Category: Russian Literature

A Question of Guilt – Dostoevsky’s “A Gentle Creature”

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella “A Gentle Creature”, also translated as “The Meek One”, makes for unpleasant reading. We are immediately thrust into the aftermath of a suicide, where the surviving partner of a marriage attempts to come to terms with why his young wife chose to end her life. In times of grief, we can often blame ourselves for things that under the lens of cold reason are not our responsibility. But in “A Gentle Creature” the situation is far less innocent. Our unnamed narrator is as repulsive as any a man Dostoevsky created, and as he explores his memories it is impossible to avoid the fact that he is responsible for his wife’s death. Theirs was an extremely abusive relationship, one which remains as fresh and horrible today as it was then.

In “A Gentle Creature” Dostoevsky uses this setup, of a man trying to evade his own guilt, to create a brilliant character study. The relationship and its decline are thematically rich, making us think about the nature of moral responsibility and fate, about money and power, and finally about the written word itself. Beneath the story, which I found painful to read at times, there is much of value to discuss.

Quotations are from the translation by Ronald Meyer, but as I prefer the title “A Gentle Creature”, I will refer to the story using that name.

“A Fantastic Story” – the Narration of “A Gentle Creature”

“A Gentle Creature” has the subtitle “a fantastic story”, and before the story begins Dostoevsky explains his strange word choice. Though it is “realistic in the highest degree”, it has an element of fantasy in how Dostoevsky takes us along the memories and turmoil of the narrator’s heart as he tries to make sense of what has happened. We meet our narrator shortly after his wife’s death. “…Now as long as she’s here – everything is still all right”. Such an opening thrusts us in media res, as if we’ve suddenly been plugged in to our narrator’s thoughts. Our own disorientation reflects his own. Though the narrator tells us that “the horror of it for me… [is] that I understand everything”, half a page later he admits he keeps getting muddled.

The narrator is our only guide to the story, but he is not reliable at all. As he goes through his memories, he also interprets them. When he comes across badly, he gets defensive – “you see, I wasn’t badly brought up and have manners”. Though he claims to portray “pro and contra” impartially, he also blames his wife for her suicide. It’s not hard to see the games he’s playing. Just as he describes his relationship with his wife as a game, so too is his description of the past a kind of game. We are drawn into his world, a world with almost no dialogue, so that we are almost suffocated by his solipsism. But he still needs his readers. He addresses them from time to time, appealing for moral support. He wants them to justify his actions. His addressees are male – perhaps he hopes they’d be biased.

The Plot

Our narrator is a pawnbroker, Dostoevsky’s favourite profession. One day he notices a repeat client, a young girl of about fifteen or sixteen. She keeps bringing him things, and seems to be growing increasingly desperate. The narrator becomes interested, and decides to learn about her. It turns out that her parents are dead, and she lives with her aunts. These women are preparing “to sell her”, and a merchant has been chosen to be her husband. She doesn’t want this, but this is the 19th century and she’s a poor woman and can’t easily defend herself. She uses the money she gets from pawning things to put adverts in the papers, hoping someone will hire her, as a governess for example.

The narrator decides to marry her instead. Compared to the shopkeeper, who has already beaten to death two wives, he must seem to the poor girl “a liberator”. She agrees to marriage. And here begins the horror of the story. The narrator, who first only had monetary power over her, now gains marital power. And as the story progresses, his power and his desire for control only grow.

“She should have appreciated my deed”.

From the very first, he expects her subservience and her respect. But this is a one-way street. He does not expect to have to offer anything to her in return. To her love – “she would throw herself at me with her love” – he presents silence. He enjoys the thought that he is “a riddle”. He creates “a complete system” for controlling her, and eventually the two of them stop talking altogether. Why does the narrator act this way? It’s both easy and difficult to say. At one point he claims to be aiming at a higher happiness for both of them, one that can only be reached through suffering. At another moment, he seems to think he’s Mephistopheles, using evil to work good.

In all of his decisions, there is no respect for what the girl thinks. In “A Gentle Creature” we hardly ever hear her speak. When she does speak, the narrator dismisses her through misogyny – “these outbursts were unhealthy and hysterical”. The narrator does not even let her go outside on her own. In all his planning, the narrator not only displays a desire for control connected with his profession as an accumulator of money, but he also shows an unwillingness to respect or acknowledge the variety of human experience, and the essential dignity of his young wife.

