Walter Benjamin Archives - Mostly About Stories

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 19^th 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?

Theodor Storm’s Aquis Submersus and the German Novella

Theodor Storm’s Aquis Submersus is a novella that shows the potentially dangerous consequences of going against society in the pursuit of love. But first and foremost, it is a story, and that’s what makes it fun to read. I’d like to make the case for that “fun” factor today, while still providing a summary of the plot and an analysis of what makes the story interesting from an “I’m going to have to write an essay on this for uni” perspective.

Theodor Storm and the Novella

The German word “Novelle” can be easily translated as “novella”, but you lose a lot of cultural associations that way. Theodor Storm, whose work is as cool as his name, was a master at the art of writing novellas and also one of the genre’s great theorists. He explained the power of the novella by connecting it to tragic drama when he said “the novella is the sister of drama”. Unlike a novel, which is typically (experimental works discounted) burdened by a large cast of characters and multiple subplots, the novella in 19th century Germany is lean and focused on a single plotline and a few characters, much like a traditional tragic drama. And unlike a short story, the novella has enough time to develop its characters and plots from fleeting impressions and moments into something with a complex plot that can grab and hold our attention.

A photo of Theodor Storm — Theodor Storm

Storm himself was born in 1817 and lived out most of his life in what is now northern Germany but during his lifetime changed from Danish to German hands. He wrote novellas and some beautiful poems, almost all of them taking his coastal homeland for their setting. This already puts him in stark contrast to the earlier German Romantics, who seemed to forget that Germany had sea as well as mountains and forests. His most famous works are Immensee and The Rider on the White Horse (Der Schimmelreiter), though Aquis Submersus is not far behind.

Storm’s tales are symbolic and often feature magic, which shows the influence of fairy tales. In their heavy symbolism Storm’s tales also conform to Paul Heyse’s Falcon Theory (Falkentheorie), which states that novellas ought to have a symbolic leitmotif that repeats throughout the work like a spine. We’ll see how this works out in Aquis Submersus.

Telling a Story – Framing the Narrative in Aquis Submersus

The thing that I like about Aquis Submersus, and Storm’s work in general, is that it has an unmistakable and yet undefinable quality of being a story to it. What does that word mean? Walter Benjamin did his best to explain what a story was in contrast to a novel. But for me, Storm’s stories feel like the sort of tales that are told by the fireside in some cold and dreary cottage. They are designed to bring mystery and wonder into a merciless world. They remind me of my own childhood, growing up in the far north of Scotland. The Rider on the White Horse even begins with that very idea – the narrator, a young boy, is told one layer of that story’s frame narrative by his grandmother, while he is playing around with an old newspaper in front of the fireplace in their cottage.

Aquis Submersus also uses a frame narrative. The unnamed outer layer narrator begins by describing his childhood visits to the house of the village priest, where he and the pastor’s son play outside in the grass by a pond. But they also sometimes investigate the church itself, which is an old building that the narrator says “excited my fantasies”. Inside that building there is a painting of a young, drowned boy, and underneath it there are the letters “C. P. A. S.”. Like any good 19^th century lad, the narrator knows Latin and quickly determines that A. S. is “aquis submersus” – died from drowning. But he and his friend struggle to work out C. P. – giving the readers their first mystery. The narrator suggests it means “culpa patris” – “through the father’s guilt” – but the priest himself doesn’t know and can’t confirm the narrator’s suspicions.

Years go by, and the narrator finds himself attracted by an old house in his town. When he goes in he discovers another painting by the same artist, once more showing the drowned boy. When he asks about the painting the house’s inhabitants say it belonged to a member of the family from long ago, and offer to show him the belongings of the painter. These turn out to be, in the words of the owner, “just some old scribblings; there’s nothing of value in them”. But our narrator is overjoyed, and in his eagerness to learn what secrets lie within these books he doesn’t even leave the house but reads them right in that very room. And it is here that the main story begins.

