The construction of the Nikolaevsky bridge, the ways and speech of the Old Believers, the icon painter Racheiskov and his art—these are the realities Leskov builds on. And yet the story has nothing of the documentary about it. On the contrary, the storyteller’s voice transforms it all into an intensely personal, human story, with touches of the visionary and fantastic. What calls up the story is a question one of the guests at the inn asks tauntingly at the beginning: “So you saw an angel, and he led you—is that it?” “Yes, sir,” the stonemason replies, “I saw him, and he guided me.”
In his letter to Shchebalsky, Leskov wrote of his need for living persons whose spiritual content interested him. That content is revealed in the spoken word. This sort of “oral writing” is known in Russian as skaz, from the verb skazat, to speak or tell. A story in Russian is a rasskaz, a folktale is a skazka. Skaz includes the teller in the tale, so that we do not simply read the printed word, but also hear the speaking voice; we listen to the telling and even begin to mouth the words ourselves. George Orwell’s dictum “Good prose is like a window pane” does not apply here. On the contrary, language becomes physically present in skaz; we are as conscious of it as we are of the events it narrates. In “The Sealed Angel,” the author, who places himself among the listeners, creates the frame setting; other listeners occasionally interrupt to ask questions; but the story itself is told by the stonemason in his own particular language. Skaz is not merely an imitation of old-fashioned storytelling; it is a new form of written expression, even a “modern” one, which draws on the qualities of oral recitation.
Leskov’s comic masterpiece, “Lefty,” is subtitled “The Skaz of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea.” Its speech is the most richly and playfully misspoken Leskov ever invented. The first separate edition of the story, published in 1882, included a preface in which Leskov declared:
I wrote this legend down in Sestroretsk from the skaz of an old gunsmith there, a native of Tula, who had moved to the Sestra River back in the reign of the emperor Alexander I. Two years ago the storyteller was still of sound body and fresh memory; he gladly recalled the old days, greatly honored the sovereign Nikolai Pavlovich, lived “by the Old Belief,” read sacred books, and bred canaries. People treated him with respect.
This was a mystification, meant simply to introduce his narrator, but readers and critics took him seriously. Whether they admired his “stenography” or thought he might have distorted the language somewhat in copying it down, they all believed the story was an actual transcription, and even said it was a well-known legend, heard long ago. But “Lefty” had cost him a lot of work (in a letter to Sergei Shubnitsky of September 19, 1887, he confessed: “This language … does not come easily, but with much difficulty, and only love of the task can make a man take up such mosaic work”), and Leskov decided to clarify things and reclaim his story by publishing an explanation in a prominent journal, declaring: “I made up the whole story last May, and Lefty is a character of my own invention.” He insisted on it several more times in various places, but that did little to dispel the illusion. Finally, when he prepared the story for his collected works in 1889, he cut the preface, leaving the fictional Tula gunsmith out entirely. But he is still there, because the whole adventure of the steel flea is told in his voice. The author himself appears only in the brief final chapter.
The question of the author’s presence in Leskov’s stories is a complicated one, because Leskov most often screens himself behind the figure of a narrator who stands for the author. We meet this “author” among the guests at the snowbound inn in “The Sealed Angel,” on the boat with the enchanted wanderer, or taking down the story of the steel flea from the old gunsmith’s dictation. There is no direct authorial commentary, no analysis, no psychological interpretation in Leskov’s work (“it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free of explanation,” as Walter Benjamin observed). Yet Leskov insisted that art must serve the true and the good and that art for art’s sake did not interest him at all. And in fact the real author’s point of view does come through quite forcefully, though it takes some discernment to see what he sees. The conservative Slavophiles praised “Lefty” as a paean to deep Russia and the noble Russian craftsman. The scathing commentary on the conditions of Russian life passed them by. But it is not a matter of either/or: both are there.
Not all of Leskov’s stories are composed in the language of skaz, but they are all told, as memoirs, stories apropos, or simply amusing and sophisticated anecdotes like “The Spirit of Madame de Genlis,” “The Pearl Necklace,” or “A Flaming Patriot,” which are also far from simple. He always includes the situation of their telling, and they all share the complex relation of author and teller. In “The Spook,” for instance, we see everything simultaneously through a boy’s eyes and a man’s. “The Voice of Nature,” inconsequential as it might seem, prompted Benjamin to exclaim: “The way the profundity of this story is hidden beneath its silliness conveys an idea of Leskov’s magnificent humor.” “The White Eagle” has been interpreted in various ways: as a mockery of the vogue of spiritualism in Russia of the late 1870s, as an unmasking of an ambitious bureaucrat driven to hallucinations by his desire for a new decoration, as an exposure of deceit and conspiracy among provincial government officials. But the fantastic keeps evolving in this “fantastic story”; it refuses to be reduced to political satire or psychodrama, and ends in an almost mystical irresolution, as the hero admits in his last words. Even the clipped, objective report of “The Man on Watch” shifts in its brief chapters from one point of view to another, one character to another, setting them side by side—again with no commentary, no single resolving voice, until the author steps in at the end.
We have arranged the stories chronologically. The earliest, “The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” was written in 1864; the latest, “A Robbery,” in 1887. We have not included works dealing with specifically churchly subjects, fine as they are, or the parables and legends of the 1890s, or any of the last darkly satirical stories, which were admirably translated (along with “Lefty,” “Singlemind,” and others) by William Edgerton and Hugh McLean, in Satirical Stories of Nikolai Leskov (New York: Pegasus, 1969). Our aim has been to bring together in one volume a broad and representative selection of Leskov’s best work, so that a new generation of English-speaking readers may discover him for themselves.