This was one of the principal reasons why throughout the rest of the nineteenth century his name was never held in the same esteem as those of the other great Russian writers. For the rest of his life, Leskov nursed a sense of bitter grievance against his former friends and colleagues, the radicals – much in the terms of Dostoyevsky’s The Devils, he saw them as nihilistic demons, bent on destroying all that was true and honourable in Russia. In consequence, he began to gravitate towards the political Right.

It was in the wake of this crisis that Leskov passed to the writing of fiction in earnest. Even before the fires, he had published several journalistic sketches which, hovering on the border between fact and fiction, describe the spiritual darkness of the Russian peasantry, in a mode utterly alien to the fashionable ‘narodnik’ sympathies of the time. In Musk-Ox, written during a four-month stay in Paris and published in 1863, Leskov makes a statement about Russian society which recapitulates much of his own experience over the previous ten years. While the critique of radicalism and radicals is still quite gentle in this story – Musk-Ox (or Yakushkin) is seen as a tragic eccentric, quite out of touch with the grim reality and brutal backwardness of the Russian peasant classes, his attempt at inciting them to revolt doomed from the outset – the central message of despair is profound and intensely felt. The idyll of the Russian countryside, evoked in passages of exquisitely poetic writing, is contrasted with the murky, labyrinthine and seemingly infinite recesses of human nature, with its greed, stupidity, bigotry and cruelty. The monks and holy men who inhabit the hermitages in the forests are portrayed as lovable, quixotic, but essentially irrelevant to the needs of society. So intense is the idyll associated with them that one has the feeling that for Leskov their meditative impracticality is much to be preferred to the hard-nosed, Scott-like commercialism of a Sviridov, even though it is on men like the latter that Russia’s future depends. Bogoslovsky’s suicide, and the ingratiating words of the old peasant to Sviridov at the end of the story (‘He’ll rot, but you’ll not, Liksandra Ivanych’) are not exactly calculated to inspire the reader with hope. Yet the vitality of Musk-Ox, his extreme individualism, contains an element of redemption at an existential level – this is what Russia is good at producing, Leskov seems to be saying: it is wild, tragic and wholly useless, something on a level with a work of art.

Musk-Ox, with its first person narrative by a person who is not necessarily the author, its strongly delineated central character and its gallery of individual secondary portraits, set the model for many of Leskov’s povesti, or ‘tales’. It would be difficult here to give an adequate account of Leskov’s prodigious output of fiction, which was to span the final third of the nineteenth century. Tales and other shorter and longer prose works (some of these are novels and quasi-novels) leapt from his pen with astonishing rapidity, and the last pre-revolutionary edition of his complete works comprises thirty-six thick volumes. Faced with such a massive opus, the best we can do in this short introduction is to follow the remainder of Leskov’s career with particular reference to the other four tales included in the present selection – each of these is, like Musk-Ox, in some way representative of a phase of Leskov’s development, and may also be regarded as a high point in the author’s progress as an artist.

In 1862 Leskov finally separated from Olga Vasilevna, and was left as a ‘wifeless husband’ – he could not obtain a divorce on the grounds that his wife was insane, since the Orthodox Church did not recognize such grounds. In Kiev, during the course of 1864, he met Katerina Bubnova, with whom he had a protracted romance, and who bore him a son, Andrei. It was while he was pursuing this affair, and writing the final instalments of his anti-nihilist novel about the ‘banality of evil’, No Way Out, that he produced the tale which is perhaps his best-known work – Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (more correctly translated as ‘A Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District’). The tale’s title is clearly derived from Turgenev, who had published a story called A Hamlet of the Shchigry District as one of his A Huntsman’s Sketches. As Hugh McLean has noted, ‘the point of such titles is to juxtapose a Shakespearean archetype at a high level of psychological universalization with a specific, local, utterly Russian, and contemporary milieu. The effect on a Russian reader of that time was almost oxymoronic: how could there be a “Lady Macbeth”, especially nowadays, in such a mudhole as Mtsensk? The truth to be demonstrated is that Shakespeare’s universals know no boundaries of time or place or class.’iv

Much has been written about the tale, which occupies a unique place in Russian literature and indeed, perhaps, in world literature as a whole, as an example of the highest achievement to which the storyteller’s art can aspire. As Walter Benjamin pointed out, Leskov is primarily a teller of stories, a journalist turned fiction-writer. It is often the exceptional, eccentric, tragically self-willed individuals, the Musk-Oxes, the Katerina Lvovnas, who fascinate him, and whose personalities seem to generate a wealth of stylistic nuances and associations through which they are transmuted into the stuff of fables and remain in the memory as legendary, heroic archetypes. The sensual and sexual energy of Katerina Lvovna, her violent thirst for power and freedom, are mirrored in the vivid, almost tactile descriptions of her natural surroundings, and find their sinister and destructive echo in the figure of Sergei, her empty and spiritless lover. The narrative means, almost operatic in their simplicity and dramatic intensity (it is not hard to see why Shostakovich selected the tale for musical development in his Katerina Izmailova), are entirely merged with the stormy, passionate nature of the heroine, and the accounts of the murders and their gruesome details are transformed into a quasi-expressionistic death-elegy by the neutral, dispassionate tone of the narration itself. There is nothing of this kind to be found elsewhere in nineteenth-century Russian literature, not even in Dostoyevsky, and it is small wonder that it was not until the twentieth century, after the experience of Symbolism and Russian modernism, that this tale, together with others by Leskov, came to be accepted and understood by readers in the country of its origin.

A work less controversial than Lady Macbeth, but one that was to prove a success in Leskov’s own lifetime (it is nowadays considered a classic of Russian literature), was the ‘chronicle of Old Town’ which he began in 1866 and finally published in 1872 as the novel Cathedral Folk (Soboryanye). ‘Stary Gorod’, or ‘Old Town’, which in the final version of the novel became ‘Stargorod’ (in imitation of Gogol’s ‘Mirgorod’), is presented to the reader as a microcosm of Russian society past, present and future. The original title of the chronicle was ‘Waiting for the Moving of the Water’, a quotation from the Gospel according to St John which refers to the healing by the angel of the ‘blind, halt and withered’. The novel in its published form represents only a carefully pruned selection from a vast and formless mass of material on which Leskov worked during these years, which was, in its basic conception, a kind of pot-pourri of chronicles, short stories and novel excerpts which presented a panoply of Russian provincial life, from the struggles of the eighteenth-century Old Believers, through the Katerina Lvovna-like drama of Platonida Deyeva, a young, beautiful woman married to a man twice her age, to a depiction of ‘Old Times in the Village of Plodomasovo’. Leskov was unable to carry this project through; Cathedral Folk represents those sections of the material which relate to the Russian clergy. In the characters of Father Savely Tuberozov, whose diary forms one of the book’s main stylistic devices, Father Zakhariya Benefaktov and Deacon Akhilla Desnitsyn, the author manages to portray the lived reality of Orthodox belief, seen from the point of view of a sympathetic Protestant outsider, and shows how it concords with a warm and compassionate understanding of human nature. It is contrasted with the nihilistic emptiness of the radicals, such as Prepotensky, Bizyukina and Termosyosov.