Category: Russian Literature

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?  

“Asya” by Ivan Turgenev

I’ve never liked Turgenev. What I mean is that I’ve never been particularly impressed by him. Among the major Russian writers of the 19th century he bears the fewest marks of the land of his birth. This is fair enough, for a man who corresponded with Theodor Storm and Gustave Flaubert, and spent much of his life in Europe rather than Russia. But it doesn’t change the fact that I’ve always found Turgenev boring. Unlike Dostoevsky, ideas don’t seem to interest him, and though he tries to write passionate characters he can’t actually write characters who ideas seem to interest them either. In On the Eve, we have a classic Turgenev tale of a revolutionary who forgets about his convictions when love appears. Fathers and Sons is not much better.

If I were feeling charitable, I’d say Turgenev’s stories are mostly about the failures of an ideological way of living. His characters are shown, time and again, to fail to achieve their goals because of their own hesitations and inaction. They think they believe something, but it always turns out that they don’t quite know themselves. It’s either love spoiling the young revolutionary, or his own weakness of will. Either way, hesitancy leading to quiet failure is the common thread in Turgenev’s work. No character really feels strongly enough to actually do anything, so opportunities are always being missed and everyone ends up sad. In “Asya”, the novella which I finished this week, the formula is little changed.

“Asya”: an Introduction to the Plot

“Asya” was completed in 1858 and shows Turgenev’s Europeanness rather plainly by being set in Europe. Our narrator and the two other principal characters are Russians, but the action takes place somewhere along the Rhine in the German lands. N. N. is our narrator, and “Asya” is ostensibly a recollection by an older and wiser N. N. of a time in his youth – “First Love”, another Turgenev novella, has a similar structure. Our hero is about twenty five at the time of his story, carefree and travelling “without any goal or plan”. He enjoys observing others, and he has recently attempted a tryst with a widow only to get rebuffed. But we shouldn’t worry for the sake of N. N.’s soul – he says himself that the wound she left “wasn’t very deep”.

In any case, he winds up in the town of Z., on one bank of the Rhine. On the other is another town, L., which can be reached by ferry. Neither of them is on the track usually beaten by Russians holidaying in Europe. Having nothing else to do, one day N. N. heads over there, and to his surprise comes across two other Russian tourists, a seventeen-year-old girl by the name of Asya, and her brother, who goes by Gagin. Gagin is a bad artist but a friendly fellow, and the two men strike up an acquaintance. Asya, however, is a wild thing – and Turgenev is constantly comparing her to a wild animal, or a child – and the narrator isn’t quite sure what to make of her. At one moment she’s enthusiastic and buoyant, at another she dresses demurely and shuns contact. One thing N. N. is certain of, however – she’s not Gagin’s real brother.

Well, he’s right. He overhears her making a confession of love to her “brother”, but it turns out she’s not actually his secret lover – as we might suppose – but actually his half-sister. She was born to one of the servants employed by Gagin’s father shortly after his wife died. Gagin for a long time never knew his sister’s identity, and her mother kept her out of the big house where the aristocrats lived. However, once her mother dies Gagin’s father took Asya into his own house, and on his deathbed he admits to Gagin that she’s actually his sister. So anyway, that’s how the two of them got to know each other.

Gagin and his sister go to Petersburg soon after, and he puts her into a boarding school – after all, he can’t keep her with him. Then, he decides he’s sick of work and wants to travel, so the two of them head to Europe for a wander, as you do.

Social Monster or Victim – Who or What is Asya?

The Russian name “Asya” is a shortened version of quite a lot of names. I know an Anastasia who uses that name, and an Arsenia. Turgenev’s Asya is, however, an Anna – which is quite unusual. It is a simple example of her rather confused, mixed identity. She is half aristocrat, half peasant – not just by parentage, but also by the amount of time she has spent in each milieu. If she stayed in Russia she would immediately be identified as not belonging, but in Europe there’s a little more leeway for her, a chance to determine her own identity. Turgenev plays up her unnaturalness by comparing her to a “little beast” and a “boy” on various occasions. N. N. notices in Asya something unnatural, though he’s unable to put his finger on what until Gagin tells him.

