Nikolai Leskov (1831–1895)
Author of Lefty: Being the tale of Cross-Eyed Lefty of Tula and the Steel Flea
About the Author
Disambiguation Notice:
Do not combine books called The Enchanted Wanderer without careful checking. Virtually every Leskov collection used to be lumped together; I have done my best to separate them. Note that there are four separate collections called The Enchanted Wanderer, the 1958 Hanna translation, the 1961 Magarshack one (subtitled Selected Tales, and not to be confused with his earlier 1946 translation of a separate group of stories, called The Enchanted Pilgrim: And Other Stories), and the Pevear-Volokhonsky and Dreiblatt ones (both 2013), all of which are very different and should not be combined. Furthermore, there is the 1924 A.G. Paschkoff translation of the story by itself, published as a separate book.
Image credit: wikipedia - Portrait by Valentin Serov 1894
Works by Nikolai Leskov
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: Selected Stories of Nikolai Leskov (New York Review Books Classics) (2020) 100 copies
The Tales of N. S. Leskov.: The Musk-Ox and Other Tales (Classics of Russian literature) (1977) 11 copies
The Ghost of the Engineers' Castle: Haunted Castle and Mysterious Disappearance of a Landowner (2009) 6 copies, 2 reviews
Valitut kertomukset 6 copies
Kertomuksia Venäjältä 4 copies
ליידי מקבת ממחוז מצנסק 3 copies
Избранные сочинения 3 copies
Der ungetaufte Pope 3 copies
Dolinskijs liv 3 copies
Insenerilossi kummitus : [jutustus] 3 copies
Il viaggiatore incantato e La belva 3 copies
Заячий ремиз 2 copies
Der Tolpatsch 2 copies
ליידי מקבת של מחוז מצנסק : סיפורים 2 copies
Der Raubüberfall 2 copies
Sinners and saints: Three stories 2 copies
Die Kampfnatur Erzählung 2 copies
De betoverde zwerver / Het kapittel 2 copies
Võlutud rändur : valik jutustusi 2 copies
Berättelser från Ryssland 2 copies
Očarovaný poutník 2 copies
Том 5: Рассказы и повести 1 copy
Том 4: Некуда 1 copy
Том 2: Праведники 1 copy
La montaña 1 copy
Т. 5 1 copy
Избранные произведения 1 copy
Повести. Рассказы 1 copy
Собрание сочинений 9 1 copy
Собрание сочинений 7 1 copy
Собрание сочинений 4 1 copy
Il meglio 1 copy
Собрание сочинений 1 1 copy
Островитяне 1 copy
Зверь 1 copy
Тупейный художник 1 copy
Воительница 1 copy
Левша (Russian Edition) 1 copy
Однодум 1 copy
Несмертельный голован 1 copy
Il viaggiatore incantato 1 copy
Т. 1 1 copy
Udvalgte Fortaellinger 1 copy
Soumrak knížecího rodu 1 copy
Espanta-diabo, O 1 copy
Leskov Nikolaj 1 copy
Le vagabond ensorcelé 1 copy
Sobranie sochineniĭ 1 copy
Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii 1 copy
Œuvres 1 copy
A Shameless Rascal 1 copy
הנודד הקסום ; פבלין ; האטר 1 copy
Naurua ja surua 1 copy
Romanzi e racconti 1 copy
Tres hombres de Dios 1 copy
Т. 4 1 copy
Gesammelte Werke Bd. 1 [...] 1 copy
Gesammelte Werke Bd. 2 [...] 1 copy
Gesammelte Werke Bd. 3 [...] 1 copy
Charaktere und Sonderlinge 1 copy
Erzahlungen 1 copy
i preti di stargorod 1 copy
Five Tales 1 copy
oeuvres choisies 1 copy
La Pulga 1 copy
Der ungetaufte Pope 1 copy
Irrlichter : Erzählung 1 copy
Interesujący mężczyźni 1 copy
Izbrannoe 1 copy
[Повести] 1 copy
Т. 3 1 copy
Т. 2 1 copy
L'artista del toupet 1 copy
Đakon Ahila 1 copy
Pige i Bastsko 1 copy
Pripovjesti 1 copy
Zakržljali rod 1 copy
Soldatnoveller 1 copy
Mimoišao ih život 1 copy
Ljevak 1 copy
Izbrane povesti 1 copy
Die schöne Asa 3 Erzählungen 1 copy
Verhalen 1 copy
Gesammelte Werke 1 copy
Associated Works
A Very Russian Christmas: The Greatest Russian Holiday Stories of All Time (2016) — Contributor — 46 copies, 1 review
Acht vrouwen klassieke Russische verhalen van Poesjkin, Toergenjev, Leskov, Dostojevski en Tsjechov (1983) — Contributor — 6 copies
Opowieści niesamowite : groza i niesamowitość w prozie rosyjskiej XIX i początku XX w. (1990) — Contributor — 5 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Leskov, Nikolai
- Legal name
- Leskov, Nikolai Semyonovich
- Other names
- Stebnitsky
- Birthdate
- 1831-02-16
- Date of death
- 1895-03-08
