Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk And Other Stories (Penguin Classics)
Nikolai Leskov
LADY MACBETH OF MTSENSK AND OTHER STORIES
Translated and with an Introduction and Notes by
DAVID McDUFF
Contents
Note on the Text
Introduction
LADY MACBETH OF MTSENSK AND OTHER STORIES
Musk-Ox
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
The Sealed Angel
Pamphalon the Entertainer
A Winter’s Day
Notes
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PENGUIN 
CLASSICS
LADY MACBETH OF MTSENSK AND OTHER STORIES
NIKOLAI SEMYONOVICH LESKOV was born in 1831 in Gorokhovo, Oryol Province. Orphaned early, he took his first job at sixteen with the Civil Service. His next post entailed a great deal of travelling around Russia and he became familiar with the lives, customs and speech of all levels of Russian society. In 1860 he took up journalism and moved to St Petersburg where he published his first story. His novels Nekuda (1864) and Na nozhakh (1872) were anti-nihilistic and thus isolated him from the literary circles of his day. He wrote a number of folk legends and Christmas tales; his later works are more satirical, particularly with regard to the clergy and the bureaucracy. Leskov, now considered an extremely original storyteller, died in St Petersburg in 1895.
DAVID McDUFF is a British translator of Russian and Nordic literature. His translations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian prose classics (including works by Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Bely and Babel) are published by Penguin. In 2013 he received Finland’s State Award for Foreign Translators.
Note on the Text
The Russian texts chosen for translation in the present volume are among those published in the thirty-six-volume N. S. Leskov, Polnoye sobranie sochineniy (St Petersburg, 1902–1903).
Introduction
The name of the great nineteenth-century Russian prose writer Nikolai Leskov is possibly less familiar to readers of English than those of his illustrious contemporaries, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The reasons for this being so are various: not the least of them is the fact that, unlike the other three writers mentioned, Leskov was, even to his fellow-Russians, an outsider – neither a radical nor a conservative, neither a member of the aristocracy nor a representative of the literary and cultural establishment. Yet his links with the English-speaking world were at least as strong as those of the ‘Anglophile’ Turgenev, if not stronger, and there is a true sense in which, as a sculptor of individual and idiosyncratic human characters who may be said to stand for an entire nation, it is possible to view him as an heir and disciple of Charles Dickens. He is also, after Gogol, the most quintessentially Russian of writers. His work is difficult to translate, but rewarding to the reader in search of an understanding of the Russian soul and character.
Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov was born in the village of Gorokhovo, in the district of the Russian provincial town of Oryol, some two hundred miles south of Moscow, on 4 February 1831.i He spent his earliest childhood in a little farm called Panino, in the district of Kromy, Oryol province, where his father, an impoverished former civil servant, was endeavouring to scrape together a living from ‘a water-mill with a grindstone, an orchard, two households of peasants and about forty desyatinas of land’, as Leskov described it in an autobiographical memoir. The family of father, mother and seven children, of whom Leskov was the eldest, had to live in a tiny farmhouse which was really little more than a one-roomed peasant izba. The strains of such a crowded and penurious existence must have been considerable; in the face of them, Leskov’s father tended to take a more and more passive role in the household, withdrawing into his books, while his mother, Marya Petrovna, a woman of strong character and great will-power, increasingly took over responsibility for the running of both farm and house. She also had to rear her seven children, and the methods she used were far from gentle. Leskov recalls how she once smacked her favourite daughter Masha, made her stand in a corner and fenced her in with a heavy armchair, promising to return later and thrash her: ‘Forgiveness was granted only in trivial cases, and then the child, sentenced by its father or mother to corporal punishment with the birch, would have to throw itself at their feet countless times, beg for mercy, and then sniff the birch and kiss it in the presence of everyone. Children of a very young age will usually refuse to kiss the birch, and only with years and education realize the necessity of placing their lips against the twigs that have been reserved for their bodies. Masha was still too young to know better; in her, feeling prevailed over calculation; she was thrashed, and long after midnight she was still whimpering pitifully in her sleep and, convulsively shuddering, pressing against the side of her bed.’
Leskov’s parents had not the means to provide him at home with the kind of education his intelligence showed that he needed; to take him out of the crowded domestic environment and supply him with something more akin to a proper school training, he was sent to live in the household of his uncle, M. A. Strakhov, whose children were instructed by resident Russian, German and French tutors. This uncle – his Russian surname means ‘Fear’ – was a rich, powerful and demonic nobleman of fifty, a bachelor who had married a fifteen-year-old girl; to the young Leskov he was a larger-than-life figure, a demigod of whom he went in awe, at once admiring him and regarding him with trepidation and hatred. In Strakhov’s home, the boy experienced much that left an indelible mark on him. Leskov wrote later: ‘He was ill-bred, despotic and, I think, slightly insane: some forty years my aunt’s senior, he slept with her, sometimes tying her by the leg to the foot of his double bed … The sufferings of my aunt were the subject of universal commiseration, but neither my father nor anyone else dared to intercede on her behalf … These were the first impressions of my childhood, and terrible ones they were – I consider that they began in me the development of that agonizing nervousness from which I have suffered all my life and which has made me do in it so many crass and stupid things.’
Later in life, Leskov was fond of claiming aristocratic descent for himself, particularly on his mother’s side of the family. Although he did possess legal nobility on his father’s side (the stories about his mother’s ‘aristocratic’ origins were his own invention), his family was descended from a long line of priests in the Oryol village of Leski (the name means ‘little forests’). What he really inherited was a religious sensibility, and a lifelong conflict between his mother’s magical Orthodox ritualism and his father’s essentially Protestant outlook on the world. Leskov tells us that although his mother was religious in a conventionally Orthodox, churchgoing way – she read akathisti (Orthodox hymns) at home and on the first day of each month held a prayer meeting, ‘watching to see what effects this might have on the circumstances of her daily life’ – his father, who in his youth had trained as a seminarist but had shocked his family by refusing thereafter to become a priest, had evolved his own, very personal form of Christian belief, going to church only seldom, and taking part in none of the ecclesiastical ceremonies apart from confession and Holy Communion, which he regarded as a purely commemorative religious observance: ‘He had no time for any of the other rituals,’ Leskov writes, ‘and as he was dying he included as part of his will a stipulation that no requiem mass be sung over him.’
This religious dualism was further reinforced by the personalities of two relatives who were to play an important role in the young Leskov’s development. The first of these was Leskov’s uncle by marriage, Alexander Scott (or Aleksandr Yakovlevich Shkott, as he was known in the country of his adoption), the son of a Russified Scottish Nonconformist, who had established in Russia a private agricultural commercial company named ‘Scott & Wilkins’.
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