“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?
Since I finished reading Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller”, which I discuss here, I have been meaning to read some Leskov, and translate it as well if it weren’t too hard. I’m not sure whether the piece I chose was necessarily the best introduction, but I found it very funny, and hope I conveyed that a little in the translation. A few comments of my own follow the main text.
A Righteous Man – Nikolai Leskov
A Vision at Midnight
I have heard it said often and indeed several times read it too: that he has “vanished” – “the righteous man” has vanished, and he has vanished not only completely without a trace, but also without any hope of ever finding him again in Russia. This is grave news, and at the same time one didn’t quite want to believe it. Perhaps, though, the matter depends more on those people who are seeking him: they are looking even though they don’t know how to find such a “righteous man”. All this makes me remember the old vaudeville “A Peaceful Night in Sherbakovii Lane”. There, if I remember right, there was a couplet, going thus:
“And even on
Sherbakovii Lane
You could find a
goodly soul.”
What that means is that the author of this piece knew how to
find “a good man” even in such a small and dirty lane as that one. And so, how
could it be the case that there cannot be found in all of Russia but one
“righteous man”? And what sort of justness are we expecting from this
“righteous man” anyway? That he “in the face of social injustice finds within
himself courage and determination to say publicly to the people: “You are
making a mistake and are going on the path of error – but look: here is the
path to righteousness”?”
I am citing this from an article I found in one public news organ
whose name I feel no need to mention. I can vouch but one thing: that these
printed words I have just repeated seemed to a great many to be deeply true.
But I remained biased against them. I believed that a righteous man still
survived, somewhere out there, and that I would soon meet him – and indeed I
did. I saw him in a battle with the whole of society, which he strove to defeat
on his own and without fear. This is how it happened.
It was the summer that has just passed by. I had left
Petersburg with one rather devout friend, who had enticed me to have a look at a
big religious celebration out in the country. The way there wasn’t particularly
long or tiresome: one cool evening we sat down in a carriage in Petersburg, and
the next morning we were already at the place. And within half an hour of
crossing the threshold my religious friend had already quarrelled with some
church sexton or other! (He had apparently said something disrespectful to him).
When evening came it found both of us in our room and my
fellow traveller sitting and busily writing a letter of complaint back to the
capital about this poor man, so I went down to breathe some fresh air and also
have a look at what exactly it was that people got up to out here. I was accompanying
an easy-going artist I had met who said he’d come here to “read his scenes” to
the public.
At such an hour back home in Petersburg all respectable
people are busy, as is well known, out in restaurant gardens eating, and here
it turned out that people were doing just the same. It thus happened, then,
that we landed without any misunderstandings right in the public garden, where my
acquaintance, the artist, was supposed to be showing off his talents.
He wasn’t a newcomer like me – he knew a lot of people here,
and they knew him too.
The garden, into which we had arrived, was rather large for
a provincial town, though it was rather similar to a mere boulevard from my
perspective. In any case, to the left there were entrances to the place where
this evening there happened to be a paid concert going on, as a result
everything was closed off. The paying public went through a single middle way, shaped
like a concave semicircle. Around the gates were placed plank booths for selling
tickets, and a number of policemen and idlers were standing there too, the
latter having no chance of getting through to the garden due to lacking the necessary
funds.
In front of this entrance to the main garden there was a
small front garden, but I couldn’t tell what it was growing or why it was here
and fenced round in the first place. Its relation to the larger garden was like
that of a waiting room in a bathhouse to the baths themselves.
The artist went through according to his “special right”,
while I bought a ticket, and we entered through the gates to the accompaniment
of the Skobelevskii March[1],
after which there were cheers of “hoorah” and new demands for the exact same
thing again.
The public were out in great numbers, and all of them were
pressed together on a small lawn, in the corner of which there was a wooden
restaurant, made to look like a pagan temple. On one side of it a summer
theatre had been erected from wood panels, and this was where the performance
was now taking place and where a little while later my Petersburg orator ought
to be doing his readings. Meanwhile, on the other side there was the “shell”
where the military band was located and busy playing the march.
