RICHARD PEVEAR
* “Les débuts littéraires de Leskov,” in Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique, vol. 22, no. 1 (1981).
† The Petersburg Gazette, November 27, 1894.
‡ See the opening of “The Pearl Necklace.”
§ Chekhov: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1997).
‖ Quoted in The Organic Worldview of Nikolai Leskov, by Irmhild Christina Sperrle (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002), p. 6 (slightly revised).
a A History of Russian Literature from Its Beginnings to 1900 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926, 1927, 1949, 1958; Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), p. 333.
b Nikolai Leskov: The Man and His Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 110.
c See note 26 to “Singlemind” for Leskov’s account of how he came to write the stories of righteous men.
d Quoted in McLean, Nikolai Leskov, p. 233.
Translators’ Note
Leskov is notoriously difficult to translate. He wrote to his German translator: “ ‘The Flea’ is much too Russian and hardly translatable (on account of its language)” (October 26, 1888). A month later he softened a little: “If you translate ‘Lefty,’ you’re the ‘foremost magician.’ ” But a few days later he cautioned: “You will have a hard time with ‘Lefty and the Flea.’ A knowledge of colloquial German is not enough. What will you do with the sound effects and the plays on words?” In the face of these warnings, we have tried all the same to keep the whole story, including its sound effects and plays on words. And we have done the same with all the stories in this collection. That is not only the challenge, but also the delight of translating Leskov. The philosopher Jacques Maritain wrote to Pope Paul VI about a new French translation of the Bible (which he did not like): “The first duty of a translator … is always to respect the word itself that the author has used … and to seek its exact equivalent.” He was not advocating a slavish literalism; he was defending the full meaning, meaning also the way of meaning, of the original.
The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
A Sketch
The first song brings a blush to the cheek.
A SAYING
I
In our parts such characters sometimes turn up that, however many years ago you met them, you can never recall them without an inner trembling. To the number of such characters belongs the merchant’s wife Katerina Lvovna Izmailova, who once played out a terrible drama, after which our gentlefolk, in someone’s lucky phrase, started calling her “the Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.”
Katerina Lvovna was not born a beauty, but she was a woman of very pleasing appearance. She was only twenty-three years old; not tall, but shapely, with a neck as if carved from marble, rounded shoulders, a firm bosom, a fine, straight little nose, lively black eyes, a high and white brow, and very black, almost blue-black hair. She was from Tuskar in Kursk province and was given in marriage to our merchant Izmailov, not out of love or any sort of attraction, but just so, because Izmailov sent a matchmaker to propose, and she was a poor girl and could not choose her suitors. The house of Izmailov was not the least in our town: they traded in white flour, kept a big rented mill in the district, had orchards outside town, and in town had a fine house. Generally, they were well-to-do merchants. Besides, the family was very smalclass="underline" the father-in-law, Boris Timofeich Izmailov, was already nearly eighty, a longtime widower; his son, Zinovy Borisych, Katerina Lvovna’s husband, was a little over fifty; then there was Katerina Lvovna, and that was all. In the five years of Katerina Lvovna’s marriage to Zinovy Borisych, she had had no children. Nor did Zinovy Borisych have children from his first wife, with whom he had lived for some twenty years before becoming a widower and marrying Katerina Lvovna. He thought and hoped that God might grant an heir to his merchant name and capital from his second marriage; but in that he was again unlucky with Katerina Lvovna.
This childlessness greatly distressed Zinovy Borisych, and not only Zinovy Borisych, but also old Boris Timofeich, and even Katerina Lvovna herself was much grieved by it. For one thing, exceeding boredom in the merchant’s locked-up tower, with its high walls and watchdogs running loose, had more than once filled the merchant’s young wife with pining, to the point of stupefaction, and she would have been glad, God knows how glad, to nurse a little child; and for another thing, she was also sick of reproaches: “Why marry, what’s the point of marrying; why bind a man’s fate, barren woman?”—as if she really had committed some crime against her husband, and against her father-in-law, and against their whole honorable merchant family.
For all its ease and plenty, Katerina Lvovna’s life in her father-in-law’s house was most boring. She went visiting very little, and if she did go with her husband to call on his merchant friends, that was also no joy. They were all strict people: they watched how she sat, and how she walked, and how she stood. But Katerina Lvovna had an ardent nature, and when she had lived in poverty as a young girl, she had been accustomed to simplicity and freedom, running to the river with buckets, swimming under the pier in nothing but a shift, or showering sunflower husks over the garden gate on some young fellow passing by. Here it was all different. Her father-in-law and husband got up as early as could be, had their tea at six o’clock, and went about their business, while she dilly-dallied from room to room alone. It was clean everywhere, it was quiet and empty everywhere, icon lamps shone before the icons, and nowhere in the house was there a living sound, a human voice.
Katerina Lvovna would wander and wander about the empty rooms, start yawning with boredom, and climb the stairs to her marital bedroom in the small, high mezzanine. There, too, she sat, looked at how they hung up hemp or poured out flour by the storehouse—again she would start to yawn, and she was glad of it: she would doze off for an hour or two, then wake up—again the same Russian boredom, the boredom of a merchant’s house, from which they say you could even happily hang yourself. Katerina Lvovna was not a lover of reading, and besides there were no books in their house except for the lives of the Kievan saints.1
Katerina Lvovna lived a boring life in the rich house of her father-in-law during the five years of her marriage to her unaffectionate husband; but, as often happens, no one paid the slightest attention to this boredom of hers.
II
In the sixth spring of Katerina Lvovna’s marriage, the Izmailovs’ mill dam burst. At that time, as if on purpose, a lot of work had been brought to the mill, and the breach proved enormous: water went under the lower sill, and to stop it up slapdash was impossible. Zinovy Borisych drove people to the mill from all around and sat there constantly himself; the business in town was managed by the old man alone, and Katerina Lvovna languished at home for whole days as alone as could be. At first she was still more bored without her husband, but then it came to seem even better to her: she felt freer by herself. Her heart had never really gone out to him, and without him there was at least one less commander over her.