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?  

Magic Sentences – Flaubert’s Three Tales

The thing with Flaubert is that he knows how to write a sentence. And not one of those magnificent but coldly complex sentences, of the sort that Henry James or William Gass carved out on a regular basis – a sentence that you admire like you admire a marble sculpture – from a distance, aesthetically. No, what Flaubert wrote were real, living, breathing sentences. I can’t read a sentence by Flaubert without wishing his ghost could find its way into my wrist and guide it to write something similar. Flaubert, this superhuman master of realism, is one of the only authors whose style I feel obliged to imitate. Because although he does nothing fancy, unlike almost everyone else in the world each and every sentence he wrote somehow comes out original and fresh.

He somehow could not think in clichés. He was repulsed by them. The only thing we as readers and writers can do to avoid falling completely under his linguistic spell is to try to remind ourselves that his work was the result of an extreme effort – these novels and stories were the real sculptures. Whereas the likes of Zola and Balzac were pumping out novels faster than your average 19th century bourgeois French intellectual could read them, Flaubert barely managed a handful over the course of his life.  

Whether or not you like the content is in a way besides the point. Personally, I didn’t like the plot of Madame Bovary that much. But the Three Tales, which I read last week, are rather fun. They are all very different. They range from the beautiful “A Simple Heart” to the weird “The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator” to the also weird but now in addition confusing “Herodias”. What was surprising for me, knowing Flaubert only from Madame Bovary, was seeing Flaubert’s range. Here’s a medieval tale, here a piece of historical fiction. It’s surprising because I tend to associate realism with writing about one’s own time and world, but Flaubert shows that neither need be a limitation.

Anyway, on to the stories, which I read in Roger Whitehouse’s translation!

A Simple Heart

“A Simple Heart” is the most standard of the stories collected in Three Tales. It is essentially the telling of the life story of a single woman, Félicité, who is a servant. Though she has the appearance of “a woman made out of wood, driven as if by clockwork”, that does not mean the tale is boring. There is an element of daring in this story, because Félicité is from low down in society, and in “A Simple Heart” there is neither ogling nor idealisation of the poor going on – Félicité simply is a human being, in spite of her simplicity. As a young lady she was disappointed in love, was divided from her siblings as a result of the need to earn a living, and eventually ended up in the service of a Madame Aubain, who is not particularly pleasant as a master, though she could, one supposes, be a bit worse.

Allow me now to mention a sentence, or rather two. We have been learning about the guests who turn up at Madame Aubain’s house. We have just read about the Marquis de Grémanville, who is somewhat profligate and prone to alcohol and overall not entirely welcome. The paragraph ends, and the next begins, as follows:

“I think you have had enough for today, Monsieur de Grémanville! Do come and see us again soon!” And she would close the door behind him.

But she was always delighted to welcome Monsieur Bourais, a retired solicitor.

What a transition! I had to stop reading and fetch my pencil. It is the most prosaic thing in the world, and yet, so perfect. The closing of the door and the closing of the paragraph, the way that we feel the sudden delight of Félicité seeing Monsieur Bourais thanks to the suddenness of his sentence, as if we ourselves were opening the door! I know, it is a minor thing. But like learning the parts of a mechanical watch, being able to look out for these details and savour them is what makes the Three Tales, and Flaubert in general, so wonderful.

Félicité works tirelessly. Her cares, for the children of Madame Aubain, for her own nephew when she meets him, all result in dejection and failure. But Félicité, who has a simple faith, just keeps going with life: “She doted on her mistress with dog-like fidelity and the reverence that might be accorded to a saint”. In some sense Flaubert’s tale reminds me a little of Gogol’s “The Overcoat”. Both stories take someone whom society was inclined to think relatively worthless – a servant and a petty scribe – and show that they have a certain dignity about them, in spite of their low origins. Félicité is treated awfully by those around her, but she does not lose her faith. And as a result, the reader comes out at the end of the story with a sense of the strength and the value of every individual. A better moral couldn’t be found.