The society here clearly belonged to several different ranks:
there were petty councillors, officers from the army, merchants and the “grey
people” of the petty bourgeoisie. In the more obvious places were packed the traders,
while in a far corner a regimental clerk and a certain sort of woman were
hanging around.
Decrepit little tables covered by dirty cloths had been haphazardly
thrown about, all inconveniently near to one another and all of them occupied. The
people cheerfully gave me a public demonstration of what exactly it was they
did here. In great demand it seemed was tea, beer, and vodka, although they
called the latter “Simple person’s wine”, as if it would sound more respectable
that way. Only in one place did I notice someone who was managing himself in a
way suggestive of greater wealth: before him stood a bottle of champagne and
cognac, and a teapot with boiling water for making punch. There were rather a
lot of empty glasses around him, but he was at that moment sitting alone.
This guest had a remarkable appearance which soon thrust itself
upon one’s sight. For one, he was gigantic, with a thicket of thick hair which
already had flashes of grey in it among the black. His dress was
extraordinarily elaborate, colourful, and tasteless. He was wearing a bright
and deep blue linen shirt with a high upturned and starched collar. On his neck
a white foulard with brown spots was carelessly hung, and over his shoulders
was slung a jacket in the Manchester style. Then, on his chest was an
extraordinarily massive golden chain with a diamond and a great number of
dangling pendants. Even in terms of his footwear he was extremely original: he
had on his feet such low boots that one might sooner have taken them for
slippers, and between them and his pantaloons flashed bright stripped red
cotton socks, just as if he had scratched his legs until they bled.
He was sitting at the biggest table, which was placed in the
very best location – just beneath a large old lime tree for shade – and it
seemed that he was in a state of nervous agitation.
The artist, who had accompanied me thus far, as soon as he
saw this most original specimen squeezed my hand quietly and murmured to me:
“Well, well, well. Now this is something unexpected!”
“Who is he?”
“This, my dear friend, is a subject[2]
of the finest sort.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I mean is that he is extremely curious. This is Martin
Ivanich – a nobleman, merchant, and extremely prosperous fellow and an absolute
nutcase to boot. In common parlance among our people he is often known as
“Martin the righteous”, because he loves to tell everyone the truth. His fame,
just like that of Ersha Ershovich[3],
has spread along every river and port of our dear Russia. And he is not without
an education either – he knows a lot of Pushkin and Griboedov[4]
by heart, and if you get him to have a drink he’ll start to draw upon “Woe from
Wit” or something from Gogol. Indeed, it looks as though he’s already started
with his spree – he’s already sitting without his hat.”
“Well, it has gotten hot.”
“No – he always brings another bottle with him hidden under
his hat, just in case they refuse to give him any more at the buffet.”
The artist stopped a lackey, just at that minute going past,
and asked: “Has Martin Ivanovich got a bottle underneath his hat?”
“Sir… I don’t know what you mean…”
“Well, that means he’s ready,” the artist turned back to me,
“and soon we two will witness a righteous performance of the most unexpected
and noblest sort. We ought to go and have a chat with him.”
The artist went towards Martin Ivanovich and I trudged after
him, stopping close by so as to observe their meeting.
The artist stopped in front of Martin and, after taking off
his own hat, with a smile said: “I bow to your honour.”
Martin Ivanovich in response to this extended a hand to him
and immediately brought him down onto the empty chair next to him, then answered:
“”I beg you to join me” – this said Sobakevich[5]”
“But I don’t want to,” Uttered my friend, but at that moment
a glass of punch was already sitting before him, and Martin once more repeated
the quote.
“I beg you to join me” – said Sobakevich.”
“No, truly I cannot. I have to go and read now.”
Martin poured out the punch onto the ground and muttered
some unpleasantry or other befitting a Nozdrev[6].
I didn’t much like this – I understood why everybody ran
away from this antique. As an original he certainly was an original, but it
seemed to me that within him was contained not only the character of
Sobakevich, but also Konstantin Konstandzhoglo[7],
who boiled fish with their skins still on. Only, this Konstandzhoglo now had
drunk a little more and in an even less pleasant mood he began to slag off the
whole of society. He talked of how they “all are wretches and scoundrels”; and
when the public once again demanded the Skobelevskii March he suddenly stood up
without a cause and shushed the lot of them.
