The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

by Nikolai Leskov

  Among the liberal intelligentsia Leskov bore the totally misplaced stigma of a reactionary all his life, and it lingered on into Soviet times. In a letter to his friend Pyotr Shchebalsky dated November 10, 1875, he mimicked the general editorial opinion of him: “He has marked himself off so clearly … and besides they say he’s close to the Third Section” (i.e., the secret police). A reviewer who praised the language of “The Sealed Angel” in 1873 added, “Leskov has such a reputation that it takes a sort of audacity to praise him.” As a result, though he always had readers, more and more of them as time went on, he suffered during his lifetime from an almost total critical neglect. Even his admirers among the critics were reluctant to write about him because of the suspicions he aroused. He was considered a minor writer, and the great originality of his work was overlooked. He remained, in that sense, undiscovered.

  In the 1880s that situation began to change. A younger generation of writers, artists, and thinkers, who had themselves rejected the violent and doctrinaire judgments of nihilism, turned to Leskov as a master. This was his second discovery. In 1881 the new weekly humor magazine Fragments published Leskov’s story “The Spirit of Madame de Genlis.” Two years later the same magazine published “A Little Mistake.” Meanwhile, the stories of the young Anton Chekhov had begun to appear there. Chekhov was in medical school and earned his living by placing comic sketches wherever he could (Fragments published two hundred and seventy of them between 1882 and 1887). In 1883 he met Leskov in Moscow. “Leikin brought along with him my favorite writer, the famous N. S. Leskov,” he wrote in a letter to his brother. He was twenty-three, Leskov fifty-two. After a night of carousing, they wound up in a cab together. “Leskov turns to me half-drunk,” Chekhov wrote in the same letter, “and asks: ‘Do you know what I am?’ ‘I do.’ ‘No, you don’t. I’m a mystic.’ ‘I know.’ He stares at me with his old man’s popping eyes and prophesies: ‘You will die before your brother.’ ‘Maybe so.’ ‘I shall anoint you with oil as Samuel did David … Write.’ The man is a mixture of an elegant Frenchman and a defrocked priest. But he’s considerable.” Chekhov took this consecration by Leskov more seriously than it sounds. And in fact they had much in common: they shared a broad experience of Russia and Russian life and an unidealized knowledge of the people. And something more important as well. In his biography of Chekhov,§ Donald Rayfield speaks of “a mystic side of Chekhov—his irrational intuition that there is meaning and beauty in the cosmos,” which “aligns him more to Leskov than to Tolstoy in the Russian literary tradition.”

  Another new discoverer of Leskov was the painter Ilya Repin (1844–1930), one of the major Russian artists of the later nineteenth century. He had met Leskov and had illustrated some of his stories. In September 1888, in a letter asking permission (unsuccessfully) to paint Leskov’s portrait, he wrote: “Not only I but the whole of educated Russia knows you and loves you as a very outstanding writer of unquestionable merits, and at the same time as a thinking man.” The poet and philosopher Vladimir Soloviev (1853–1900), a central intellectual figure then and now, also championed Leskov’s work. They became personal friends in 1891 and met frequently. Soloviev hand-carried the manuscript of Leskov’s novella “Night Owls” to M. M. Stasyulevich, editor of the liberal, pro-Western Messenger of Europe, who had declared once that Leskov was “someone I will never publish,” and persuaded him to change his mind. When Leskov died in February 1895, Soloviev published an obituary notice:

  In his will, Leskov wrote: “I know there was much bad in me; I deserve no praise and no pity. As for those who want to blame me, they should know that I have already done so myself.” But it is impossible to fulfill such wishes when it is a question of such a remarkable man. Therefore I will conform myself to the spirit rather than the letter of this will, and allow myself to express in a few words what I think of the person of the dead man and of his work.

  What was striking above all in Nikolai Semyonovich was his passionate nature; at an advanced age, and though seemingly inactive, he was still prey to a constant seething of the soul. He needed a quite uncommon spiritual force to keep his ardent character within bounds. Besides, in his works one felt a passionate and restless attitude towards the things he described, which, if his talent had been less, might have turned into an obvious partiality. But in Leskov, as in every great writer, that passion is tempered and betrays itself only secretly, though here and there in his writings there still remains some trace of ideological engagement …

  It is likely that Leskov’s compositions will elicit critical judgments as serious as they are profound; and then, despite what is written in his will, the late writer will become the object of much praise and much blame. But they will all certainly acknowledge in him the brilliance and extraordinary originality of a talent that never remained buried, like the keen yearning for the truth that ruled his being and his work.