The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator

I didn’t like the other two of the Three Tales as much as I did “A Simple Heart”. I am a bore, I know. “The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator” tells the story of how a certain Julian became a saint. As a theme, this is rather off-putting to the modern reader. I mean, who reads about saints these days? The most we might expect is a boring-old morality tale. And of course, that is part of the story. But there is more to it.

Julian is born in a castle, and to his mother and father respectively it is prophesied that he will become a saint and an emperor. As a young man he is a hunter, and here was something I had not expected – Flaubert’s violence. This tale is pretty unpleasant to read for even the most steak-loving of readers. Julian kills everything. For pages and pages we read about how he slaughters – and I mean slaughters – this or that creature. “They circled round him, trembling with fear and looking up at him with gentle pleading eyes”. And he kills them anyway. Lakes of blood, and all that – it’s all here! Eventually though, the animals fight back and Julian is told a curse is upon him. He will kill his father and mother. Uh-oh.

To save his family Julian runs off, becomes a mercenary, and gets a palace of his own – as you did, back then, in the days of knights and shining armour. Here’s another sentence: “The whole palace was so quiet that you could hear the rustle of a scarf or the echo of a sigh”. What suggestion!

Anyway, Julian does kill his parents, in the kind of ridiculous comedy-of-errors manner that is only possible in Greek tragedies and the Middle Ages, and commits to a life of voluntary wandering. Julian’s suffering as he wanders is just as intensely described as the suffering he inflicted on the animals, which meant it was effective even as it was difficult to read. But it is the end of the story that is the hardest part of all to read. A leper comes to Julian asking for help and Julian does everything he can to help the man, even hugging him tightly while they are both naked so as to give the man his warmth. I know we don’t have lepers these days, but Flaubert’s descriptions made me shrink back in disgust all the same.

Yet this, I think, is what makes the story so powerful – it really makes us feel what it must have been like to be a saint. We feel after reading like we have an idea of what is asked for. This is in stark contrast to, say, Tolstoy’s “Father Sergius” where it’s impossible to escape the feeling that Tolstoy and his main character just need to get a better therapist and maybe go outside more. Julian’s faith feels lived in a way that Sergius’s always felt on the edge of parody.

Herodias

Finally, the last of the Three Tales is “Herodias”, Flaubert’s retelling of the story of Salome and John the Baptist. I basically only know that story from the Klimt painting. And I have just googled it and discovered that the painting has nothing to do with this story to begin with, which means I know even less about the story than I thought. I didn’t like the story. I found it hard to follow. There are far too many characters and I do feel that readers without a sense of the background (more than just the tl;dr “John the Baptist gets decapitated” summary) are going to be just as confused as I am. Perhaps if I read it again slowly, after reading the Bible version, things would be clearer.

Gustav Klimt’s Judith and the Head of Holofernes, which has nothing to do with “Herodias” though thematically I feel it’s reasonable to link them together.

As it stands, I appreciated bits of it but not the whole thing. Moments like this description of a dancer will remain in my memory –

“Her feet moved rhythmically one in front of the other to the sounds of a flute and a pair of hand cymbals. She extended her arms in a circle, as if she were calling to someone who was fleeing her approach. She ran after him, light as a butterfly, like Psyche in search of her lover, a soul adrift, as if she were about to take flight.”

So too will the speech given by John the Baptist himself, which has a certain Biblical force about it. And finally there is this image, as the ruler of who has had John the Baptist imprisoned looks out over the desert, which has the same power as Shelley’s Ozymandias:

“His spirits sank as he looked out over the desert; in its fold and convolutions he seemed to see the shapes of ruined amphitheatres and palaces.”

But overall, I must say the story left me more confused than awed.