The girl is kind – at first she does her best to love him. But through his coldness, the narrator attempts to reform her into a different person entirely. The fifth part of the first chapter in the story is called “The Meek One Rebels”, and there’s a degree of irony in it. The narrator has tormented her so much that she can no longer be herself. But then we might also think about suicide in connection with this. For many people, the decision to kill themselves comes as the consequence of losing their sense of identity. The narrator demands she break with hers. Her rebellion consists with an attempted liaison with one of the narrator’s old comrades (they were both in the army together), but the liaison does not work out. She is too morally pure, even then.

But the narrator still punishes her. He forces her to sleep on a different bed, behind a partition. The marriage is over. He makes her feel guilty for what he has driven her to. Later on, she declares that she is “a criminal”, even though she’s done precious little wrong.

Guilt and the Limits of Knowledge

Throughout “A Gentle Creature” we are asking why the poor girl killed herself. In some sense, it’s trivially simple. The narrator hurts her, abuses her, forces her into silence, and crushes her sense of self. But at the same time, it is still worth thinking about questions of responsibility as we read the story. The narrator may be an idiot when he suggests “I was forced to act as I did then”, as if he can simply excuse himself by invoking fate, but there might be value in questioning how far he is to blame, or at least, how he ended up in that position. I think the main problem is a failure of imagination on his part, coupled with the way that he refused to acknowledge her individual dignity.

 Why imagination? He makes plans, but finds she doesn’t fit into them because he is unable to plan enough. That’s at least one level to the problem. But it goes further than that. Under the surface of “A Gentle Creature” there is a lot of pent-up feeling. The narrator is a bad person in action, but not at heart. He really is aiming at a kind of happiness, and I think he did love his wife. But he was unable to express that love. Whenever he wanted to, it came into conflict with his desire for control and the lack of respect for his wife caused by his misogyny.

As a result, instead of being kind, he was silent. Instead of talking about his feelings, he tells us that it is impossible, “what would she have understood?” The narrator blames her for dying when she did. If only she’d waited a little while longer, then things would have worked out. But he is at fault for driving her to suicide, and whether she did it earlier or later the important thing is that he drove her to it in the first place.

In the end, though, as much as we condemn the narrator, we can’t avoid thinking about how we determine responsibility to begin with. After all, in “A Gentle Creature” we only hear his side of the story – we never learn hers, and never will. And though he hardly portrays himself well, he’s also suffering from shock and grief, and isn’t thinking clearly either.

Why is the Narrator as he is?

Comparing the narrator of “A Gentle Creature” to that of “Notes from the Underground” is a sensible decision, as both, though talkative, never seem to get anywhere with their thoughts or with their lives. They seem trapped in small places, like characters from something by Samuel Beckett. But more than that, both of them are in a sense poisoned by their era. The girl in “A Gentle Creature” is from a different generation to her husband, and where he is cold and cruel, she is idealistic and hopeful (until he’s had his way with her). The narrator is someone who also clearly once had his own ideals, but failed to live up to them. When he was younger, he was a soldier, but he was forced from his regiment after failing to participate in a duel. He tries to call his actions courageous, but it’s hardly convincing.  

He takes out his shame on her. He makes her feel ashamed of her own actions, above all for her love. But there is more to him than damaged pride. The end of “A Gentle Creature” is particularly difficult to read because the narrator finally seems to come to terms with his guilt. His worldview is spoiled, and he feels completely isolated. “I am alone with the pledges”. What had earlier given him power, even a sense of self – his money – now weighs down on him. He becomes aware of the emptiness of his life, and we have a feeling as he cries out with fear at the prospect of his wife’s body being removed from the house that perhaps his own suicide is not far off either. “People are alone on this earth” he thinks. That is his conclusion after so much suffering – both his and his wife’s. Fun.

Conclusion

“A Gentle Creature” ends bleakly, with a sense of terrible isolation. To be fair, it is bleak throughout. We watch a kind, hopeful, loving girl be destroyed in an abusive relationship, unable to express herself and controlled wherever she goes. There is, as with all suicides, a pervasive and nauseating feeling that if only we had a little more time, perhaps things would have been different. But for all the gloom, the story is still worth reading. The narrator is, in the Dostoevskian mould, perhaps a little too evil in thought, but his actions are believable and well-described. And however uncomfortable following his thoughts is, the twists and turns as he tries to justify himself remain fascinating.