Asya is playing a role – she is trying to be the aristocrat she isn’t, and the effort is draining. Just like Maslova in Tolstoy’s Resurrection, because Asya is the product of two social groups she struggles to sit easily in either of them, causing great spiritual strain – like Maslova, she also struggles with having had an absent mother in her life. N. N. once comes across her reading a French novel and complains of her taste, not realising what her reading means to her: “She wanted to be no worse than other ladies, and so she gave herself to books”. Later, she desperately asks him “Tell me what I should read! Tell me what I should do!”

Youth, Love, and a Complete Inability to Do Anything

Unsurprisingly, after a few days together both Asya and N. N. fall hopelessly in love with each other. Asya, a girl who “doesn’t experience emotions by halves”, arranges a rendez-vous between them. They meet, but N. N. has already spoken with Gagin about it, and he comes prepared to play a role himself. She wants him to marry her, and he refuses. He doesn’t even say what he feels for her. Shortly afterwards, she and Gagin disappear, never to be seen again.

The narrator’s reluctance to marry her stems from his class prejudices, from the need for respectability. It also stems from his word of honour, given to Gagin, that he wouldn’t let his emotions get the better of him. But once Asya has gone he realises his love for her and feels that it is stronger than anything else. However, he had missed his opportunity, and he will never have another such chance again. He grows old, feeling sad and regretting what he lost.

Honour, class, are apparently left worthless when love has escaped our grasp. But Turgenev’s novella tells us all this with enough irony to keep us guessing. First of all, we might think of the structure – why is N. N. telling this story? He says at the end “that I didn’t feel sad about her for too long”, that probably she’d have been a bad wife. At the beginning of his story he talks of youth as like a “biscuit that we think is hearty bread”, and says that like flowers we should never bloom too long. But I think his words are ultimately a kind of self-deception. The man is alone, living on his memories, and perhaps worth feeling sorry for. As he says, “happiness has no tomorrow”, and he missed his “today”.

Location and Literature

“Asya” doesn’t strike me as a particularly complex story, but there are a few things going on behind the scenes that are interesting enough to mention. I quite like the idea of the two towns, separated by the river. The crossing from one end to another is a nice visual metaphor for what happens to N. N. as he enters Asya’s world. I also like the way Turgenev uses literary references in “Asya”. We have Gretchen (Goethe’s Faust), Tatyana (Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin), and the Lorelei myth, which has featured in lots of poems by various Germans including Goethe and Heine. The Tatyana one is quite interesting. Asya says “I would have liked to be Tatyana” – a woman who loved a man who didn’t love her back, and then rejected him once he did. The comparison with Pushkin’s heroine ties Asya to her homeland (something N. N. remarks on elsewhere, saying she’s the most Russian creature he’s ever seen), but it also makes her a little immature for wanting to be a tragic heroine. Although N. N. is mostly to blame for the failure of the relationship, Asya herself is not without fault for her decision to appoint mysterious rendez-vous and make overly harsh demands of N. N. – her final note said if he’d said he’d loved her she would have stayed. So much for second chances or taking things slowly!

This tragic nature makes us think the story will end with a melodramatic death scene. Indeed, there’s a frightening moment when N. N. goes searching around the town for her, and it seems certain she’s about to take her own life (as Lorelei did, by jumping into the river). It turns out that she didn’t, and just went home instead. While Turgenev can’t escape traditional descriptions of women or boring men he is at least wise enough to know that not every story involving a girl needs to end with suicide.