“Why’d he do that?” I asked my friend as he fled the
vicinity.
“Because he is now going to cast a little righteousness in
their direction. But anyway, we should head into the theatre.”
I left with my friend and made myself comfortable in his
dressing room. We sang, read, and once more went out into the garden.
The spectacle was finished. The public had markedly thinned
out and, as they were leaving, once more demanded the same Skobelevskii March.
Without difficulty we found ourselves a table, but luckily or unluckily we had
ended up right next to our Martin Ivanovich again. He, while we had been away, had
managed to increase his sensibility still further, and his sense of justice, it
appeared, now demanded a vocal stand from him. He now no longer sat, but stood
and declaimed not poetry, but a prose excerpt which really made you admit that
he was very well-read for someone of his milieu. He was rolling off from memory
phrases from the praised word of Zakharov[8]
to Catherine, which was located in “Considerations on the Matter of New and Old
Style”.
“”Suvorov[9],
so spoke Catherine, show us! He rose like a tumultuous whirlpool and he blasted
the Turks from their guarded borders; like a hawk he fell upon his prey.
Whoever he saw he sent to flight; whoever he met he conquered; and to whomever
he brought his thunder he annihilated. There were none who escaped. Europa
herself was left trembling… and…””
But just at that moment the public once more demanded the
Skobelevskii March, and once the orchestra had started fulfilling this request it
was no longer possible to discern whatever Martin Ivanovich was declaiming.
Only when the march had finished did his words reach us again:
““-Thus, must we honour our forebears and never think too
highly of our own poor selves!””
What is this man trying to get at?” I asked my friend.
“Verily, verily, my good fellow, he is trying to achieve his
justice.”
“What does he want it for now?”
“For him it is essential: the man is righteous, and you can
see it on his face. Look look…” The storyteller finished, and I saw that Martin
Ivanovich had suddenly stood up from his place and with rapid if tipsy steps had
gone after an older man in military uniform who at that moment just happened to
be walking past.
Martin Ivanovich caught up with this stranger (who happened
to be the bandmaster of the orchestra), grabbed him from behind by the collar
and shouted: “”No, no, you shan’t get away from me” – so said Nozdrev”.
The bandmaster smiled with a look of embarrassment but asked
that he be released.
“No, I shall not let you go,” Answered Martin Ivanovich. “You
are tormenting me!” And he forced him down towards the table and shouted again:
“Drink to the insult to our affronted forebears and the darkness now covering
our future descendants!”
“Who did I insult?”
“Who? Me, Suvorov, and all the righteous people of our land!”
“I didn’t think I… I wasn’t suggesting to…”
“Then for what in God’s name were you playing that itch of a
march for the entire evening long?”
“The public requested it.”
“You are tormenting me with this injustice.”
“The public requested it.”
“Despise the public, then, if they are unjust!”
“What is this injustice you are going on about?”
“Why aren’t you playing Suvorov’s March, eh?”
“The public did not request it.”
“I suggest you clear up the matter with them. Play the
Skobelevskii March once, then Suvorov’s March twice, because he waged war more
than him. Yes! Now I shall let you go – head back right at this moment and play
Suvorov’s March!”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“There’s no such thing as Suvorov’s March.”
“How could there be no march for Suvorov? “Suvorov, spoke
Catherine, show us how it’s done! He blew things up, swooped down upon them,
destroyed them, conquered them, gave a shake to Europa!…” and you’re saying
he doesn’t have a march?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“The public hasn’t requested one.”
“Aha! Well, I will show them what’s what!”