Compared with The Double, “A Gentle Creature” is far more psychologically interesting, and (surprisingly for Dostoevsky!), a good exercise in concision. It is not as enjoyable as Crime and Punishment, in part because it has little positivity, and no Sonya waiting at the end. But that’s no reason not to give “A Gentle Creature” a chance the next time you have an hour free. It certainly won’t disappoint you.

Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin

Alexander Pushkin is held by his countrymen to be their greatest writer, something which always strikes Westerners as unusual. The main problem is that Pushkin was primarily a poet, and poets, particularly Russian ones, are exceedingly difficult to translate and still harder to translate well. Yet Pushkin did write prose. His novel The Captain’s Daughter, and his short story “The Queen of Spades”, are among his best-known prose works. Another is the cycle of short stories, The Tales of Belkin, which I finished recently. While I can’t deny Pushkin’s verve for verse, his prose is rather more – if you’ll forgive the pun – prosaic.

What is particularly interesting about these five stories is more how we see in them the seeds out of which grew the magnificent prose that for so many exemplifies Russian literature. A saying often attributed to Dostoevsky is that Russian writers “all came out of Gogol’s “Overcoat””. But Gogol’s story in turn came out of these tales.

For all their significance as trailblazers, though, that’s not to say that these five stories can’t stand on their own.

The Editor’s Introduction

The Tales of Belkin, as its title indicates, purport not to be Pushkin’s own work at all, but rather that of the late Ivan Petrovich Belkin. The stories are introduced to us by Pushkin himself, acting as an editor (he did run a magazine for some time). This brief introduction, though, has much to say. Most of it is given over to a letter from one of Belkin’s friends, in which he describes the late author. Belkin was a young man, “humble and honest”, who let his estate in the country go to seed and died something of a recluse with many unfinished manuscripts lying around.

The letter-writer and editor note that the tales were all reportedly told to Belkin by someone else, and these names are given in a footnote by Pushkin. This, alongside the description of Belkin himself “average height, grey eyes, reddish hair, straight nose”, and the inclusion of a real date to the letter “Nov 16, 1830”, has the effect of giving The Tales of Belkin an extra dash of realism. We feel their author is a real person because he is treated like one. Many of the stories themselves feature a narrator as a character, who is then told the main story by someone else. This is quite a democratic approach, because many of these extra storytellers are from the lower ranks of society and it gives them a voice. It anticipates Turgenev’s Collection A Sportsman’s Sketches, where the approach is used to great effect.

“The Shot”

“The Shot”, the first of The Tales of Belkin, contains one of the classic examples of a duel in Russian literature, slotting in neatly next to Evgenii Onegin, A Hero of Our Time, and that squib in Fathers and Sons. Our narrator, an officer, is beguiled by Silvio, a Russian with a distinctly non-Slavic name. Silvio is an excellent shot, and though he is not an officer but simply a nobleman living nearby, he spends much of his time with the officers. They, for their part, enjoy such traditional pleasures as carousing and shooting each other in duels. One evening Silvio suffers an embarrassment at the hands of another officer, for which he should have called him to a duel, but Silvio declines at great cost to his honour. Our narrator is confused by this, thinking that Silvio is possibly a coward. But then Silvio tells him his own story.

It turns out that Silvio cannot fight in a duel because he needs to get revenge on another man, and this requires Silvio to take care of his own life. The incident in question happened when Silvio was in the army. A newcomer turned out to be equal to Silvio in popularity and talent, and Silvio felt threatened, eventually finding an excuse to duel him. Alas, he was fighting a Russian of the new generation: “His indifference made me lose my temper. What was the point, I thought, of taking his life when he didn’t seem to give a damn what I did?” Silvio let the man live, but he was determined to get his revenge. He waits until he hears the man has married, then he goes to his country estate with the intention of finally shooting, this time against an opponent who has a reason to fear death.

It works. He does not hit his opponent, for his goal was simply to regain his lost honour. His rival survives, but shaken and embarrassed in front of his new wife. One thing that’s particularly interesting about “The Shot” is the way that it plays with our notions of truth. Not only is the narrator himself a character, but he hears the story in two halves. The first comes from Silvio, while the second part, detailing Silvio’s ultimate revenge, comes from the rival himself. The overall effect is to make us wary of trusting anyone by drawing our attention to the biases out of which our understanding of truth is necessarily built. With that said, I’m not sure how much I enjoyed the story itself, however much its ideas of honour and its narrative complexity are important for the later tradition, particularly with Lermontov, for instance.