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Orel Gymnasium
- Occupations
- journalist
novelist
short story writer
clerk
army recruiter - Nationality
- Russian Empire
- Birthplace
- Gorokhovo, Orel, Russian Empire
- Places of residence
- Kiev, Ukraine, Russian Empire
- Place of death
- St. Petersburg, Russian Empire
- Burial location
- Volkovo Cemetery, St. Petersburg, Russia (Literatorskiye Mostki necropolis)
- Map Location
- Russia
- Disambiguation notice
- Do not combine books called The Enchanted Wanderer without careful checking. Virtually every Leskov collection used to be lumped together; I have done my best to separate them. Note that there are four separate collections called The Enchanted Wanderer, the 1958 Hanna translation, the 1961 Magarshack one (subtitled Selected Tales, and not to be confused with his earlier 1946 translation of a separate group of stories, called The Enchanted Pilgrim: And Other Stories), and the Pevear-Volokhonsky and Dreiblatt ones (both 2013), all of which are very different and should not be combined. Furthermore, there is the 1924 A.G. Paschkoff translation of the story by itself, published as a separate book.
Members
Discussions
Nikolai Leskov in Fans of Russian authors (January 2019)
Reviews
Overshadowed by contemporaries such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Nikolai Leskov was a nineteenth-century Russian author best known for shorter fiction like The Enchanted Wanderer and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Not being very well-versed in Russian literature, I had never before encountered his work when I picked up The Wild Beast - which is presented as an illustrated story for children.
But although it is narrated by a young boy, I am not entirely sure that it is meant for children. Then again, show more it is entirely possible that I have simply been influenced in this by my own cultural ideas of what is "suitable" for younger readers. Whatever the case may be, I can say that I am profoundly grateful that I did NOT read this as a child, as I think I would have been terribly wounded by the cruelty shown to the captive bear Sganarelle, and, knowing my earnest younger self, would have brooded on it for years. As it is, I know I will not soon forget the almost overwhelming sense of sadness that gripped me while reading The Wild Beast, or the terrible pity I felt for Sganarelle and his human keeper, Ferrapont/Hrapon.
Set on a great Russian estate in the early part of the nineteenth-century, before serfdom had been abolished, this is the tale of a hard master - the narrator's uncle - who does not believe in mercy, for either man or beast. When the trained bear Sganarelle is caught killing livestock and mauling people, he is condemned to death by bear-baiting, and Ferrapont, a former French prisoner-of-war reduced to slavery, is ordered to participate in the killing of the creature he loves best in all the world...
A powerful story, of man's cruelty, both to his fellow man and to "God's other creatures," this unforgettable story is also a tale of redemption, and of a change of heart. But for all its nominal "happy ending," somehow I suspect that it is the cruelty and stupidity of man's dealings with the natural world than will haunt me. show less
But although it is narrated by a young boy, I am not entirely sure that it is meant for children. Then again, show more it is entirely possible that I have simply been influenced in this by my own cultural ideas of what is "suitable" for younger readers. Whatever the case may be, I can say that I am profoundly grateful that I did NOT read this as a child, as I think I would have been terribly wounded by the cruelty shown to the captive bear Sganarelle, and, knowing my earnest younger self, would have brooded on it for years. As it is, I know I will not soon forget the almost overwhelming sense of sadness that gripped me while reading The Wild Beast, or the terrible pity I felt for Sganarelle and his human keeper, Ferrapont/Hrapon.
