Rereading Nikolaj Leskov’s Lady Macbeth in the Mtsensk district* after so many years is almost like making a journey through time, a not unusual experience when we read stories set in places and written in times so far from our own, not only for geography and imagination. Yet the story is very modern from a formal point of view.
The protagonist is the restless wife of a merchant in the district by the same name, and the short story could be outlined as an account of the disastrous consequences of her passion. However, it would be restrictive to put it like this because the novella is a jewel of structural cohesiveness and formal elegance, notwithstanding its disturbing theme. Reading Lady Macbeth in the Mtsensk District is like being plunged into a sulphuric and powerful noir, despite the apparent simplicity of the story and the linearity of the plot. It’s a shame to read it in translation, because we lose all the traits of the skaz, a technique already inaugurated by Gogol’ and masterfully (re)elaborated by Leskov, on which the Formalists devoted some fundamental pages that for years scholars of literature, in Russia and elsewhere, took as a reference for their critical analysis.
After Tzvetan Todorov’s death, it appears as necessary to remember his famous work of collecting some of the most important essays on the formalism that now seem so outdated in the shabby academic landscape of today. The Russian formalists, published in Italy (my edition dates back to 1968) at the end of the Sixties, established some great criteria to be followed when reading critically a literary work and inspired all of those people who work with structure and material to create a great story (together with Propp’s Morphology of the Tale would say).
It seems to be talking about centuries ago; and flipping through certain books, finding the small, miserable notes on the margins of the pages, makes you feel the time that passes by (or has passed by, in this case) with a greater melancholy than that surrounding Marcel’s madeleine soaked in the infusion of linden blossoms. Let us add that re-reading Lady Macbeth with the contemporary eye is like opening the heavy dusty curtains of an imaginary theatre to witness an archaic and yet seminal scene, that is an apparently trivial event represented with rare and subversive power. A blueprint for cinema and the noir atmosphere of our times, I would say.
Taking inspiration from one of the most seminal and inspiring dark ladies of modern Western tradition, which already in the hands of Shakespeare was not mediated by any refined or intellectual stratagem, the young Katerina Lvovna Izmailova embodies all the power and subversion of a fierce passion. She is a woman that should be imagined not only as a real character but also as the prototype of the indomitable and sulphuric female overwhelmed by her passion and aware of a special force.
It would be a mistake to read this story trying to frame it in a moral or religious perspective. There is something artfully brilliant in the way Leskov permeates this sordid and wild story, something that lies precisely in the fact that what unfolds is not only bloodthirsty and cruel but also formally coherent, indeed impeccable, for the atmosphere it creates and the events that follow their inexorable conclusion. Essentially, Leskov’s novella is a jewel of form.
The nineteenth-century literature overflows with stories of adultery, fall, and punishment. From one end of the ocean to the other, transgressing and subversive female figures (at least in feelings and moral conception) seem to popularize the collective imagination of readers and add a telluric current to the bourgeois notion of the family. Anna Karenina, Hester Prynne, Emma Bovary, Effi Briest seem almost like goddesses in comparison with other female characters of certain British literature, except for the first powerful female villain that is Lady Macbeth and certainly not in the nineteenth century, an era of compromises and mediations.
Maybe because Leskov had worked for a merchant of English origin (a certain Mr. Scott) or because he read Shakespeare, his version of the “lost” femme fatale has nothing to do with the self-sacrifice in Tolstoj, Hawthorne, Flaubert and Fontane inventions. Far from our Western view, Leskov’s lady belongs, if anything, to the genius of those women who are damned and unredeemed, brutal and foolish, unforgiving, unmediated by any middle-class prudery.