And Martin Ivanovich suddenly let go of the bandmaster, stood
up on top of the table and cried out: “You public! You are unfair, and what’s
more, you are a pig!”[10]
Everything suddenly grew noisy and people started moving
about, while near the table where Martin Ivanovich the Righteous was continuing
his speech a policeman had appeared and was now demanding that the orator lower
himself back to the ground. Martin did not comply. He defended himself by
kicking about with his legs and loudly continued to reproach everyone for their
injustice towards Suvorov. He finished with a challenge for a duel, throwing
down one of his shoes instead of a glove. A couple of townsfolk who had come to
the rescue grabbed at his legs, but they couldn’t put an end to the mayhem:
into the air there flew yet another boot, the entire table flipped over, and
the sounds of smashing cutlery could be heard alongside the splashing of water
and cognac… in a word, it was a right mess… at the buffet table for some reason
the lights all momentarily went out and a everyone began a stampede towards the
exit, while on their platform the musicians decided have a go playing their
finale: “Only Gloried is our God in Zion.”[11]
My friend and I joined the handful of curious ones who had
not rushed to leave and were now awaiting the denouement. We were all tightly
packed in that place were the police were trying to restrain Martin Ivanovich,
who was still managing to keep them off him and all the time was heroically
defending the matter, crying: “Catherine spoke: Suvorov, show us… Explosions,
swooping, annihilation, shaking!”
And then he was silent, either because he was tired or because
something had finally managed to interrupt him.
In the darkness that now followed it was hard to see who had
a hold of whom, but then the voice of the righteous man resounded anew: “Stop strangling
me: I am on the side of righteousness!”
“There isn’t any justice here” Said the policeman.
“I am not speaking to you, but to the whole of society!”
“Maybe if you just go over here…”
“And I will go – but only get your hands off – come on! I’m
going… hands off! No need to embrace me.”
“Gentlemen, please move out of the way.”
“I am not scared… Why is there no march for Suvorov?”
“Go complain to the justice of the peace.”
“And I will
complain! Suvorov conquered more!”
“The justice will decide the matter.”
“The justice is an idiot! Where is that devil of a man to
learn about it?”
“Well just wait and see!… it’s all in the protocol.”
“Well I’m not scared of your justice. I’m going!” Martin
shouted. He threw off the arms of the policemen and went with big steps towards
the exit. He was still not wearing any shoes – he was walking with only those
multicoloured socks…
The police didn’t keep off and tried to encircle him.
From among the rows of the public who were still there
someone cried out: “Martin Ivanovich, go and find your shoes… you need to put
something on your feet.”
He stopped for a moment, but then he waved his hands and
carried on, shouting: “It’s nothing… if I am a righteous man then I should be
walking like this. Justice always walks without boots.”
At the gates they forced Martin into a carriage with a
policeman and then they drove off.
The public then went off to wherever each of them needed to
be.
“Well, all things considered, his reasoning was just,” Said one
stranger to another as they overtook us.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s just like he said – Suvorov conquered more than
Skobolev after all – why shouldn’t they have played his march?”
“There isn’t an arrangement.”
“So that’s your injustice right there.”
“Eh, shut up. It’s not for us to bother with it. Maybe the
justice of the peace will have to worry about it, but not you. Who cares about
being just or not?”
My friend took me by the arm and whispered: “If you want to
know – this is the real truth.”
While I was getting undressed in my room I heard two people
going along the corridor, quietly discussing something. They decided to part
ways by the entrance to the room next door and finished with the following:
“Well, however you want to look at it, in his drunken state there was some
justice alright.”
“Yes, well, maybe you’re right, but the devil was in it too.”
And they wished each other good night.
[1] Mikhail
Dmitrievich Skobelev (1843-1882), recently deceased at the time the story takes
place, had been a successful general during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878.
[2]
The Russian has “suzhekt” a pun on “sub’ekt” meaning a subject, and “syuzhet”,
meaning a plot.
[3]
Ersha Ershovich was a character in a popular satire of the 17th
Century
[4] Pushkin
is the most famous Russian writer, equivalent in stature to Shakespeare in
English. Alexander Sergeevich Griboedov (1795-1829) was a diplomat, poet, and
dramatist. His comedy “Woe from Wit” is extremely popular in Russia and has had
a huge influence on literature ever since its publication.
[8] I.
S. Zakharov was a famously good stylist according to the work mentioned
[9] A
V Suvorov was general under Catherine, and among the most well-known generals
of the Imperial period altogether. Far more important that Skobelevskii.