Conclusion

At under a hundred pages in my edition, the Three Tales are short enough to read over the course of three hours – in my case I read one each day. And I am certainly glad I read them, even “Herodias”. I really can’t express fully how giddy with excitement Flaubert’s prose makes me, even though it is distorted by translation. And in his use of historical topics, and not just the world around him, he has reminded me of the full range of literary possibilities associated with realism. Finally, these stories do have a certain thread of continuity to them. All of the Three Tales are concerned with faith, and the differing ways it manifests itself. And in the way that the faiths here are in the most part unusual – the prophet’s faith of John the Baptist, the saint’s faith of Julian – these stories are interesting and powerful to read, and not just beautiful. Though they are, certainly, that too.

A Human Adultery Tale: Waves / Wellen by Eduard von Keyserling

Eduard von Keyserling is the latest German writer who publishers seem to have decided needs a revival. This is explained partly by his dates – he was born in 1855, and died in 1919 – which means there has been a flurry of attention upon him anyway thanks to the centenary of his death. My own edition of his late novels, which Waves / Wellen is included among, is a lovingly crafted hardback, filled with notes and the impressions of his contemporaries. The only problem is that it’s written in German. There are also new English translations of his works coming out all the time, Wikipedia suggests, including one of Waves itself which was released in 2019 and translated by Gary Miller.

Keyserling is interesting not only because he happened to die a hundred-ish years ago, though. He’s also the most well-known Baltic German writer. The Baltic Germans were the ethnically German ruling class who once inhabited Latvia and Estonia, a people who have now vanished for a variety of reasons. Keyserling is therefore interesting for representing a now vanished people, a now vanished way of life. But since every writer does that in some sense, we should perhaps look for reasons to read him elsewhere.

Waves, the short novel I finished yesterday, is a tender exploration of the life of a woman who has left her husband. It’s interesting to compare the life of Doralice, the heroine, with the heroines of the 19th century “adultery classics” – Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, and Effi Briest. While those novels showed adultery ending in unpleasant deaths, here Keyserling tries to ask what life is like instead.

A Woman’s Story

Theodor Fontane, my favourite German novelist of the 19th century, once remarked that women were far more interesting to write about than men. At least at that time, he was on to something. The realist tradition often takes as its spiritual core the battle between the individual and his or her society, and since women in that period saw their lives and freedoms more constrained by society than men did, their lives generally provided a more interesting canvas for writing on than did those of men. It’s just a shame that our occasionally well-intentioned 19th century male authors did not realise that the “interesting lives” of women did not necessarily have to be about adultery or marriage. I forgive them, sometimes, this.

Waves, or Wellen in the original, was published in 1911. Taking place on the Baltic coastline, it centres around two groups of people. The first is Doralice and her partner, Hans Grill. Doralice, who only a year before the story begins had been living as the Countess of Köhne-Jasky in a big castle, abandoned her much older husband to be with Hans, who she met while he was painting her portrait. The second group centres around the aristocratic and respectable Buttlär family – father, mother, the mother’s mother, and various children – most importantly, Lolo, whose fiancé Hilmar joins them a little into the story. These two groups, forced together by the small size of the beach setting, are what leads to the novel’s central conflict.

Eduard von Keyserling is often called an Expressionist. So is Edvard Munch, whose paintings match the slightly expressive mood of Waves.

Doralice, or Countess of Köhne-Jasky?

Doralice, or the Countess of Köhne-Jasky, is our main character. By the time the story begins she has already left her husband for Hans Grill, who is a humble painter. Together they are relaxing in on the coast, making use of her money. But Waves begins not with Doralice, but with Mrs General von Palikow and her daughter, Baroness Buttlär. We are introduced to Doralice through the rumours about her and the fear that she inspires in other characters. Baroness Buttlär is so terrified of the influence this free woman could have upon her children that she forces them to go to bed early so that they might not hear about her past. The adults of the family are “like two fortresses, keeping out all those who do not belong to their kind”. (all translations are mine)

Of course such attempts do not work, and the children are fascinated by the beautiful countess. Waves is a novel about misperceptions, as much as anything else, and for the children their misperception is that this woman is a Romantic heroine. Doralice is far less passionate and far more human than they make her out to be. Even her love for Hans is startlingly normal, which is the problem. At times we are left asking whether she left her husband because of how awful he was, or because of how nice Hans was. Doralice herself sits and dreams of her old life, with its luxury and respectability. In meeting the Buttlärs she is confronted with what she has lost forever.