The significance of the frame narrative device is here that it heightens the feeling that what we are reading is just a story. It mimics the format by which we ourselves here stories in the real world – organically and often through chance occurrences, so that we build ourselves a narrative out of the separate pieces. Just like the narrator we learn about a mystery, and then only gradually do we see it resolved. The fact that we have a resolution, the fact that the narrator stumbles upon the books – these are unrealistic, perhaps, but we accept them as we accept the corner-cutting and rearranging that takes place every time an old story is recounted. We know that not everything we hear is to be believed, but we want to hear anyway, and decide for ourselves what is real and what may well be fiction.

The Plot – “Just some old scribblings”

The story of Aquis Submersus concerns an orphan, Johannes, who finds financial support from a family of German nobles. The son of the family, the appropriately named Wulf, resents Johannes because he is receiving what Wulf considers his inheritance. It gets even worse when Johannes falls in love with Wulf’s sister, Katherina – a love that, in the middle of the 17^th century when the novella takes place, cannot be legitimised through marriage due to the differences between their classes.

Time passes and Johannes leaves to become a well-known painter in Holland. When he returns, five years after his last meeting with the family, he finds that “the good times have passed”. As he approaches the family’s castle he is attacked by Wulf’s new bulldogs, and he also learns that the father has died, leaving the hostility of Wulf towards him without check. But there is another tragedy approaching – Katherina is preparing to be given away in marriage, likely to a neighbour, Kurt, who is noted for his brutality. As if to rub salt into the wound, Wulf demands Johannes paint his sister’s picture before she goes, so that her memory will always be in the house.

Johannes paints Katherina in a room filled with old paintings of her relatives, including one woman who reminds him of Katherina’s mother while also terrifying him. It turns out that the picture is of an ancient relative who cursed her own daughter, leading to the daughter’s death in a pond nearby. The reason was that the daughter didn’t want to marry the person chosen for her – and Katherina admits that she feels the curse is on her too. But there is a way out, and Katherina gives Johannes a letter to pass on to an aunt who might be able to spirit her away. Unfortunately, though, it seems that Kurt has put spies out, because when Johannes returns, the task complete, Wulf and Kurt together set the dogs on him, and Johannes is only able to escape by sneaking into Katherina’s window and spending the night with her.

The next day he must move on, expecting never to see her again. But a few years later he finds himself tasked with painting a priest in a local village, and he heads out there. The priest’s son is a small boy, also called Johannes, and at first his mother is unknown. But a series of events lead to Johannes the painter learning the identity of the mother, and thus begins the novella’s tragic conclusion.

Drama’s Sister – Tragedy in Aquis Submersus

The mother is none other than Katherina. Kurt has married someone else, leaving Wulf to dispose of his sister by leaving her with the priest – a good and kind man. Since Katherina was pregnant – with Johannes’ own child – the man’s decision to marry her saved her from ignominy and shame. But when Johannes sees her again, all thoughts of the public and their potential reactions go out of the window. She is outside with her child when Johannes catches her, and though she says she wants to keep the young boy – he’s only about four – in sight, Johannes refuses to let her go. He has waited too long. There is a moment of bliss between the two old lovers, and then it is shattered with a cry. The child has drowned, and the priest, now returned from work and knowing the full story, doesn’t let Johannes see the result.

These moments towards the end of the book demonstrate the way that Aquis Submersus is very much a tragic work extracted from the same vein as tragic theatre. A crescendo of happiness – what we might consider to be well-earned by the travails of both characters – is destroyed in a way that seems at first completely unfair. But when we ask ourselves why such suffering has taken place, explanations do appear. With each of the great tragic figures in literature, there are reasons for their fates.

But what makes Aquis Submersus exciting from an interpretive perspective – not just in essays, but when you listen to the story by the fireside – is that there is no one dominant explanation. Does Johannes’ child die because of his father’s impatience and selfishness? Or does he die because Johannes is going against society and God by trying to be with someone from a different social class? As one of the servants in the castle says early on in the story, “we ought to stay wherever the Lord God has chosen to set us down”. Is it a kind of hubris for him to want to be with Katherina? And why does Katherina have to suffer, when she tried to escape Johannes and watch over the boy? And why must the boy himself die? Unanswered questions like these form the tragic component of Aquis Submersus, where fate itself is inscrutable.