Set on a great Russian estate in the early part of the nineteenth-century, before serfdom had been abolished, this is the tale of a hard master - the narrator's uncle - who does not believe in mercy, for either man or beast. When the trained bear Sganarelle is caught killing livestock and mauling people, he is condemned to death by bear-baiting, and Ferrapont, a former French prisoner-of-war reduced to slavery, is ordered to participate in the killing of the creature he loves best in all the world...
A powerful story, of man's cruelty, both to his fellow man and to "God's other creatures," this unforgettable story is also a tale of redemption, and of a change of heart. But for all its nominal "happy ending," somehow I suspect that it is the cruelty and stupidity of man's dealings with the natural world than will haunt me. show less
If you thought that with Pushkin, Gogol, Tourgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, you knew practically all of 19th-century Russian literature, you'd be disappointed. This Nikolai Leskov (1831-1895) may not have belonged to the eminent circle, but he's apparently a striking, entirely idiosyncratic voice in the company. This story proves it. Leskov has an (unlikely) monk recount his adventurous life at length. The most improbable events pass by, sometimes in the style of a classic show more picaresque novel, sometimes as a series of magical realist incidents (now I know where Michael Bulgakov got his inspiration for The Master and Margarita), and so on. There's no real focus or plot, certain twists are very far-fetched, and in several places the novel feels unfinished (certain incidents are repeated several times in an adapted version). This makes for a frequently frustrating read. But Leskov clearly wasn't lacking in storytelling. And indirectly, you get glimpses of Russian society in the second half of the 19th century. show less
Six Russian Short Novels/ : The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District by Nikolai Leskov. A Lear of the steppes by Ivan Turgenev. Master and Man and Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy. Ward No. 6 by Anton Chekhov by Randall Jarrell
Got this at a New York college bookstore in the late 60’s. Some of the stories I’ve read and re-read over the years. Nikolai Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (still don’t know how to pronounce Mtsensk) is one. Seems to anticipate American crime novels like the Postman Always Rings Twice, though loads better. Very up front with female sexual desire. The other stories seem to be, one way or the other, haunted by the anxiety of death. But in this story, it’s just matter show more of fact – it is what it is. Crime (3 murders), punishment (no soul searching or remorse), supernatural (cats, floating heads, pike & perch). I agree with the editor that there’s something incredibly compelling about Katerina Izmaylova. Maybe it’s the single-mindedness.
The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol. May have read this for the first time. The coat takes on a life of its own, absorbing the poor owner’s soul. Gives a sense of what ownership means to a person who has had very little his whole life.
A Lear of the Steppes by Ivan Turgenev. Read his Sportsman’s Sketches years ago; this one takes place in the same milieu. The focus on the “Lear” character, Martyn Harlov, centers on estate planning and death (something I can identify with). Fooling yourself that you can somehow control your fate, and that you know the people closest to you.
Master and Man & The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy. The latter is a chestnut, read on multiple occasions. Probably the editor included Master & Man (which he doesn’t see as entirely successful) because his choice of Dostoyevsky’s The Eternal Husband conflicted with another collection issued by Anchor. Master & Man is told in the simple style of some of T.’s semi-parable stories, though it turns out rather ironically. There’s an explicit parable when Vasily Andreyitch and his man Nikita are caught in a snowstorm. They stop at a village dwelling for respite, and, by the fire, the villagers bemoan the breakup of families because of economic circumstances. One of them, a youth & former schoolboy, tells a story (from one of his schoolbooks) of a teaching moment when students try unsuccessfully to break a bunch of branches, but only succeed by separating each branch. When master and man get lost in the blizzard as they continue on their journey, the two cling together, as in the parable, but one is frozen solid, unbreakable, while the other survives. The bond is broken through sacrifice.
Found Ivan Ilyich (the story) to be rather misanthropic in tone. T. seems to have great animus toward Ilyich, who appears to have done a decent enough career as a judge, and his colleagues are made to seem quite heartless, but T. seems to be expecting a higher degree of empathy than is warranted. At the same time, the unsentimental description of the anger and the pain of I.I.—I’m guessing he has some kind of cancer -- is a facet of the author’s integrity and truthfulness. Pain and death aren’t generally noble. I believe his worldview at this point in his writing career was not all that different from Andre Yefimitch in the Chekov story Ward No. 6, and in the introduction the editor reads the Chekov story as a sort of riposte to the Tolstoy perspective. However, Yefimitch’s worldview is from his reading, Tolstoy has the skill to make his own worldview seem realized in the person of his dying subject.
