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January 01, 2021

Shoeing a Flea

Shoeing a Flea
A portrait of Leskov Valentin Serov (1889)

Nikolai Leskov, born February 4, 1831

Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov holds a somewhat odd place in Russian literature. On one hand, he is a famous writer, a recognized classic. On the other, he has not won the same honors granted to the “first tier” writers, most consequential among those honors being inclusion in school curricula. In other words, generation after generation of millions of Russian schoolchildren have not had to – like it or not – read his books (or at least familiarize themselves with their plots).

As a result, Leskov has more or less disappeared from Russia’s collective consciousness. Of course, he’s still studied by literary scholars, and true lovers of Russian literature read him, but he’s nevertheless far from a “household name” in Russia. Why is that?

There seem to be several reasons for Leskov’s being swept under Russia’s cultural rug. First of all, several of his novels offer rather unflattering depictions of “nihilists” – the revolutionarily inclined young people of the 1860s and ’70s. This was enough to dispose a large proportion of his contemporaries against him and certainly to taint him in the eyes of Soviet publishers.

That might seem like a convincing explanation for why Leskov fell out of favor, were it not for the scathing depiction a revolutionary received in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Demons (admittedly, that particular novel was never promoted in Soviet times). Demons did not stop Dostoyevsky from becoming a towering presence within Soviet literature, a stature that seems entirely disproportionate when measured against Leskov’s relative obscurity.

What other circumstances might have “compromised” Leskov? Another would be his fascination with religion and the church. Of course, from the Soviet perspective this is a clear blot, but again – both Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy somehow managed to slip through the anti-religion filter. Furthermore, Leskov’s attitude toward the church greatly evolved over the course of his life. He became increasingly cool toward official religion as he developed an affinity for an informal Tolstoyan spiritualism outside the church. Leskov adored Tolstoy, and the two were friends (they were just three years apart in age). In their thinking and writing, they both contemplated a Christianity untainted by church bureaucracy, which they saw as an appendage of the state. Leskov considered church ritual to be unimportant and increasingly focused his attention on simple souls imbued with religious feeling. From a theoretical standpoint, it is hard to see why Leskov could not have been forgiven his Christianity in the same way Tolstoy was.

Two more factors that help explain Leskov’s lack of recognition can be added to the list. First, there is the intense, explosive, earthy eroticism permeating one of his most significant works – Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Strange as it may seem, for Soviet-era puritanism, this proved more off-putting than Leskov’s political and religious perspectives. Why, for example, was Tolstoy’s War and Peace chosen as part of the school syllabus rather than Anna Karenina, despite the fact that the latter is clearly more accessible to an unsophisticated reader? Is Levin’s spiritual quest the problem? That spirituality is also present in War and Peace. Marital infidelity, sex, family disintegration, on the other hand – how can that be discussed in the classroom?

The second factor is the difficulty of placing Leskov in a particular literary pigeonhole. Both in terms of the era in which he wrote and lived and the subject matter he chose, he could easily be categorized as a practitioner of realism, the literary school most highly extolled within Soviet culture. But it does not require any deep analysis of his writing to see that realism is not what Leskov was about. His protagonists could be tinkers or tradesmen, priests or intellectuals, and his stories were set in Leskov’s contemporary Russia – how is that not realism? In fact, Leskov’s language, his highly stylized, offbeat, fairy-tale/folk-tale phraseology, his linguistic flourishes that veered toward the highfalutin actually attest to an amazing extravagance of form that belies his archetypically Russian appearance.

As a result of all this, Leskov has fallen into an undeserved obscurity. A great deal of his oeuvre remains out of view of the broad readership. His two best known works are Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District and the story “Lefty” (Левша). And what became of them? Lady Macbeth is now mostly associated with Dmitry Shostakovich’s stunning opera of the same name, which was absolutely groundbreaking for its day. Shostakovich felt a resonance between his own musical experiments and Leskov’s bizarre, unsettling story of a merchant’s wife turned murderer. She burns with lust for one of the workers on her husband’s estate and winds up murdering her husband and young nephew, who was destined to inherit the estate. She is sent off to a labor camp and, devastated by the betrayal of her lover, kills another woman she sees as a rival and winds up dying alongside her. Shostakovich’s astonishing, jarring, jolting score, along with the opera’s shocking subject matter, provoked Stalin’s indignation. The notorious Pravda article, “Disorder Instead of Music,” signaled a merciless campaign against the composer. The article’s author correctly picked up on the opera’s innovativeness: the music is indeed disorderly, and that disorder is central to its genius.

Shostakovich survived several waves of vicious criticism, and later, after Stalin’s death, he produced a second, more “sanitized” version of the opera, even changing its name to Katerina Izmailova. Ever since, Leskov has been inextricably linked to Shostakovich in the public consciousness. That’s not such a bad thing, but he is a writer who deserves to live on in posterity on the force of his own work. 

Lefty monument
A monument to Lefty in Oryol.

Leskov’s most famous work is the tale “Lefty” (the title has also been translated as “The Tale of Cross-Eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea” or as “The Lefthander”), a rather odd (that word comes up a lot when discussing Leskov) story of a Russian gunsmith so adept at metalwork he manages to put tiny shoes on a mechanical flea, thereby outdoing the Germans and amazing the English. Upon his return to Russia, however, he becomes the victim of an uncaring state. The “Lefty” story is often seen as a metaphor for Russia’s development, and the hero’s nickname has come to be a synonym for people able to create amazing things with their hands. At the same time, “Lefty” has been transformed into a children’s tale about a funny little dancing flea. Still, I can clearly remember my own bewilderment as a child – what kind of writing is this? Why are these people behaving so strangely? Why are they talking in such an odd way?

Alas, the avant-garde, odd, hard-to-categorize Leskov is still not read much in Russia. Whether or not he’ll ever get his due, only time will tell.

Tags: Leskovrussian literatureliterature

See Also

Dmitry Shostakovich

Dmitry Shostakovich

A short biography of the composer whose life was continually challenged by the Powers That Be.

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