Enchanted Russian wanderings

Press, 23 January 1988, Page 26

Enchanted Russian wanderings

The Enchanted Wanderer: Selecteg Tales. By Nikolai Leskov. Translated from Russian by David Magarshack. Andre Deutsche, 1987. 300 pp. (Reviewed by John Goodiiffe) The name of Nikolai Leskov (18311895) is probably unknown even to those English-speaking readers who are reasonably familiar with nineteenth-century Russian literature. He was indeed neglected in Russia in his lifetime, regarded as a second-rate writer, and in the Soviet Union, although enjoying an improved press and exerting some influence, his works have been published far less than those of, for example, Pushkin, Gogol, or Chekhov, largely because of his unjustified reputation as a reactionary conservative. But there are welcome recent signs that he is at long last being discovered by the English-speaking world, as demonstrated by this paperback republication of David Magarshack’s 1961 collection of five of his stories. It is true that Leskov’s work is uneven, varying from the spectacularly good to the downright

bad. For the most part he chose to ignore the generally accepted conventions of nineteenth-century narrative prose fiction and the result is spontaneous disorder and an exciting unpredictability. Leskov’s favourite technique is to let a colourful and eccentric character tell a story, employing vivid and racy language, garrulously digressing and frequently stretching the reader’s credulity to the limit and beyond. The best example of this is the longest story in the collection, “The Enchanted Wanderer” (1873). In this the narrator is a passenger on a lake steamer, a giant of a man in monkish habit, who regales his fellowpassengers with a series of incredible anecdotes about his life’s adventures with horses, Tartars, gypsies, holy men, and Cossack chiefs. They include, for example, the subduing of a wild horse by the use of a riding whip and a bucket of dough, a flogging match, and the insertion of horse-hair bristles into the narrator’s heels. “The Enchanted Wanderer” amounts to about a dozen amazing stories rolled into one.

And the incredible stories for the most part have a basis in fact. In his capacity as commercial agent for an English firm of which his uncle by marriage, an Englishman, was codirector, Leskov travelled widely all; over Russia, picking up a multiplicity of raw material for his stories from ordinary people, their colourful lives, anecdotes, folk superstitions, mystical beliefs, wild imaginings. This is why Maxim Gorky, himself widely travelled, called Leskov “the truest Russian of all Russian writers ... entirely free from any outward influence.” The stories in the collection represent different periods of Leskov’s variegated literary career. The first, "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” (1865), is a hair-raising story of violence, sex and murder, worthy of Alfred Hitchcock. “The White Eagle” (1880) is a rare example of a Russian ghost story. It is typical of Leskov that the reader is left uncertain about whether the ghost really was a ghost, or part of an elaborate hoax. “The Sentry” (1887), based on a real-life incident, tells how a private soldier on sentry duty in St Petersburg heroically rescues a drowning man from the icy waters of the River Neva. Bureaucratic muddle and military inflexibility ensure that while the private is flogged, an undeserving officer, taking credit for the rescue, is awarded a medal for bravery. My own favourite is a story which is pure invention: "The Left-handed Craftsman” (1881). Tsar Alexander I, visiting England purchases at enormous expense a microscopic English-made, mechanical wind-up dancing steel flea which is kept in a .diamond. However, the brilliance of English craftsmanship is outmatched by the skill of a left-handed cross-eyed Russian gunsmith and his two companions who nail miniature horseshoes on the flea’s feet. Unfortunately the extra weight prevents it dancing. This outrageous tale is told in a racy down-to-earth style, sprinkled with Russian malapropisms which defy translation. Leskov’s “Russianness,” in particular his eccentric and often colloquial language, means that he loses more in English translation than a more orthodox writer like Chekhov. But the loss is not significant enough wholly to deprive the stories of their special flavour. There iyan enjoyable surprise on almost every page of Leskov.