The Leitmotifs and Symbols of Aquis Submersus

Aquis Submersus is a highly symbolic work in addition to being a tragic one. Throughout the story objects and images repeat in the same way that a leitmotif repeats in certain types of music. Two prominent symbols are the castle and its grounds, and paintings. The castle and grounds are first introduced in the outer section of the frame narrative. There, they are completely in disrepair and the hedgerows are empty and “ghostly”. What we see in the inner narrative is the decline to this point play out. At first, while the father of the family is alive, things are well, but by the time he and the older servants are dead Wulf becomes isolated there. It is only by using the lush vegetation of the castle walls that Johannes is able to spend the night with Katerina. But with her banishment the place grows barren and infertile.

A picture of a German castle — A German castle, perhaps like the one of Aquis Submersus

Our first introduction to the central story of Aquis Submersus comes through a painting. The inscription is the source of the mystery – clearly there was a reason to commemorate the death of a child, but what? The idea that paintings are a source of memory continues when Johannes is tasked with painting Katherina prior to her departure from her family’s home. But the memories located in paintings, it soon becomes clear, aren’t always positive. The initial painting serves as a warning about the dangers of all-consuming love, while the portrait of the distant ancestor works to bring knowledge and memory of past misdeeds down through the generations as a curse. Johannes’ own career as a painter is marked by a desire to become famous because then the class barriers between him and Katerina will be no more. But in painting his dead son, Johannes finally performs an act of redemption.

There are other symbols too, such as birds and the water of the very title. But these two above should give an idea of how Storm weaves symbolism into the narrative and uses it to reinforce central themes. The castle comes right from traditional medieval works and their ideas of chastity, while paintings and their recorded images have always had occasional negative undertones, as if it is not an image but a soul that is trapped within them. Some things, of course, it is better not to remember. A painting keeps us from moving on.

Conclusion

I read Aquis Submersus both because I knew it was on my reading list for next year and because I’ve read and enjoyed Storm’s stories before. I was glad that this one didn’t disappoint. As with all of these German novellas, the formal aspects of Aquis Submersus are pretty interesting, letting you talk about various novella-theories and also how the story fits into Benjamin’s conception of storytelling too. But more importantly, the tale is fun because of the story itself, which is suspenseful and exciting. And at only eighty-or-so pages, it’s hard not to recommend it.

For more Storm, I have a summary of Immensee here. I’ve also translated some of Storm’s poetry, which you can read here.

Picture of a castle comes from KlausFoehl and is used under [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

Literature in the Face of Death and Mourning

Today my father was cremated. Though he had lived an enviable life he was just fifty-nine – not an age at which many would be satisfied to face death. For my brother and me, at sixteen and twenty-one, it feels far too soon to lose him, and more than a little unfair. But so sudden was the cancer that we all had little say in the matter. Death affects us all in different ways, and those of us touched by it must find our own solutions for coping, whether they be fighting bravely against the current, or following it into a numbing despair that seems, all things considered, reasonable enough. I want here to set down a few thoughts about books, and their value, in times of difficulty. Exhaustion has left my mind not entirely clear, so I apologise for mistakes and incoherency. This is, I’m afraid, a personal piece.

Medicine

I am the only one in my family who reads fiction. My father was a great lover of non-fiction and read widely, according to his whimsy, in the way that only one who is naturally intelligent but has never been confined in a university can. When news of his several brain tumours came, just over two months ago, in spite of his inability to read properly he did what he could to try and understand the disease that was killing him, and see if he might not discover a solution that the doctors had passed over or did not know. I myself placed my faith in them, because I know many medics at Cambridge, and they have always struck me as the greatest, hardest working, and best of all the students there. If anybody could save him, it seemed to me that a doctor would be the one.