And now a bit of the story. Katerina Izmailova is a young woman married to the merchant Izmailov of Tuskar in the province of Kursk; she leads a monotonous, boring life with no interests or leisure. Relegated in a secluded country mansion and often left alone with her father-in-law, gruff and not inclined to worldly life, the woman appears not only unhappy but secretly restless, one of those figures that you could see framed by the camera to look out of the window where the distant plains of family property hardly ever offer distraction (the film by W. Oldroyd conveys the idea in a faithful and rigorous way). She is in search of something different from the monotony of the work in the fields, or from the pervasive silence of the house where nothing happens time and time again. No theatres nearby, no books to read at home other than the lives of the saints and nothing appealing to Katerina’s death-like existence. One day, going down in the courtyard among the peasants, she meets the young and sensual Sergej, a scoundrel who has come to do hard work in the family property. Sergej shows not much interest in Katerina except for a disrespectful body language of complicity toward her youth and beauty. What unfolds in the pages that follow is a raw and crude example of the power without mediations of the Russian soul when passion and lust are at stake.
In a beautiful essay on Dostoevsky (Dostoevsky) Nikolaj Berdiaev, a Russian philosopher famous in Western Academic contexts, speaking about the great writer and his concept of literary form, noted how much Russian literature ignored “the admirable representations found in Western European literature”. The Russians”, Berdjaev said, have “nothing like the love of troubadours, the love of Tristan and Isolde, Dante and Beatrice, Romeo and Juliet”. This lack of mediation and cultural elaboration leads to a representation of love as a massive, tormenting and tormented, opaque, deformed experience. If in Dostoevsky love confines with madness, ambivalent feelings, an irreconcilability of desire with passion and does not foresee anything mediated in the female figure, turning into perversion of the soul or in a tormented sensuality even when it is veined with compassion, in Leskov the tumultuous elaborations of Dostoevsky are set aside, and we witness the rigorous description of an unbounded passion and its harmful consequences. Katerina first kills her father-in-law and then, increasingly swarming and lying, she overwhelms her lover in a series of heinous crimes. Nevertheless, Leskov is so strict that he continually touches the grotesque inherent in every story of this kind, without slipping into the obscene violence to which we have been accustomed since postmodernism gore appeared as a stylistic slap in the face. In Leskov, blood, crime, and numb lust are described with a formally plain language and do not find a shred of compassion in the social forms offered by the community or religion. The world of Leskov in this masterly novella is purely immanent, entirely inserted in its environment as it appeared to a reader of his time. Yet, it opens up, surprisingly, to the world of today with the infinite possibilities of representing a paradigmatic story about the annihilation of the individual both as prey and as an uncontrollable predator of passions. And all this without psychological analysis! All the characters in this story act and are represented in the pure immanence of gestures and dialogues, actions and scenes.
Shostakovich should have noticed this powerful potential when he drew a work that Stalin did not like (a complete and very interesting article is here). This feature is also testified in the different cinematic and theatrical representations that have been made of Lady Macbeth (including one by Andrzej Wajda, 1963 with the title Siberian Lady Macbeth and a recent one by Wiliam Oldroyd presented at the Toronto Film Festival in 2016 – review).
In Considerations on Nikolaj Leskov’s work, (in Angelus Novus) Walter Benjamin stated that “There is nothing that more effectively assures the stories to the memory of that pure conciseness that subtracts them from psychological analysis […] it is in fact already half of the art of narrating, leaving a story free, in the act of reproducing it, from all kinds of explanations”. Leskov is a master, because the extraordinary, the wonderful and the disturbing are reported with extreme precision, without ever imposing the psychological connection of events to the reader who remains “free to interpret the things as he prefers”.
I close with a note on the last part of the story, which in my opinion inaugurates an almost expressionist style, both for the descriptions and for the atmosphere in which the imprisonment of the culprits and the surrounding characters are immersed. In few pages, Leskov manages to convey the horror and anguish of the prisoners, the horrible dissolution of bodies and souls. The atmosphere (weather and imagery) changes colours, everything is dismal and gloomy, and the landscape is transformed into a hellish circle to which there is no escape until the not-to-be-missed, fulminating ending in the waters of the Volga River. Lady Macbeth in the Mtsensk District is a small jewel of literature and a text that survives its era with the strength of a tremendous dramatic form that is unique in its genre, mainly due to the control between structure and style and the perfect balance between narrative material and narrator’s point of view. A lesson for all who need six hundred pages to describe something that is far from being unforgettable in contemporary literature, sometimes so fashionable and so often overestimated today.
La lettrice immaginaria 