A Woman’s Identity

What is sad is that all around Doralice are people who, if not bad, are still unwilling to let her develop in her own way. From the words she remembers from her parents – “”when you will be married”” – to her old husband’s habit of saying “we” when he really means “you”, and even to Hans Grill himself (though in a less oppressive form), Doralice’s identity is always being determined by those around her. When she finally has her “freedom”, it is unpleasant. Locked out of society, but still by birth an aristocrat, her days at the beach are marked by idleness and English novels.

This is in stark contrast to the fishermen of the village, who are always hard at work, and to Hans himself. Although it seems unfair, Hans is right when he says: “Work and action – this is what we need in our lives”. For idleness is fallow ground for the imagination, and imagination (especially when English novels are involved) can lead to tragedy.

An Adulteress

When Hilmar, the dashing Lieutenant who is Lola’s husband-to-be, turns up, things take a turn for the dangerous. Where the aristocrats think Doralice is someone to be feared, and the children admire her, Hilmar sees her as someone to seduce. And within the world he lives in, his view is logical. Here, an adulteress is a woman who has shown herself to be a loose woman with loose morals. Within German society at the time there was very little opportunity to say that actually, one can make a mistake in marriage, and that the second love may be more successful than the first. And so, even though he breaks his fiancée’s heart, Hilmar sets about seducing Doralice. He takes her out sailing, he finds her alone while she’s reading… you know, the usual.  

Their meeting while she is reading in the forest is one of the saddest moments in the story. For Doralice is lonely, desperately lonely in her new life. And yet Hilmar, a new face, can only see her as an object.

““I was once told by a young Attaché that he thought it was impolite for him to spend more than a moment alone with a young lady without declaring his love for her””.

Doralice’s words made me laugh, but they also contain a deep sense of the emptiness of even what first appears to be passionate feeling. She inhabits a world – all of the characters inhabit a world – where behaviour is almost completely conditioned by society, and true feelings are repressed so deeply that they may never come out again. Hilmar of course denies that he is here to declare his love. But Doralice knows better – she doesn’t want to play his game. “”All of my ties with the world have been cut. You can either talk about the weather with me, or you can declare your love for me instead.”” Everything is socially determined, and Doralice’s deep loneliness is the result.

More Munch. Both artists, Keyserling and Munch, have an excellent sense for the intensity of loneliness.

Conclusion: Waves, Loves, and Other Things

One of the aspects of Waves that I haven’t been able to talk about yet is the style. Although much of it is written in the same realist style of Fontane or Turgenev, when dealing with passionate emotions Keyserling is not afraid to go into long, intense and very expressive paragraphs. Waves as a title calls to mind Woolf’s The Waves, and the beach setting and style occasionally reminded me of To the Lighthouse. Like Woolf, Keyserling can write a beautiful, thoughtful description when he wants to. In this he is a transitional figure between the realisms of his youth and the modernisms that took over in his late middle age.

And I think that this is an important part of why this story is interesting in the first place, and why it’s worth reading if you can find a translation (or read German). Keyserling really gives Doralice a soul – he lets her feel. She is not as cunning as Emma Bovary, or as passionate as Anna Karenina. Instead, she is a human being who was forced into a marriage and life that were wrong, and who made the brave decision to walk away from it. Her story is the working out of a difficult relationship with the man she left her husband for, rather than one of passion and punishment. And after so many adultery tales, it’s nice to read one that sees the adulteress for what she really is – a human like the rest of us, instead of a lamb to be sacrificed to make a point about society.

That’s why Waves is worth your time. And did I mention it’s under two hundred pages?