“The Blizzard”

“The Blizzard” is another of The Tales of Belkin which seems particularly interested in narrative itself. Our heroine, Maria, has been “brought up on French novels” and has a rather overdeveloped imagination as a result. She and her lover, a poor soldier, are forbidden to meet by their parents, but together they hatch a plan to elope, relying on their parents to accept them once they are legally married. Alas, it does not work out. The night they are supposed to marry there is a terrible blizzard, and Vladimir, her husband-to-be, gets lost on the way to the church. Maria, meanwhile, reads in everything an ill omen as she heads there herself. Pushkin constantly switches perspective between the two lovers, before finally shifting forward to the next morning at Maria’s house, where she seems to wake up as if nothing had happened.

But it is not so. Maria falls ill from her failure to marry Vladimir, and her parents meanwhile forbid him to set one foot within their house ever again. Vladimir, dejected, returns to the army and fights against the French, who at this point are advancing on Russian territory (we are in 1812). We lose track of him, and then hear that he has died. But Maria, with a Romantic constancy, refuses to marry anyone else, and holds onto everything of Vladimir’s that she can lay her hands on. However, one day she meets Burmin, a Hussar, and they get on swimmingly. Yet for some reason, though time passes, he does not propose to her. At last, she pressures him into explaining himself, and he says that he’s already married. Now, finally, Burmin gives us the missing piece, explaining what actually happened in the church on the night Maria was awaiting Vladimir.

It is ridiculous. But the story is more interesting than it seems. On one level, it’s a magical “everything turns out okay” kind of ending. But it’s complicated by Pushkin’s shifting of perspectives, consciously manipulating the reader’s knowledge and setting limitations on it. Most importantly, it’s complicated by the way that Burmin himself does not recognise the woman he somehow married. While I don’t doubt she would have been wearing a veil at the time, it is still rather ominous. At least it seems so to me.

“The Undertaker”

“The Undertaker” is a rather unusual story, the most fantastical of the stories of The Tales of Belkin. Our hero is a grumpy old undertaker who has recently moved into a new house. Unlike, as Pushkin notes, the undertakers of Shakespeare or Walter Scott, his own is humourless. But that’s not to say the text is without humour, because Pushkin’s undertaker’s pleasure at hearing about other people dying, and his disappointment when they don’t, is all part of the comedy. One day the undertaker is invited by a German shoemaker to a birthday dinner, and there the old man drinks far too much. Made uneasy by a comment one of the Germans had made – that we should toast our clients and invite them to a party – he suggests he will indeed invite the dead back and goes home.

To his horror the dead do turn up. They seem in a good-enough mood, but unsurprisingly the undertaker is rather shocked by their presence. He ends up pushing a skeleton out of anger, and at this point the dead turn against him. At this point he faints, or rather “loses the presence of his soul”, and wakes up. The experience of death lends itself to a psychological reading quite easily. The undertaker has repressed his ambivalent feelings towards his clients – people whose deaths make him glad, though they should not – and these feelings burst out in a bad and drunken dream. The effect of this is immediate. We have a sense that the undertaker has awoken a changed man – his final words are to call in his daughters for tea, perhaps thereupon to make amends for treating them badly until then. We can only guess, for the story ends there.

This little story – it’s the shortest of all the Tales of Belkin – is still packed with things to think about. At its heart is that simple but rather unanswerable question which has always plagued Russian writers – how should we live? It takes a bad dream to jolt the undertaker out of his bad existence. Perhaps for Pushkin’s readers, it may take only this story.

“The Station Master”

Of all The Tales of Belkin perhaps my favourite was “The Station Master”. It tells the story of a station master, a man who was in charge of a station on a road where tired horses could be exchanged for fresh and food and rest sought, a little like an inn. The story is focused on questions of sympathy. It begins humorously, with an epigraph from Prince Vyazemskii (a poet) about how these station masters are little dictators within their realms, before Pushkin himself lists the difficulties and frustrations of using their services, including the pointless complaint we write optimistically in their feedback booklets. (How little, I thought, has changed!). But then Pushkin suddenly stops us to say: “if we really get into their position properly, then instead of frustration our hearts will be filled with an honest sympathy for them”.  