[10]
“You are swine” is another translation, but I thought using pig was more funny.
In the Russian he is speaking to the public as if it were an individual,
including using the second-person singular form of “you”.
As I mentioned above, this is the first Leskov piece I’ve read, so there’s only so much I can say about it. He’s not a particularly well-known writer outside of his homeland, and then only for “Lady Macbeth of Mtensk”. He writes simply, and that gives me an advantage translating the piece, because I have less recourse to the dictionary or my Russian friends. Still, I hadn’t anticipated Martin Ivanovich’s quotes when I started reading, and they were a bit trickier to translate – I did need help for those, because the Russian is much older than what I’m used to, being as it was from the 18th century.
Nikolai Leskov around the time this story was written. Doesn’t he look like a man with plenty of yarns to spin?
More useful, probably, is to explain a few of the ways the
story connects to Benjamin’s ideas of storytelling.
For one, the story is recounted as if it were a story from real life – and indeed, Leskov is recounting a largely real event, according to the notes in his collected works. The narrator explains how they heard about the story then tells the story itself, which is simply an event. He also tries to frame it, in the beginning, within moral questions. That is, the story has a moral – another key element for Benjamin. It is trying to tell us something, most obviously that there are still righteous people out there, though they may seem strange to us.
The story is also written simply. The language is of a low
register, and indeed in recounting the speech of people the narrator even veers
into coarse day-to-day language of the time. He doesn’t try to explain actions,
or provide justifications – he lets the characters speak for themselves, and
then the reader find their moral. Because of the lack of a psychological level –
another distinguishing characteristic of stories as opposed to novels – there is
a layer of ambiguity. Are we to treat Martin Ivanovich as a truly righteous
person, or is there more irony involved? These questions depend on how the
story is told – with each retelling, a narrator could focus on one or the
other.
Though it is true that this is a story in a book, and thus it lacks some of the other traits that oral stories would, it nonetheless serves as a kind of base, which through real-life retellings, could be shaped and moulded into a truer story. Perhaps you, reader, could pass it off as one of your own experiences, the next time you find yourself enjoying an evening with your friends, and see what they think. 🙂
“The Storyteller”, or “Die Erzähler”, is an essay, written in 1936, by the German-Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin, consisting on one level of a discussion of the stories of the little-known Russian writer Nikolai Leskov, and on another of Benjamin’s views on the division between stories and storytelling, and novels and writing. It is included in the collection of essays entitled Illuminations, which I’ve been reading in the past weeks, but I had been meaning to have a look at this particular essay for much longer, since I had guessed already that its contents would appeal to me. Though Benjamin is a challenging thinker and I doubtless missed things here and there, still I want to share what I got out of the piece. Here is a summary of its main points.
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German-Jewish critic and philosopher who took his own life after encountering difficulties fleeing the advancing armies of Nazi Germany.
The Death of Experience and the Death of Stories
Benjamin begins by making us consider what exactly a
storyteller is. Though the name is surely familiar, they are almost entirely
confined to the past. In the modern day, for various reasons, the craft – and
it is a craft – of telling stories, is dying out. We may see the “great, simple
outlines which define the storyteller”, but we cannot find them among our
number anymore. The main reason for this is that experience, which is the
source of all stories, has fallen in value and is no longer used. As to why,
Benjamin suggests three potential causes.
The first of them is that society is, in its industrialised
state, changing so rapidly that experience from the past no longer can have
much effect upon the present. He finds examples of this in the horrors of his
time: one’s experience of the economy becomes useless against the unprecedented
nature of hyperinflation. One’s knowledge of war and battle is deemed useless in
the face of new military technologies like the tank and mounted warfare. A
related cause is the consequence of the first World War: “was it not noticeable
at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent – not
richer, but poorer in communicable experience”. As a result of the truly awful
things they have seen in the early 20th century – overexperience, in
a word – people no longer wish to talk about what a hundred years before might
have made a ballad or a thousand years before an epic poem.
