Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

"This is the most celebrated story by a writer who is not quite so well known in English. It was written in 1864. It is another work overshadowed by its operatic version, which in this case became something of a cause célèbre in the 20th century. In 1936 Stalin used his savage attack on Shostakovich’s opera of it to fire a broadside against all Soviet artists unwilling to conform to Communist Party dictates. So it is quite refreshing to go back to the original source and simply enjoy Leskov’s story as a ripping yarn. Yes, it’s set deep in the heartland of provincial Russia, which Leskov knew very well. He grew up in Oryol, south of Moscow, and Mtsensk is a town in the Oryol region. Leskov had a lingering memory from his childhood of the funeral of an old man who was murdered by his voluptuous young daughter-in-law while he kipped under a blackcurrant bush on a summer’s day. This is what gave Leskov the idea for his story. Here we move from the aristocratic milieu of westernised St Petersburg in the 1830s to the oriental world of provincial Russian merchants in the 1860s. Leskov was actually one of the first Russian writers to write about merchants, who were then still a separate social class. They dressed differently, tended to be conservative and pious, and kept their business and their wives behind closed doors. So it is not surprising that Leskov’s young heroine is bored while her husband is away and ends up taking a lover. The other writer who also focused on the corrupt and autocratic ways of the Russian merchantry was Alexander Ostrovsky. It is tempting to think Leskov’s story is a response to Ostrovsky’s play The Storm , which was written just a few years earlier. It features another bored merchant wife called Katerina who longs for freedom, and is the basis for Janáček’s opera Katya Kabanova . The claustrophobia which both Leskov and Ostrovsky depict is a comment on Russian provincial life, but there are political overtones. It was in the early 1860s, after all, that the new Tsar Alexander II launched the era of the “Great Reforms” after the stifling reaction of the reign of Nicholas I. Ostrovsky somewhat idealised his heroine Katerina, who nobly throws herself into the Volga when her infidelity is discovered, and some radical critics viewed her suicide as a symbol of social protest. Leskov is more of a hard-headed realist. His Katerina is not a heroine with many redeeming qualities, and she ends up becoming a serial murderer in the name of her sexual liberation. She murders her father-in-law by feeding him mushrooms laced with rat poison, she murders her husband and then the heir to the merchant family’s fortunes, and finally ends up murdering her lover’s new mistress before committing suicide herself. There is a nod towards Shakespeare’s play, of course, but Leskov’s title is heavily ironic – not least because his heroine is hardly a character of tragic stature. In fact the main allusion is to a story called “Hamlet of Shchigry District” by Turgenev, who incidentally also went on to write another story called “A Lear of the Steppes”. Turgenev came from the same neck of the woods as Leskov, but he was of quite different stock and of a much older generation. Whereas Turgenev writes in the elegant, slightly archaic Russian which suits his gentry background, Leskov opts for the demotic. He uses a local resident to recount the hair-raising events of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District , and his deadpan, folksy narration adds to the story’s colour. This kind of personalised story-telling, which we call “skaz”, was first introduced to Russian literature in Gogol’s short stories, and is linked to oral traditions. The word “skaz” comes from the verb “skazat”, which means “to tell”, and the Russian word for short story is “rasskaz”."