We are introduced to a particular station master, whose daughter, Dunya, is his helper. He is extremely proud of her – touchingly so – and guards her fiercely. The daughter’s attractiveness is irresistible to the narrator, and he kisses her before he leaves. A few years later he comes by the same road and expects to see her again. Instead, he finds a changed place, an inn “without flowers in the windows, where all around there was a feeling of carelessness and decay”. The station master himself is still there, but his daughter has vanished, and without her he has fallen into ruin. He tells the narrator how she disappeared – kidnapped and married by an officer passing through – and how his own attempts to get her back from her new home failed.

Dunya, alas, was happy there, though we have a feeling that her position is unstable, as it always was for the many girls who left the provinces for the city during those days, and were reliant upon the goodwill of whoever had seduced them, for class differences meant that a marriage was unlikely. In the inn, the narrator draws our attention twice to a cycle of paintings showing the story of the Prodigal Son from the Bible, and once the station master refers to Dunya in similar terms.

Yet one of the ways that Pushkin plays with his readers is to frustrate their expectations. The narrator leaves the station for the second time, and the next time he passes through the area he finds the man already long dead. He manages to locate his grave and there is told by a local about a noblewoman who once visited it, coming on a wonderfully rich carriage and with children in tow. It is no doubt Dunya herself. Though we are disappointed that no reconciliation between father and daughter took place, still Pushkin surprises us by showing that her own story at least has a happy ending.

In focusing so much on questions of sympathy and rank, “The Station Master” is an obvious inspiration for Gogol’s short stories, particularly “The Overcoat”. But it stands on its own. I cared for the characters and their fates, and that’s perhaps all that matters.

“The Noblewoman-Peasant”

“The Noblewoman-Peasant” is the final story of The Tales of Belkin. It tells the story of a romance between a noblewoman and a nobleman whose fathers are at odds with one another. Liza cannot meet Aleksei because as a noblewoman, she has no reason to go to his house without her father’s permission, and so she contrives a plan to bump into him in the countryside, dressed up as a peasant (so that nobody, least of all Aleksei himself, can suspect she is a noblewoman). It is an idiotic scheme, but Pushkin reminds us that it is not unbelievable for a country girl, whose entire knowledge of the world is from silly novels.

Liza successfully meets Aleksei, who himself is forced into a role – he doesn’t want to startle the peasant girl he thinks he’s caught by suggesting he’s a nobleman, so he pretends to be the nobleman’s assistant. Liza, meanwhile, has to contend with the fact that sexual mores among peasant girls aren’t quite the same as among noblewomen, and has to break character to tell Aleksei politely that she won’t be going to bed with him in the bushes. But this remark, delivered in the perfect Russian of a noblewoman, only piques Aleksei’s interest still further. They meet again, and again, and fall in love – even though both, faking their identities, know that the relationship can go no further.

But then, amazingly, their fathers make up and the two youths are supposed to meet. Even worse, the fathers decide the children would be a good match. Liza does not wish to reveal her deception, so she once more adopts a fake role, dressing herself up unrecognizably in a hideous dress, covering herself with makeup, and refusing to speak any language other than French. Liza survives the meeting, but Aleksei’s love for her peasant alter-ego grows unstoppable. The “Romantic idea” of marrying a peasant comes to absorb him, and he makes ready to propose. Luckily, this story does end happily, and just as madly as it began.

But under even this comic exterior, there’s a lot going on. As Aleksei’s father pressures him to marry Liza we have a sense of the generational conflicts that will be especially prominent in the 1860s, with works like Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. Meanwhile, though there’s a slight irony to its description of noblewomen in the countryside, Pushkin nevertheless demonstrates the difficult boredom of life there for them, practically trapped in their rooms and with nothing to do but read and gossip.

Conclusion

The Tales of Belkin are a cycle of short stories, and one thing that I looked for while reading them was points of connection between them, beyond their own imaginary author. It is not easy to say what they are all about, at least once one discards such broad and probably useless generalisations like “the meaning of life”, or “love”, and so on. Instead, I think the clue might be in the editor’s introduction. The stories are all about imagination. The undertaker’s imagination changes his life for the better, while Liza’s idea of dressing up as a peasant, however risible, ends up getting her exactly what she wants. I admit that it is not a fool proof suggestion, but it seems to work for most of the stories. Pushkin is interested in the ways that we tell stories, in narrative strategies, and imagination is part of that.