The third and final cause Benjamin gives special mention to:
the rise of “information”. Information, Benjamin writes, “lays claim to prompt
verifiability.” We have newspapers which will tell us not only what has
happened, but why it has happened, regardless of where in the world it took
place. In the past, intelligence and experience that came from afar was valued,
even if it could never be verified that a traveller spoke the truth. But now,
through the ubiquity of the “why” in the form of news, we no longer care for the
experience of others. Information, however, “proves incompatible with the
spirit of storytelling”, and since we are so surrounded by it, it can be hard
to escape the idea that an informational understanding of the world is the only
and best way to understand it. A further problem with information is the way
that it is intimately connected to its own time: “the value of information does
not survive the moment in which it was new.” As time passes, news becomes out
of date, explanations for events are improved, and the newspaper becomes good
for nothing except scrap paper.
The Origin of the Storyteller
But Benjamin is not aiming to be depressing, at least not
entirely. He sees a beauty in the story and he wants to share that with us,
even as it breathes its last. Storytelling, as has become something of a commonplace,
is something ancient, deeply rooted inside us. Benjamin concludes the essay by
calling the storyteller a craftsman – they take raw experience from themselves
and from others and make solid, useful, and unique works from it. And the best
storytellers, for him, are those whose work has the quality of being little
different from the speech of unnamed multitudes of storytellers. That is, those
who seem to belong to a whole greater than themselves. He sees part of the success
of the growth of the story in the structures of earlier societies. There were
two people who gained a lot of experience: those who spent much time in the
same place, such as master craftsmen; and those who travelled a great deal and
saw much of the world, albeit in less detail, such as journeymen. For Benjamin,
the cross-pollination of these two groups, such as in a blacksmith’s home, lead
to the exceedingly fruitful combination of “deep” experience with “wide”
experience. Storytellers, the essay notes, are often interested in practical
matters, and Benjamin makes the point that the best of them are also “rooted in
the people”, with jobs that fully immerse them into life itself, such as being
soldiers, sailors, or other manual workers.
Stories: Wisdom and Advice
But what exactly is a story? What are these mysterious things that the storytellers tell? Well, to begin with, every real story has “openly or covertly, something useful” hidden within it. “A moral… some practical advice… a proverb or a maxim”, whatever the case, the story has “Rat” within it – some advice, or counsel. This is not surprising – if the storyteller lives among the people and works among them too, then naturally what they want to do is help them using their experience. There is more to them than that, but Benjamin already hears criticism of this idea of stories. It’s awfully old fashioned to want a moral, to want some kind of advice, out of the things we hear or read. But Benjamin doesn’t see the problem in the stories themselves, but rather in a society which, due to its ever-growing specialisation, has meant that “the communicability of experience is decreasing.” What an accountant might be able to say usefully to a cleaner at a hotel nowadays is far less than, two hundred years ago, two similar such people might be able to share with each other. Barriers have arisen between us. This has the knock-on effect of disarming wisdom too, which is “Rat” “woven into the fabric of real life”. What use could be the use of the wisdom of a banker, unless we want to be a banker? Consciously, or unconsciously, we devalue the wisdom of others more and more and instead rely upon that upstart known as information. Another reason for wisdom’s death is that instead of using experience for finding our “truth”, we also increasingly use bigger narratives, such as ideologies, cutting out the human element entirely.
“The Storyteller” is included in the collection Illuminations, pictured here, alongside other famous works of Benjamin’s, like “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”.
Stories: Novels and Isolation
Nowadays we still come across what can be called “a story”
within novels and other works of written art, but we no longer see “stories”.
The novel rose in prominence as the story declined. Benjamin sees novels as
completely separate from stories because it is completely “dependent on the
book”. “It neither comes from the oral tradition nor goes into it.” Think about
the last serious novel you read, and then think about the times you spoke about
it with others. Rarely does the story itself assume prominence in these kinds
of discussions anymore. Literary criticism is partially to blame for this, but
whatever the reason, the plot takes a back seat to forces like form, style, and
genre. Novels have their value, of course, in Benjamin’s eyes, but that value
is one disconnected from the value of stories. Novels for him show the
confusion of life, but they do not and cannot be vehicles for the dissemination
of wisdom – the instant they do there are cries of “moralising”, “preachy”, and
all sorts of other insults.
