Lady Macbeth and a Tarantas

LADY MACBETH OF MTSENSK: SELECTED STORIES OF NIKOLAI LESKOV

Translated by Donald Rayfield and others

(NYRB Classics 448 pages, $17.95)

This collection opens up genres of Leskov’s fiction that I hadn’t encountered. In “The Unmercenary Engineers” Leskov (1831-1895) takes a step into biographical fiction, and in “The Innocent Prudentius” he dives head-first into the creation of a Christian legend. Anton Chekhov noted about another of Leskov’s legends of the time (1892), but that also describes this one: “Divine and spicy. A compound of virtuousness, godliness and fornication. But pretty interesting.”* The tall-tale-ish “The Steel Flea” and the Christmas story “The Sealed Angel” are, apparently, greatly admired by Russian readers. 

I find myself, having wandered through this and the earlier collections in English, head over heels only with the tried and true, the extraordinary “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” and “The Enchanted Wanderer.” They’re so exciting and gripping they make me wonder why Leskov, who has never reached the fame in English of his nineteenth-century contemporaries Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov, didn’t continue in these veins. No one has ever written such a hair-raising love story as “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” (“Katerina Lvovna was now ready to follow Sergey through hell and high water, to prison or the cross”), or such a rollicking picaresque novella as “The Enchanted Wanderer”: “I make an effort to stay silent,” the wanderer confesses, “but the spirit overcomes me.” Thank goodness, because Ivan Severianych is the best travel raconteur since Odysseus. Tolstoy praised the writing’s “exuberance,” which is just right.  Upon meeting Leskov for the first time in 1887, Tolstoy exclaimed to a friend, “What an intelligent and original man!”

Donald Rayfield, a veteran translator, has taken on four new translations and supplemented them with two previously published ones by Robert Chandler and William Edgerton. The translations share an easy colloquial phrasing; I never noticed any clunkiness or detected Russian syntax asserting itself over the English (I cannot seem to manage this in my own translations). The only thing to squawk about is the selection, which Rayfield seems to have made to more dramatically distinguish it from David Macduff’s Penguin Classics edition and Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s bigger (and far better) collection, The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories. 

– Bob Blaisdell

TARANTAS

By Vladimir Sollogub

Translated by Michael Katz*
 (Univ. of Pittsburgh, 180 pages, $23)

This is an utterly delightful book to discover during a time of plague.

First, because it offers the vicarious pleasures of travel through Russia, even if at the remove of nearly two centuries. Second, because it is infused with refreshing veins of mirth and self-deprecation.

Tarantas offers biting commentary on human foibles and is a refreshing entry in Russia’s enduring debate between Slavophiles and Westerners, in the persons of the landowner Vasily Ivanovich “about 50 years old, of short stature, but so portly that it was amusing just to look at him,” and Ivan Vasilievich, a young fellow just returned from abroad whose “hair was cut in the style of the Middle Ages, and traces of an awful beard were still visible on his chin.”

Ivan deeply desires to understand his homeland, and Vasily’s response to this notion is hilarious:

“What do you intend to do, sir? Huh?”

“I’d like to have a look at Russia, to get to know her.”

“What, sir?”

“I’d like to study my motherland…”

“What? What? What?”

“I intend to study my motherland.”

“Excuse me, I don’t understand… You want to study it?”

“To study my motherland… to study Russia.”

“And how, my friend, will you study Russia?”

“Two ways… in relation to her antiquity and her nationality, which, by the way, are closely connected to one another. By analyzing our monuments, our beliefs and legends, and listening carefully to the echoes of our olden times, I will succeed… excuse me, we will succeed… we, my comrades and I… we will achieve an understanding of our national spirit, our customs, our demands, and we will know from what source our national enlightenment should come, using the example of Europe, but not accepting it as a model.”

“In my opinion,” said Vasily Ivanovich, “I’ve found you the best means of studying Russia – get married.”

And so the stage is set. The foppish, garrulous Vasily – who knows Ivan’s father – agrees to give the cash-strapped Ivan a ride home in his ridiculously overburdened tarantas – a horse-drawn carriage with a long wheelbase and springy construction meant to counteract the horrific state of Russian roads (a vehicle “which never needs repair, never overturns, the pride and joy of the endless steppe”).

The pair’s travel encounters and misadventures provide ample pretext for commentary (and occasionally tedious monologues), yet it is often the almost throwaway lines that are the funniest:

“Ivan Vasilievich was a lad who possessed a completely Slavic nature, that is, lazy, but smart.”

[We gentry are] “almost all lighthearted to the point of madness; because we’re all infected with the same disease from our childhood… It’s called simply: ‘Living beyond our means.’”

“Ivan Vasilievich managed to reflect on the state of Russia and admire the beauty of the peasants, who, to tell the truth, had already begun to get on his nerves.”

“Well excuse me,” interrupted Vasily Ivanovich, “now it seems to me you are simply speaking metaphorically.”

“In my opinion, one can die for one’s country, but one should live abroad.”

And there are also wonderfully descriptive passages:

“The tarantas entered a small, but very strange town. It consisted of only one street, along both sides of which little wooden, weather-beaten houses cordially greeted travelers. Most of the windows had broken panes of glass and had been replaced by greasy paper, behind which here and there protruded worn uniforms, reddish beards, and dented teapots.”

There soon follows a description of that town’s tavern that is absolutely priceless, but you’ll have to just take the journey yourself, as it is too long to cite here.

As the trip drags on and the tedium of the road and the bland vistas settle into their bones, the pair have numerous discussions about everything from literature to merchants to religion, and we learn their backstories, which read like Gogolian tales.

They do not ever reconcile the Westerner/Slavophile debate, and Sollogub himself offers little guidance. But one exchange at the book’s midpoint, about sums it up:

“So, in your opinion, what is so remarkable abroad?”

”The past.”

”And in Russia?”

“The future.”

“Yes… yes… Well… Fine. But to tell the truth… I don’t understand how people like you are allowed to roam the world... You gather such foolish ideas and speak such subtleties, that I can’t even understand what you say.”

– Paul Richardson