Taken separately, these stories are simply stories, but taken together The Tales of Belkin are in some sense an exploration of the ways we tell stories, and what their value can be. Either way, they’re worth reading if you come across some Pushkin lying around.

Murder and Passion in Leskov’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk”

“Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” is the most famous of Nikolai Leskov’s short stories, at least in English anyway. This is no doubt because its title sets the story in a familiar cultural context. But in reality the tale has little to do either with Macbeth or with its heroine. Like Turgenev’s “Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District”, the comparison to Shakespeare is much more parodic than anything else. Here we have a tale of a simple woman with a simple goal – power. But Leskov, rather than focusing on the gruesome details, asks two important questions. The first is why does this woman, our “Lady Macbeth”, start to kill? And the second is how far should we actually blame her for the killings?

Introduction to Leskov’s Style

My most popular post on this blog is my summary of Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller”, which is partly about Leskov’s style of writing. Benjamin of course is not the only important critic to have written on Leskov, but I do think that it is hard to read Leskov without having Benjamin’s ideas in the back of your mind. Briefly put, Benjamin draws a distinction between stories and novels. The former were once very popular, but the growth of the bourgeoisie and then the horrors of the First World War led to their demise. This is because stories are characterised by deliberate ambiguity – they are based off experience, which means that stories necessarily change based on who is telling them and when. Novels, meanwhile, aim to have that newspaper-like quality of fact to them. Yes, we have unreliable novelistic narrators, but stories are more moral, and fallible as we are.

Many of Leskov’s tales are tales that his narrator recounts hearing from someone else. Frame narratives of this sort are an easy way of recognising stories – Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches uses a similar structure. The Leskov story that I translated badly, “A Righteous Man”, is another example. “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” is not a frame narrative, but it has certain other qualities that give it a story-like quality. Leskov’s story is written in a very conversational tone, with a strong sense of readership – “From time to time in our country we come across such characters who leave such an impression on us that even after many years we feel a shudder of horror when we remember them.” The first line (my translation) already sets the story within a world familiar to its readers (“our”, “we come across”).

There is also a sense not of those frustrating lapses of memory that characterise certain modernist unreliable narrators, but just the simplicity and exaggeration that come to all of us when we try to tell a story. We are told of Katerina Lvovna Izmailova, our heroine, that she “once played out a terrible drama, after which our noblemen started to call her Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, not altogether seriously”. The narrative style paints the narrator as an insider, a local, and also sets up a kind of chorus – the average citizens of the countryside where our story takes place. Implicitly, it thereby creates the moral framework for the story, telling us who are to be our moral compass.

Your Average Country Merchant Family

And so, Katerina Lvovna, our future Lady Macbeth. We learn that she is in her early twenties, good looking – the usual things anyone in the 19th century thinks we should know about a woman. But though Leskov is not a champion of progress, there’s a definite sense in “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” that he wants us to treat her with more sympathy than she might receive otherwise, in spite of the first paragraph. As soon as we finish learning about her appearance we get to the other important attribute – marital status. “She was given in marriage to our merchant Izmailov” – in the Russian the passive construction sounds more natural, but it’s essential here. Katerina Lvovna is acted upon – as a Russian woman, she never has no power to act for herself. Why does she marry an older man? Because “she was a poor girl and didn’t have a say in the matter”.

Once the marriage gets going life doesn’t get better for Katerina Lvovna. She fails in the only task she had – giving birth to an heir. Probably because her much older husband spends most of his time working and doesn’t seem to feel much desire towards her at all. Without even a child to entertain her, Katerina Lvovna’s life is extremely boring. The narrator is always attempting to explain her character, because he wants to make the murders comprehensible. Katerina Lvovna is “passionate, and, having grown up in poverty, she had grown used to freedom and simplicity” – both things denied to her in her new home. And being not a reader and not a great believer, she has nothing at all to do. But what is worst of all is that “nobody, as happens, paid even the slightest attention to her boredom.” She is simply alone.

Romance!

That is, until one day one of the workmen, Sergei, starts to come after her. The outside world of the servants, with its “jolly words and jokes”, is contrasted with the dead house Katerina Lvovna lives in. Though she is warned by a wise female servant that Sergei “the bastard, will flatter and flatter and bring any woman to sin”, Katerina Lvovna falls head-over-heels in love with the first person to ever show an interest in her. We readers see immediately that he is playing with her; she does not learn the truth until almost the end of the tale.

