writes graphically on the hypnotic intensity of the story.

²⁹ Pushkin's variant is published in Pesni, sobrannye pisateliami, Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 79, 1968, p. 192. See also Balashov, Narodnye ballady, pp. 153-54.

³⁰ Balashov, Russkie narodnye ballady, pp. 265-67 with brief notes on p. 307. Three other variants of the same song are to be found in id., Narodnye ballady, pp. 153-56, 354-55. Gorelov, op. cit., p. 99, points out that V. V. Krestovskii, the author of the literary reworking of this ballad (1861), was a friend of Leskov, but that the stylistic links are of course with the folk version.

³¹ 1, pp. 103-04.

³² 1, p. 106, quoted by Gebel', op. cit., p. 206.

³³ 1, p. 112.

³⁴ 1, pp. 98, 101 . Gorelov, op. cit., pp. 100, 157, also notes this parallel, and on pp. 102-03 offers further examples of stylized skaz. He also provides a folk-song parallel to Katerina's obsessive love in a song recorded in 1836 in Mtsensk province (op. cit., p. 103)

³⁵ It would be inconsistent with the rest of the story if the large grey cat that Katerina L'vovna sees in her dreams were purely the product of Leskov's imagination. In fact, as a symbol, it is taken primarily from Dream Books, where dreaming of cats is a sign of marital breakdown. That the cat is large, grey and male reflects local beliefs from Orel province, where this portends sorrow or disaster. The doubly unlucky symbol partly explains Katerina's sense of supernatural horror. For further details, see F. Wigzell, 'Russian Dream Books and Lady Macbeth's Cat', Slavonic and East European Review, 66, 1988, 4, pp. 625-30.