  II

  In 1889–90 the first collected edition of Leskov’s works was published in ten volumes, seen through the press by the author himself. An eleventh volume was added in 1893, and a twelfth in 1896, posthumous but prepared by Leskov. This edition was reprinted twice, with the addition of an interesting, somewhat hagiographic preface by Rostislav Sementkovsky. In 1902–03 a thirty-six-volume Complete Collected Works (also not complete) was published and became the standard edition. Twenty years later the formalist critic Boris Eikhenbaum (1886–1959) finally accorded Leskov his rightful place in Russian literature, looking at his writing in itself rather than in its ideological context, and showing that the attempt to set his work beside that of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev was mistaken, because he equaled them not by resembling them, but by being totally unlike them. In a tribute published in 1945, on the fiftieth anniversary of Leskov’s death, Eikhenbaum wrote:

  Without him our literature of the nineteenth century would have been incomplete, first and foremost because it would not have captured to an adequate degree the depths of Russia with its “enchanted wanderers,” it would not have revealed with sufficient fullness the souls and fates of the Russian people with their daring, their scope, their passions and misfortunes … Neither Turgenev, nor Tolstoy, nor Dostoevsky could have accomplished this as Leskov did.‖

  Here Eikhenbaum was looking back at Leskov in his own time. In 1924, looking at the present and the writers of the early twentieth century, in an article entitled “In Search of a Genre,” Eikhenbaum wrote: “The influence of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky has been replaced in an unexpected way by the influence of Leskov, as much in stylistic tendency as in that of genre.” By way of example, he cites the “memoirs and autobiographical stories” of Maxim Gorky, who declared himself Leskov’s disciple, then the major figures of the new Russian prose—Alexei Remizov, Andrei Bely, Evgeny Zamyatin, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Boris Pilnyak, Isaac Babel, and others. (Incidentally, in 1926 Evgeny Zamyatin made a stage version of what may be Leskov’s most famous story, “Lefty,” entitling it “The Flea.”) Their work showed the influence of Leskov’s art in two seemingly contradictory things: an “ornamentalism” of style, giving value to words, wordplay, puns, popular etymology; and a return to the primitive sources of storytelling, to speech, the voice of the storyteller, the act of telling. “We often forget,” Eikhenbaum wrote, “that the word in itself has nothing to do with the printed letter, that it is a living, moving activity, formed by the voice, articulation, intonation, joined with gestures and mimicry.”

  Tolstoy once remarked cryptically, “Leskov is a writer for the future, and his life in literature is profoundly instructive.” Eikhenbaum shows that Leskov’s storytelling was indeed not a return to the past, a nostalgic imitation of old ways, but a new joining of past and future, a synthesis and interpenetration of old and new. In his preface to the critical anthology Russian Prose (1926), he refers to this fusion of archaism and innovation as “the dynamic of traditions”: “We must become aware of the historical dynamic of traditions. We have forgotten far too many things and have blindly accepted fa
r too many things. We have need of culture.”

  This third discovery of Leskov, by the modernist writers and then by the new criticism, also reached beyond the borders of Russia. We feel the same sense of excitement in Walter Benjamin’s well-known essay, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” published in 1936, and in the fine chapter on Leskov in D. S. Mirsky’s History of Russian Literature, written in English and first published in 1926, the same year as Russian Prose. Mirsky ends with an admonition to his readers:

  The Anglo-Saxon public have made up their mind as to what they want from a Russian writer, and Leskov does not fit in to this idea. But those who really want to know more about Russia must sooner or later recognize that Russia is not all contained in Dostoevsky and Chekhov, and that if you want to know a thing, you must first be free of prejudice and on your guard against hasty generalizations. Then they will perhaps come nearer to Leskov, who is generally recognized by Russians as the most Russian of Russian writers and the one who had the deepest and widest knowledge of the Russian people as it actually is.a

  It is true that we meet people, see places, and witness events in Leskov’s work that we do not find anywhere else in Russian literature. It is also true that, fantastic as they may often seem, they are almost always grounded in reality. In an open letter to his friend P. K. Shchebalsky, editor of the Warsaw Journal, dated December 10, 1884, Leskov wrote:

  In the articles in your newspaper it is said that I have mainly copied living persons and recounted actual incidents. Whoever the author of those articles is—he is perfectly right. I have a gift for observation and perhaps a certain aptitude for analyzing feelings and motives, but I have little fantasy. I invent painfully and with difficulty, and therefore I have always needed living persons whose spiritual content interested me. They would take possession of me, and I would try to incarnate them in stories, which I also quite often based on real events.

