Books: The Truest Russian

SELECTED TALES (300 pp.)—Nikolai Leskov—Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($5).

In a sense, the igth century was Russia’s Renaissance. Until then, Russian literature had been of little consequence, but 19th century Russia showered on the world a wealth of literary greatness such as few centuries anywhere have equaled and none have surpassed. In an epoch that produced Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Chekhov, it is not surprising that some valuable authors were virtually overlooked by the West. One of these, almost unknown to American readers, is Nikolai Leskov (1831-95), whose output of novels, stories, memoirs and articles filled a posthumous edition of 36 volumes.

Leskov’s life and career were anomalous in his century. He was one of the few Russian writers who did not come from the gentry; his background was lower middle class. There was a strong nonconformist influence on him through an aunt who had married an Englishman and followed the Quaker way of life. He never joined a political party and so, at one time or another, was reviled by both radicals and conservatives. Yet in his job as an assistant steward on the vast estates of the wealthy Perovsky and Naryshkin families, he traveled through his country so extensively and perceived so much that Gorky called him “the truest Russian of all Russian writers.”

Angels & Demons. American readers can now sample Leskov’s insight and variety in a new collection, generally well Englished by David Magarshack. The first story, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, is the Leskov work best known in this country because of the Shostakovich opera based on it (1934)-It is a quietly told story of an increasingly violent passion. The avalanche of sensuality starts when a bored wife has an affair with a young clerk on her old husband’s household staff, and leads with chilling practicality to a murder, then to another and another; and the story ends in a convict gang en route to Siberia as the wife pulls a rival down to joint death in a river.

Much of the story’s impact comes from its style. It is a skaz (a tale), a form particularly associated with Leskov, in which the events are told by a fictional narrator in his own idiom and manner. The method gives those events—especially when they are grim—an ingenuous drama, as if a child were holding out a severed head and saying innocently, “Look what I found.”

Hovering over the skaz is old Russia’s half-world of demons, firebirds, avenging angels and devils. When the wife and her lover strangle her little nephew (so that she may inherit her late husband’s business), the walls of the house are suddenly shaken fiercely; windows rattle and icons tremble. It turns out to be an outraged mob battering at the doors, but at the moment it is possible to believe with the frightened lover that it is an angel thundering over the house.

Tartars & Indians. The pearl of this collection. The Enchanted Wanderer, is the skaz at its purest, with a framework of auditors who listen to the story and occasionally interrupt with provocative questions. It is a picaresque short novel, narrated by its hero, who was born a serf, trained as an outrider, and who became in turn a thief, a Tartar captive and husband of Tartar wives, a soldier, a horse dealer, a civil servant, an actor and a novice in a monastery—always resigned to his fate, yet full of curiosity and humor, always interested in the experience of being a Russian in gigantic and diverse Mother Russia. The Wanderer is a credible symbol of his people and his century, and his story reminds the reader once again of the parallels between Russia and America : the sense of large possibility deriving from large size, the feeling of the frontier (being captured by Tartars was much like being captured by Indians), and the headlong, belated rush to create a culture that compares with that of old Europe.

Statements about national characteristics are always dangerous but always tempting. As the Irish genius is essentially in the voice, as the French is in beautiful logic and logical beauty, so the Russian genius wings straight for the remotest caverns of the soul. At his best, Leskov tells his stories simply, almost confidingly, putting incident and observation unpretentiously one after another until, before the reader realizes it, he has been led out of the story, and even out of Russia, to glimpse some of the mystery of his own existence.