A picture of Tolstoy — Leo Tolstoy may have ended up with some odd views about God and religion, but at his best his fiction can instil a sense of wonder that lets us weather the storm the death brings into our lives

In Anna Karenina Tolstoy on several occasions displays a sort of scorn towards medicine. Doctors come to try to rescue Kitty from her despair, proscribing contradictory remedies that never work and looking like fools in the process. Of course, Tolstoy has a point that is still relevant today, when it has been proven how much our mental health can affect our physical health. Often the best remedies can be ones of the heart and head, and not things we ingest. Tolstoy’s mistake, at least as I see it, is that he thinks all diseases work this way and doctors have no purpose. But he was as opinionated as they come, and I can understand why he thought that way – at least in the late 19^th century medicine still had something alchemical to it. Now we are much luckier. My father’s problems were in his head, yes, but not his mind.

Wonder

I thought of Tolstoy a lot as my father rapidly declined. The Death of Ivan Ilych, Hadji Murat, and Anna Karenina in particular were sources of comfort. They made death real, but Tolstoy, the spiritual man, also made death valuable and sacred by imbuing it with a sense of wonder and mystery. He makes us see its horror, yes, but he also shows that through it there may also come a kind of salvation. There was a sense of wonder in seeing my father’s casket, and a sense of wonder in hearing our bagpiper piping us all in. In moments of such wonder you can feel that death is but a stepping-stone to something that lies beyond.

Tolstoy, like the best of our writers and artists, instils this sense of wonder. They make us see that death is not an end, but a new beginning. By making us aware of the mystical, the spiritual component that accompanies a passing on, they give us the consolation that mere thoughts and intellectual rigor cannot. Schopenhauer’s idea of death as returning to sleep is nice, but not nearly so nice as what Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and other writers of spiritual conviction can achieve at their best. The Bible, and the other mystical books of our world’s religions, are full of tales that inspire wonder. They give us food for belief in magic, the sort of magic that makes the world glisten and shine with meaning. I’m thinking of Ivan Karamazov’s sticky buds here. And when we feel wonder, nothing, not even death, can hurt us or our love for the world.

Dreams and Levin’s Brother

For what consolation can rationalism offer here? The man under the shroud is still dead and cold. Death can lose its sting through thinking about the absence of our perceptions in the tomb, but loss of life will never cease to be painful to contemplate unless we see the mystical opportunities that surround it. My father came to me in a dream. He was in the Saint Petersburg Metro, healthy and well again, and heading onwards. He did not speak, but we embraced. The dream came during his final night alive – he died the next afternoon. Of course, it could have been just luck that made him appear at that time. But I see no reason to favour seeing it as mere chance instead of a holy and hopeful sign.

I cannot explain my dream, except as a revelation of the magic and mystery of our human souls. I remember clearly the death of Levin’s brother in Anna Karenina – his death was not one, but twofold. He said his final words and departed in dignity as a soul – “Don’t leave me”. And then he struggled on for another day, and when the characters gathered round his deathbed mention he has finished his struggling he suddenly comes back to life to say: “Not yet… just a little longer”. And then he dies as a body as well.

Conclusion: Narratives against Death

I have an advantage as a reader and as a writer. I live in stories, and I build them. Death, as Walter Benjamin remarks, destroys the placidity of our bourgeois existence – it is the one thing that breaks through even the strongest of our illusions and delusions about our lives. It creates a rupture and destroys the meaning of our world. In the initial weeks of my father’s illness I was almost glad to have, for the first time, a real reason to be depressed. It felt right for once to be in mental anguish. But of all my family I have been the one to cope with the fewest tears and the least pain, and I can’t help but think that reading has something to do with that.

Against the rupture of death, I was able to create a narrative, to come to an understanding with what has happened. I had read about death many times, and when the grief came, I saw how it reflected countless moods I’d seen in books. It gave me the community of fellow-sufferers and their strengths, and their own attempts to move on. And it made me feel less alone. By understanding that stories are the way we give meaning to our lives, I was able to reconfigure the meaning of my own to take into account my father’s death. Perhaps I am deluding myself in talking of wonder, in seeing signs in dreams and the dewy grass. But it is the power of books that they give you the choice to do so. They give you the tools to choose your fate. And that is a magical thing, whatever you believe.

Have you found literature to be a consolation in times of great suffering? Or have all our great scribblings become petty and unreal for you under the harsh light of death? Do leave a comment and let me know what you think