  In 1862, during his stay in Paris, away from the troubles that had overwhelmed him in Petersburg, Leskov wrote “The Musk-ox.” He dated it very precisely on the final page: “Paris, November 28, 1862,” as if he were marking an important moment in his life. In it for the first time he found his way as an artist; that is, he found his own manner of constructing and narrating a story, “perching it,” as Hugh McLean has written, “neither solidly in the realm of reality nor in that of fiction, even realistic fiction, but in the no-man’s-land between them.”b The story portrays people from Leskov’s own past (his maternal grandmother appears here for the first time and under her real name; the hero is modeled on a school friend from Orel); it includes seemingly irrelevant digressions, and is told in the first person by a narrator who may or may not be the author.

  Leskov wrote other important stories during the sixties, among them his first real masterpiece, “The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” which in its single focus and sustained objectivity is unique among his works. But he gave most of his time to writing three long and more conventional novels, No Way Out (1864), The Bypassed (1865), and At Daggers Drawn (1870–71). All three were anti-nihilist and entered into the polemics that had begun with the editorial of 1862, so that while they are by far the longest of Leskov’s works, they are also the most limited—“hasty, journalistic jobs,” as he acknowledged later. Leskov’s genius was not suited to the genre of the novel and he knew it, or he came to know it after At Daggers Drawn. While he was writing this last novel, he was already at work on something very different, a “novelistic chronicle,” as he first called it, entitled Cathedral Folk, which was published in 1872. After Cathedral Folk, Leskov went on steadily producing works in his own genre, or genres, for the rest of his life.

  The form of the chronicle appealed to Leskov because of its freedom from the artificial restrictions of plot, its seemingly unselective inclusiveness, its way of unrolling like a ribbon or a scroll. In a letter to the philologist and art historian Fyodor Buslaev, on June 1, 1877, he spoke of this “expanded view of the memoir form as a fictional work of art. To tell the truth, this form seems very convenient to me: it is more alive, or, better, more earnest than depicting scenes, in the grouping of which, even in such great masters as Walter Scott, the forcing is obvious—which is what simple people mean when they say, ‘It happened just like in a novel.’ ”

  The free form of the chronicle allowed Leskov to bring all sorts of materials into Cathedral Folk, including the notes of one of the book’s heroes, the elderly archpriest Father Savely Tuberozov, written in his own churchly, slightly old-fashioned, but forceful style. In one passage, Father Savely “involuntarily” recalls reading The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, by “the very witty pastor Sterne,” and jots down his conclusion that, “as our patented nihilism is coming to an end among us, Shandyism is now beginning …” (“Shandyism,” as Sterne himself defined it, is “the incapacity for fixing the mind on a serious object for two minutes together.”) Laurence Sterne was one of Leskov’s favorite writers, and the narrative form of many of his works besides Cathedral Folk is indebted to Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey. At the end of his life, discussing his last story in a letter to Stasyulevich (January 8, 1895), he says: “I’ve written this piece in a whimsical manner, like the narrations of Hoffmann and Sterne, with digressions and ricochets.”

  The form of the journey as a narrative structure is embodied most fully in “The Enchanted Wanderer,” which Leskov began in 1872, after journeying himself around Lake Ladoga, an area of ancient monasteries, fishing villages, and isolated peasant communities north of Petersburg. The full title in its first magazine publication in 1873 was “The Enchanted Wanderer: His Life, Experiences, Opinions, and Adventures,” which clearly echoes the titles of works in the picaresque tradition, but in its “opinions” also gives a nod to Tristram Shandy. Here again Leskov chose a loose, accumulative form of storytelling, looped together by the “enchantment” that leads his hero in his wanderings from one chance encounter to another and one part of Russia to another, until it finally brings him to the place he was intended for by his mother’s prayers before he was born. The story is told by the hero himself in response to questions from his fellow passengers as they sail across Lake Ladoga to the monastery of Valaam.