Another difference between the novelist and their work and
the storyteller and their own is to do with their relationship to their readers
and listeners. Born out of social interactions and experience, a storyteller is
a social animal, and so is their work. I tell you a story, and you are in
dialogue with me, able to ask questions, and challenge things. More importantly
still, my stories are a mixture of my own experiences and those of others, and
when I tell you my story, you have a new story for yourself – storytelling
involves connection and giving. Even if written down a story still creates a
copy of itself in your head in a way that a novel, for Benjamin, does not. By
contrast, the novelist is isolated, creating alone, for a reader who may not
even exist. He is “no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his
most important concerns, is himself uncounselled, and cannot counsel others”.
He doesn’t have any advice to give because his experiences cannot create
stories. There is a sense of great loneliness implied here. Benjamin has in
mind here, I think, those truly huge and serious novels, works like Anna Karenina or The Brothers Karamazov, which deal with such great philosophical
and theological concerns, but are all ultimately the product of too much
thinking, rather than too much experience. A story about the same topics of
faith and God, one imagines, would be simply tell of a man or woman pacing up
and down in a wood-panelled room and raging against their mind and the world it
contains. Not exactly a good story, in short. The practical nature of the
storyteller’s life means that their stories are also practical in theme and
advice.
A good and simple way of comparing the division between
stories and novels is this: consider the contrast between our two phrases “the
moral of the story” and “the meaning of life.” A story has its moral and answer,
whereas a novel merely searches for an answer to that undoubtedly greater but
certainly also more abstract question of “what is it we must do?”.
Stories: Ambiguity
Benjamin relates a story told by Herodotus. King Psammenitus
of Egypt, defeated in battle and enslaved, sees his son go by to be executed
without any outward show of emotion. Next he sees his daughter go by as a maid.
But when finally he sees one of his old servants go by as a prisoner he starts
crying and falls into the deepest mourning. Herodotus does not explain why. The
story illustrates the next key idea of stories – their ambiguity. When I read
Benjamin’s description of the incident, I thought initially that the king was
crying because he suddenly realised that all previous social ranks had been
abolished, and he was no different to one of his servants in status. Yet
another, equally valid suggestion that Benjamin puts forward is that the king
was restraining his grief, and seeing the old servant is the feather that
finally made the dam of his sorrows burst. We have no way of knowing who of us
is right, or whether the explanation is yet another one.
Stories are marked by their ambiguity. Unlike the novel,
coming from an age of information, which tries to explain everything through
psychological detail, stories do not try to explain things. “The most
extraordinary things, marvellous things, are related with the greatest accuracy”,
but there are no attempts to offer up a “why” for them. Our own imaginations
are left with that task. Information demands an attempt to offer a why, which
also means it is bound to what is scientific, verifiable. On the other hand, stories
can use any manner of fantastic ideas or miracles, because they are not defined
by the pursuit of a “why” or a scientific idea of “truth”. You can tell a story
again and again, and each time, depending on one’s mood, one’s station in life,
one’s age, you will get a different reaction to it. But information is always
the same – the work of imagining is impotent before facts and their
explanations. Stories “resemble the seeds of grain which have lain for
centuries in the chambers of the pyramids shut up air-tight and have retained
their germinative power to this day”: each time they are told, they create a
new version of themselves, a new experience, within us. Whereas a novel is
doomed to being dated – its psychological framework always bears the brand of
its own age.
Stories: Memory, Boredom, and Endings
Stories are told for plenty of reasons. Ambiguity is one of
them, because it means a retelling is never in vain. They are also told because
of boredom. Benjamin writes that “boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation.
Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience”. Through boredom
we are receptive to stories, but not only in the sense that we are willing to
listen to them – we are also willing to remember them. For remembering, and
then retelling, stories is key to the art of storytelling, “and this art is
lost when the stories are no longer retained”. Unfortunately, Benjamin sees our
age as one without the sort of boredom we need for stories. There are many of
us who get bored – children especially complain of it. But nowadays we hardly
ever live in such a state for long. Phones, games, and videos all provide a
rapid escape from that tiresome emotion. But they also provide an escape from
the possibility of telling stories, of passing the time through conversation
and company. Given this environment of boredom, Benjamin adds that stories end
with the sense that they can always be picked up and carried on. Novels,
however, end without the same kind of feeling that they can just be continued.