Ward No. 6. Read this a couple of times. As I grow older, more and more I see myself in Andrei Yefimitch. Just a part of me, I hope. “Once prisons and asylums exist, someone must inhabit them,” says Yefimitch to his paranoid patient, anticipating Michel Foucault and his own fate.
A word on the Introduction. Randall Jarrell wrote two introductions for Anchor. The one for The Anchor Book of Stories is a masterpiece. This one, less so. He wrote a brilliant essay on Walt Whitman which consisted largely of quotations from the poet, and he uses the technique here, but Russian prose in translation is not the same as poetry, and his obiter dicta while often striking and right, seem to stop at the sheer magic of the narrative fictions, and no further. show less
The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol. May have read this for the first time. The coat takes on a life of its own, absorbing the poor owner’s soul. Gives a sense of what ownership means to a person who has had very little his whole life.
A Lear of the Steppes by Ivan Turgenev. Read his Sportsman’s Sketches years ago; this one takes place in the same milieu. The focus on the “Lear” character, Martyn Harlov, centers on estate planning and death (something I can identify with). Fooling yourself that you can somehow control your fate, and that you know the people closest to you.
Master and Man & The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy. The latter is a chestnut, read on multiple occasions. Probably the editor included Master & Man (which he doesn’t see as entirely successful) because his choice of Dostoyevsky’s The Eternal Husband conflicted with another collection issued by Anchor. Master & Man is told in the simple style of some of T.’s semi-parable stories, though it turns out rather ironically. There’s an explicit parable when Vasily Andreyitch and his man Nikita are caught in a snowstorm. They stop at a village dwelling for respite, and, by the fire, the villagers bemoan the breakup of families because of economic circumstances. One of them, a youth & former schoolboy, tells a story (from one of his schoolbooks) of a teaching moment when students try unsuccessfully to break a bunch of branches, but only succeed by separating each branch. When master and man get lost in the blizzard as they continue on their journey, the two cling together, as in the parable, but one is frozen solid, unbreakable, while the other survives. The bond is broken through sacrifice.
Found Ivan Ilyich (the story) to be rather misanthropic in tone. T. seems to have great animus toward Ilyich, who appears to have done a decent enough career as a judge, and his colleagues are made to seem quite heartless, but T. seems to be expecting a higher degree of empathy than is warranted. At the same time, the unsentimental description of the anger and the pain of I.I.—I’m guessing he has some kind of cancer -- is a facet of the author’s integrity and truthfulness. Pain and death aren’t generally noble. I believe his worldview at this point in his writing career was not all that different from Andre Yefimitch in the Chekov story Ward No. 6, and in the introduction the editor reads the Chekov story as a sort of riposte to the Tolstoy perspective. However, Yefimitch’s worldview is from his reading, Tolstoy has the skill to make his own worldview seem realized in the person of his dying subject.
Ward No. 6. Read this a couple of times. As I grow older, more and more I see myself in Andrei Yefimitch. Just a part of me, I hope. “Once prisons and asylums exist, someone must inhabit them,” says Yefimitch to his paranoid patient, anticipating Michel Foucault and his own fate.
A word on the Introduction. Randall Jarrell wrote two introductions for Anchor. The one for The Anchor Book of Stories is a masterpiece. This one, less so. He wrote a brilliant essay on Walt Whitman which consisted largely of quotations from the poet, and he uses the technique here, but Russian prose in translation is not the same as poetry, and his obiter dicta while often striking and right, seem to stop at the sheer magic of the narrative fictions, and no further. show less
“In these parts one occasionally comes across individuals of such character that, no matter how many years may have passed since one’s last encounter with them, one can never recall them without experiencing an inward tremor. An example of this type was Katerina Lvovna Izmailova, a merchant’s wife who once enacted a drama so awesome that the members of our local gentry, taking their lead from someone’s light-hearted remark, took to calling her ‘Lady Macbeth of show more Mtsensk.’”
—"Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” by Nikolai Leskov
Wow. The opening did not fail the story and this story did not fail the collection. I’m not sure how I’ve made it nearly forty-four years without reading Leskov, but I’m grateful to discover yet another Russian author’s oeuvre I can dig into over the next years that I hope to be graced with (although, it would be a perfectly Russian literary ending to die part-way through the next novel). His work smacks more of Gogol than anyone else I’ve read: its experimentation (he’d invented a type of Russian to mimic Greek for “Pamphalon the Entertainer”—untranslatable, of course), its varied use of style and form (philosophical and suspenseful and absurd and epic and . . . ), its believable psychology within stories that could be too fantastic in less capable hands. It also has shadows of Chekhov in the faithful representation of Russian peoples from nearly every class.
“Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” is thrilling and unsettling and has a whopper of an ending that makes me absolutely itch for the film adaption. “Pamphalon the Entertainer” rivals Hesse’s “Siddhartha” philosophically, and maybe supersedes it emotionally. I was moved by the stylite’s interaction with a humble yet flamboyant (somehow it doesn’t seem like a contradiction) citizen of Damascus, and yet have lost any real compulsion toward the religious myself—at the very least, religious redemption expounded in Christian theology. Yes, like Michael Stipe (Stylite?), I’ve also lost my . . . and that leads me to another story about isographers (essentially, icon-painters): “The Sealed Angel”. Its methodical description of the different styles of sacred art with technical details so exacting that it warranted over three pages of endnotes somehow didn’t detract, but in fact heightened the theft of the “angel” of the story and its subsequent restoration and ultimate forgery. I was impelled to interrupt the wife’s nighttime reading with a page and a half of painstaking depiction of that reparation and she didn’t seem annoyed. Score for Leskov!
I own another work of the author’s that I hadn’t known was his. Man, those Russians are the kings of concealment, waiting on shelves, wedged between more brightly jacketed books, lying in that nondescript Penguin Classics black with white font, and then . . . BOOM! They pop out from nowhere. Balaclavas and Kalashnikovs and heavy cassocks and cyberattacks blaring. Another score for Leskov!
From this volume’s introduction I learned that Leskov was riffing on Turgenev’s “Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District” which was riffing on Shakespeare, as was Leskov, and then Turgenev publishes “King Lear of the Steppes” riffing on . . . himself? I’m kind of lost, but enjoying the music nonetheless. It’s all Graeco-Russian to me. show less
—"Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” by Nikolai Leskov
Wow. The opening did not fail the story and this story did not fail the collection. I’m not sure how I’ve made it nearly forty-four years without reading Leskov, but I’m grateful to discover yet another Russian author’s oeuvre I can dig into over the next years that I hope to be graced with (although, it would be a perfectly Russian literary ending to die part-way through the next novel). His work smacks more of Gogol than anyone else I’ve read: its experimentation (he’d invented a type of Russian to mimic Greek for “Pamphalon the Entertainer”—untranslatable, of course), its varied use of style and form (philosophical and suspenseful and absurd and epic and . . . ), its believable psychology within stories that could be too fantastic in less capable hands. It also has shadows of Chekhov in the faithful representation of Russian peoples from nearly every class.
“Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” is thrilling and unsettling and has a whopper of an ending that makes me absolutely itch for the film adaption. “Pamphalon the Entertainer” rivals Hesse’s “Siddhartha” philosophically, and maybe supersedes it emotionally. I was moved by the stylite’s interaction with a humble yet flamboyant (somehow it doesn’t seem like a contradiction) citizen of Damascus, and yet have lost any real compulsion toward the religious myself—at the very least, religious redemption expounded in Christian theology. Yes, like Michael Stipe (Stylite?), I’ve also lost my . . . and that leads me to another story about isographers (essentially, icon-painters): “The Sealed Angel”. Its methodical description of the different styles of sacred art with technical details so exacting that it warranted over three pages of endnotes somehow didn’t detract, but in fact heightened the theft of the “angel” of the story and its subsequent restoration and ultimate forgery. I was impelled to interrupt the wife’s nighttime reading with a page and a half of painstaking depiction of that reparation and she didn’t seem annoyed. Score for Leskov!
I own another work of the author’s that I hadn’t known was his. Man, those Russians are the kings of concealment, waiting on shelves, wedged between more brightly jacketed books, lying in that nondescript Penguin Classics black with white font, and then . . . BOOM! They pop out from nowhere. Balaclavas and Kalashnikovs and heavy cassocks and cyberattacks blaring. Another score for Leskov!
From this volume’s introduction I learned that Leskov was riffing on Turgenev’s “Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District” which was riffing on Shakespeare, as was Leskov, and then Turgenev publishes “King Lear of the Steppes” riffing on . . . himself? I’m kind of lost, but enjoying the music nonetheless. It’s all Graeco-Russian to me. show less
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