  Leskov made use of various other forms of storytelling, giving them names like memoir, potpourri, paysage and genre, rhapsody, sketch, stories apropos (“I very much like this form of story about what ‘was,’ recounted ‘apropos,’ ” he once wrote to Leo Tolstoy), and sometimes subtitling them “a story told on a grave,” “a Moscow family secret,” “a fantastic story,” “a spiritualistic occurrence.” Later in life, when he allied himself with Tolstoy, he wrote fables for publication by the Tolstoyan popular press, The Mediator, and he also wrote a series of legends set in the ancient Near East, Egypt, Byzantium, in early Christian times. He wrote a number of Christmas stories, and also a series of what he called “stories of righteous men,” several of which are included in this collection (“Singlemind,” “Deathless Golovan,” “The Spook,” “The Man on Watch,” “The Enchanted Wanderer,” “Lefty”). Leskov considered these last the most important part of his work. “The real strength of my talent lies in the positive types,” he boasted in a letter to a friend. “Show me such an abundance of positive Russian types in another writer.”c As Walter Benjamin says in “The Storyteller”: “The righteous man is the advocate for created things and at the same time he is their highest embodiment.”

  All of these forms are based essentially on the anecdote, which serious critics tend to scorn. Mirsky enthusiastically defends Leskov’s practice:

  His stories are mere anecdotes, told with enormous zest and ability, and even in his longer works his favorite way of characterizing his characters is by a series of anecdotes. This was quite contrary to the traditions of “serious” Russian fiction and induced the critics to regard Leskov as a mere jester. His most original stories are packed with incident and adventure to an extent that appeared ludicrous to the crit
ics, who regarded ideas and messages as the principal thing.

  Boris Eikhenbaum, in his essay “An ‘Excessive’ Writer,” published in 1931 in honor of Leskov’s hundredth birthday, says: “the anecdote … can be considered a sort of atom in Leskov’s work. Its presence and action are felt everywhere.” The anecdote is the most elementary form of story, told for its own sake or apropos of some more general topic of discussion in a group of friends, at a Christmas party, or among travelers stranded at an inn during a blizzard.

  This last is the occasion for the telling of “The Sealed Angel,” a fine example of Leskov’s composition at its most complex. The story is held together by the event of the title, the official “sealing” of an old icon, but it includes much else besides. The storyteller, who is also the central character, is an orphaned peasant who has worked all his life as a stonemason; the action, as I have already mentioned, involves the construction of the Nikolaevsky suspension bridge in Kiev, which Leskov witnessed in the early 1850s. The masons who build the bridge belong to the Old Believers, a group that separated from the official Russian Orthodox Church in 1666, in protest against the reforms of the patriarch Nikon. The Old Believers were anathematized by the Church and deprived of civil rights; they were often persecuted and tended to live in the more remote parts of the empire. They had their own ways of speaking, which had fascinated Leskov since his youth in Kiev, and which he captures in his narrator’s voice. In 1863, soon after his return to Petersburg from Paris, Leskov was sent on an official mission to inspect the schools of the Old Believers in Riga, an experience that deepened his knowledge of and sympathy for their condition. The masons he portrays in “The Sealed Angel” are very devout, but have no priests or sacraments; their piety is centered on their collection of old icons, the most beautiful of which is the angel of the title. Leskov himself had become interested in icon painting, and particularly in the icons of the Old Believers, in the later 1860s. At around that time he made the acquaintance of an icon painter and restorer by the name of Nikita Sevastianovich Racheiskov, who was an Old Believer himself and lived in a shabby quarter of Petersburg inhabited mainly by Old Believers. Leskov visited him often, and in a tribute to him written after Racheiskov’s death in 1886, he claimed that “The Sealed Angel” had been “composed entirely in Nikita’s hot and stuffy workroom.”d The icon painter who comes to help the masons in the story is named Sevastian, from Racheiskov’s patronymic; he has enormous hands like Racheiskov’s, and yet, like Racheiskov, he sometimes paints with brushes made of only three or four hairs. Much of the discourse on icon painting that plays so important a part in the story was noted down by Leskov from his talks with the master.