A novel, once it has ended upon a sufficiently good revelation about the
meaning of life, stops and digs its heels in. Again, this is also a formal
thing – a speaker can carry on, but a novel always arrives as a finished
article.
Stories: the “transparent layers”
Benjamin is critical of the short story too, which is due to its intimate connection to the novel, but the shorter work has the added problem of struggling to deal with the larger thematic concerns that novels excel at. So, it occupies an awkward artistic position of failing to be either story or novel and thus flounders. In the case of a story, the “how” of its creation is important. Each storyteller will give their account of how they heard the tale, and in this way “traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel”. Short stories, though they can approximate this with certain frame narrative structures, nonetheless prove themselves storytelling “abbreviated”. They have lost their connection to the oral tradition, and also no longer permit “that slow piling one on top of the other of thin, transparent layers which constitutes the most appropriate picture of the way in which the perfect narrative is revealed through the layers of a variety of retellings”. By cutting out the middleman – the storyteller – a short story also cuts out the power and mystery that a history of retellings brings to a story. By doing so they also lose the “chain of tradition”, that a real story has. A short story, no matter how good, no longer reaffirms our connection to our roots.
Nikolai Leskov (1831-1895) is not one of the most famous Russian authors here in the West. No doubt a part of this is due to the fact that his stories rarely conform to the more acceptable bourgeois forms like novels
Leskov and the Rest
So, where does Nikolai Leskov fit in to all this? The
Russian is a modern-day storyteller for Benjamin, though his dates (1831-1895)
mean he had been long dead even by the time that our author put pen to paper. Leskov
was a member of the Russian Orthodox Church, and throughout his life had worked
various odd jobs around the country, most successfully for an English firm
which paid him to travel all around Russia on behalf of its leaders. Because of
this, Leskov had the wealth of experience needed to give his work a story-like
quality. He wrote novels, but more often shorter stories and novellas, all of
them incorporating the ideas of story-ness that Benjamin highlights above. His
most famous story, at least in the English-speaking world, is “Lady Macbeth of the
Mtsensk District”, and Benjamin also singles out stories such as “The
Deception” and “The White Eagle”. Leskov is not the only storyteller who
Benjamin names, though he is the focus. Among the others are Kipling, Poe, and Johann
Peter Hebel. I might add Joseph Conrad, whose tales of the sea often also
display the characteristics of stories.
Conclusion: Against the System
Even today, Benjamin writes, do people still pay attention to the words of a dying man or woman. In dying we have the same power, place the same demands of silence and thought and memory, as did the storyteller long ago. The story is not dead, but from my own experience it is certainly dying out in our time. I remember rare evenings, long ago, walking back from a long run with friends in the dark and fog of a November night, trying desperately to find some kind of ghost story worth telling, and being unable to. Only one us knew one, which they heard one from someone else. But that story remains with me, buried in my memory, unlike so many carcasses of novels and short stories. We oughtn’t let stories disappear from our lives without a fight. For stories, as Benjamin hints at, allow us to escape the systems that dominate our lives, most notably capitalism itself. They allow us into a carefree existence of laziness, boredom, and relaxation, safe from deadlines and reckoning up of bank accounts. They also, unlike novels, draw us closer to other people. Novels, formed by the bourgeois and capitalist system of their origin, can never truly escape it. Telling stories, meanwhile, is a permanent act of rebellion, an assertion of our freedom and the value of our experience against a world that tries to tell us we are nothing unless we add to information. Stories are the deepest, and greatest, treasure we have.
If all this has inspired you to take a look at Leskov for yourself, my translation of “A Righteous Man” is located here.
Alternatively, for another recent writer who has carried on the tradition of ambiguous storytelling, my translation of Franz Kafka’s story “Before the Law”, can be found here.