Conclusion

There’s no doubt Turgenev was a sensitive soul. He wrote some beautiful nature passages which I had to force myself to analyse in my first year at university, but in some sense that’s about it. His characters are limp and forgettable. I don’t actually remember Fathers and Sons, though I’ve read it twice. I only remember Bazarov because he’s significant in Russian literary history, not because he actually shines in his own story. “Asya” was very okay. While it’s true I was surprised by it in a few places, at the end of the day it’s just another story about two young people who fall in love and end up unhappier for their trouble. There are a few interesting ideas in here, but not really enough to make this story particularly exciting. In the end, “Asya” is as limp as its narrator. And that’s just doesn’t make for an awesome reading experience.

Still, it’s a nice story to have in my mental repertoire. There are some worthwhile comparisons to be made between Asya and Lelenka in Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya’s “Boarding School Girl” – both are almost the same age, and both of them are faced with the challenges of forming their own identity against the identity that society wants to force upon them. But Turgenev is not particularly interested in the Woman Question, and anyway I can’t write about him on that topic in my exam because he’s not a woman to begin with.

If you’re out here looking for some Turgenev to read that’s not Fathers and Sons, I’d recommend Rudin over “Asya”. It’s not too long but it’s much more interesting. But if you have nothing else to read except “Asya”, then be my guest. After all, if you’re dying of thirst then even the lukewarm bottle of water you left out on the table overnight will do for a drink.

“The Wanderer” by N. P. Ogarev (translation)

This year at Cambridge I founded a small Russian poetry translation group. Unlike my German poetry translation group, which never made it beyond a Facebook group chat, I can call the Russian one a success. We have yet to meet in person, but already we have seen each other over Zoom a few times. This poem, by Nikolai Ogarev, was the first poem I translated specifically for the group.

I came across it while flicking through an anthology of Russian religious poetry that I have. Much as with Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, which I wrote about last week, I enjoy religious poetry because it makes people’s beliefs accessible and stamps them with an individual’s personality. We often come away from religious poetry believing in belief, even if we don’t get any further.

As for why I translated Ogarev’s poem instead of any of the hundred others included, the answer is rather more simple – it is nice and short! “The Wanderer” is the only poem of his included, so there was lots of white space around it, which gave me a place to begin the translation.

Anyway, here’s the poem:

The Wanderer

 Misty lies our dreary vale,
 Clouds conceal the sky.
 Sadly blows each mournful gale,
 Sadly looks each eye.
  
 Though you wander, have no fear,
 Though this life is hard -
 Peace and prayer are always near,
 Safe within your heart!

I enjoyed translating this poem, just as I enjoyed reading the original. One of the advantages of translating a poem (and poet) which is not too well known is that it is far easier than something from a “Great” poet. Both because the poet has inevitably been translated many times already (and certainly better than you could), but also because it’s nice to feel a certain degree of equality to your quarry. It is certainly presumption on my part, but there you go. I don’t feel, from the original, that Ogarev is a fantastic artist, but I felt he was one I was good enough to be able to translate. A similar train of thought is how I explain my success with Theodor Storm’s poetry in German.

I don’t feel the poem itself needs much explanation. It’s the kind of optimistic call for self-reliance that is always necessary for a revolutionary (and most of the rest of us). But I like it. It’s a nice little credo, the sort of thing that perhaps really can be mumbled before bed.

A photo of the page in my anthology of Russian prayers where I translate Ogarev's "The Wanderer".
My surprisingly neat attempts at translating “The Wanderer”. Generally it is much worse – I feel particularly sorry for my copy of Fet’s poems.

Nikolai Ogarev is best known now for his association with Alexander Herzen, a major Russian radical who lived for much of his adult life in exile in London. Together they printed the newspaper “The Bell”, which was smuggled into Russia and provided a far more liberal outlook than could be found in most Russian papers because of tsarist censorship. Today there is a website with the same name, run from America (in English and Russian), which gives an interesting look on Russian affairs. The spirit of criticism lives on, even though there is little else that links the two.

Thanks for reading. For more Russian poetry, look at my translation of Baratynsky.