Katerina Lvovna, simple as she is, is taken by an irresistible force and finds herself “in spite of her intentions” reciprocating his physical desires. Katerina Lvovna’s experience of love is, because of her lack of experience, dominated by things she does not understand but nevertheless accepts. She is strangely disconnected from her own actions – drinks are “drunk”, kisses are “kissed” and food is “eaten”. Can we really blame her for thinking that this is what life is all about, like an uneducated Anna Karenina?

…And Murder

How do we get from illicit love to murder? It’s as easy as getting caught in the act by one’s father-in-law. After getting punished (her husband is away on a work trip) Katerina Lvovna decides to poison him. Or rather, he is poisoned. Even here, “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” prefers not to assign blame: “He died in just the same fashion as the rats which Katerina Lvovna poisoned in the storeroom did”. After killing her father-in-law, and somewhat encouraged by Sergei, Katerina Lvovna then kills her husband, and then his remaining heir – a relative. She, meanwhile, is pregnant with Sergei’s child. But as she and Sergei are finishing off the heir they are caught by the townsfolk and sent to a penal colony for the novella’s dénouement, in which Katerina Lvovna finally discovers that although she desperately loves Sergei, he’s just as everyone said he was – an untrustworthy rogue.

The Cat and the Conscience

What makes “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” interesting, which totally passed me by on my first reading of the story, is the question of responsibility. We are initially led by the story’s use of “the people”, especially at the scene in which Katerina Lvovna is finally caught (by a huge crowd of townsfolk surrounding the house and trying to break in), to view the story as simply one of justice – if you do something wrong, you will be punished. But the question of conscience and knowledge complicates this picture. Katerina Lvovna doesn’t really have a sense of right or wrong. Whereas Sergei hesitates, “goes pale”, at some of the more unpleasant moments, such as when he realises another death will be necessary, Katerina Lvovna does not think about such things. What is striking is her purity – at one point we read that Katerina Lvovna “smiles and breathes like a perfect baby”.

A recurring image is that of a cat. Katerina Lvovna dreams this cat twice, but when she reaches out to touch it, it dissolves in her fingers. The second time this happens the cat transforms into the head of the dead father-in-law, shocking Katerina Lvovna half­-to-death. The dream is obviously a representation of her unacknowledged conscience, but even with that knowledge it’s not the same thing as saying that Katerina Lvovna is particularly guilty. She has lived in a world which grants women, especially merchant women, no freedoms whatsoever, and she has not the mind to entertain herself. Her husband speaks a terrible truth when he tells her after discovering her betrayal that “our power over you has not been taken away, and never can be taken away”. Note the first-person plural he uses – his power over her is at least in part linguistic.

Conclusion: Who is to Blame?

Katerina Lvovna gives herself up to love, or rather passion, because the romance with Sergei is the first time she has ever felt anything or had anyone feel anything for her. It’s pretty heavily implied that her husband only married her because his previous wife had died without giving him a child, and we read nothing of her own parents. Meanwhile, in killing and gaining control of her husband’s capital, Katerina Lvovna is for the first time playing an active role in shaping her future. Should we blame her for choosing a choice over passivity, emotions over boredom? She definitely makes poor choices, but given the terrible world she lives in, there are mitigating factors.

The narrator himself certainly doesn’t seem sure what to make of her. The noblemen’s comment at the start of the story, that she is a “Lady Macbeth”, misses the point – where Lady Macbeth is a confident schemer and actor, Katerina Lvovna scarcely seems aware of what she’s doing and is herself constantly manipulated by outside forces – men, love, power. The title of Leskov’s tale, then, in drenched in irony. In the depths of Russia (admittedly, Mtsensk isn’t actually in the depths, but it’s hardly Moscow) the best we can be is a petty murderer…

The first time I read this story I was unimpressed. This post comes from a second reading, this time in the original Russian. And to be perfectly honest, I’m still not a huge fan. I just don’t feel there’s actually that much going on in the story. It’s too simple, in a way. I can’t find anything to think about. Yes, there are some interesting things Leskov does with language – mostly to show Katerina Lvovna’s lack of control over herself in general, and her initial passivity and later power. But beyond that, it’s just a story about a woman who murders three people on the basis of relatively understandable reasons. But that’s just it.

If you’ve read Leskov and like him, do feel free to correct me here. What am I missing?