Word: leskov
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Much of the story's impact comes from its style. It is a skaz (a tale), a form particularly associated with Leskov, in which the events are told by a fictional narrator in his own idiom and manner. The method gives those events-especially when they are grim-an ingenuous drama, as if a child were holding out a severed head and saying innocently, "Look what I found...
...literary greatness such as few centuries anywhere have equaled and none have surpassed. In an epoch that produced Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Chekhov, it is not surprising that some valuable authors were virtually overlooked by the West. One of these, almost unknown to American readers, is Nikolai Leskov (1831-95), whose output of novels, stories, memoirs and articles filled a posthumous edition of 36 volumes...
...Leskov's life and career were anomalous in his century. He was one of the few Russian writers who did not come from the gentry; his background was lower middle class. There was a strong nonconformist influence on him through an aunt who had married an Englishman and followed the Quaker way of life. He never joined a political party and so, at one time or another, was reviled by both radicals and conservatives. Yet in his job as an assistant steward on the vast estates of the wealthy Perovsky and Naryshkin families, he traveled through his country...
Angels & Demons. American readers can now sample Leskov's insight and variety in a new collection, generally well Englished by David Magarshack. The first story, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, is the Leskov work best known in this country because of the Shostakovich opera based on it (1934)-It is a quietly told story of an increasingly violent passion. The avalanche of sensuality starts when a bored wife has an affair with a young clerk on her old husband's household staff, and leads with chilling practicality to a murder, then to another and another...
Statements about national characteristics are always dangerous but always tempting. As the Irish genius is essentially in the voice, as the French is in beautiful logic and logical beauty, so the Russian genius wings straight for the remotest caverns of the soul. At his best, Leskov tells his stories simply, almost confidingly, putting incident and observation unpretentiously one after another until, before the reader realizes it, he has been led out of the story, and even out of Russia, to glimpse some of the mystery of his own existence...