The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

“As you wish,” I replied. “So, are you sure that you’re now dying?”

“Am I sure? I tell you, I’m almost gone!”

“Splendid,” I said, “but have you thought well about whether this grief is worth your expiring on account of it?”

“Of course it’s worth it; it’s worth a thousand roubles,” the dying man moaned.

“Right. Unfortunately,” I replied, “the play would hardly bring you more than a thousand roubles, and therefore …”

But the dying man did not let me finish: he quickly raised himself on the sofa and cried:

“What a vile way to reason! Kindly give me a thousand roubles and then you can reason all you like.”

“Why should I pay for someone else’s sin?” I said.

“And why should I be the loser?”

“Because, knowing how things go in our theaters, you described all sorts of titled persons in your play and presented them as each one worse and more banal than the other.”

“Ahh, so that’s your consolation! According to you, one must describe nothing but good people, but I describe what I see, brother, and all I see is filth.”

“Then something’s wrong with your eyesight.”

“Maybe so,” the dying man replied, now thoroughly angry, “but what am I to do if I see nothing but abomination in my own soul and in yours? And thereupon the Lord God will now help me turn from you to the wall and sleep with a peaceful conscience, and I’ll leave tomorrow despising all my native land and your consolations.”

And the sufferer’s prayer was answered: he “thereupon” had an excellent night’s sleep, and the next day I took him to the station; but then, as a result of his words, I myself was overcome by a gnawing anxiety.

“Can it be,” I thought, “that in my or his or any other Russian soul there really is nothing to be seen but trash? Can it be that all the goodness and kindness ever noticed by the artistic eye of other writers is simply stuff and nonsense? That is not only sad, it’s frightening. If, according to popular belief, no city can stand without three righteous men, how can the whole earth stand with nothing but the trash that lives in my soul and yours, dear reader?”

That was terrible and unbearable to me, and I went in search of righteous men, vowing that I would not rest until I had found at least that small number of three righteous men without whom “no city can stand.” But wherever I turned, whoever I asked, everyone answered me in the same way, that they had never seen any righteous men, because all men are sinful, but one or another of them had occasionally met good people. I began taking notes. Whether they’re righteous or unrighteous, I thought, I must collect all this and then try to see “what in it rises above the level of simple morality” and is therefore “holy to the Lord.”

These are some of my notes.

The number of righteous men in Leskov’s work went well beyond three, as the reader will see, but the cycle as such was never published and Leskov cut the foreword in later printings.

The Devil-Chase

(1879)

  1. bread and salt … metropolitan’s …: The offering of bread and salt was the traditional way of greeting important persons on their arrival. A metropolitan is an Orthodox bishop or archbishop in charge of churches in a major city or regional capital.

  2. Filaret’s catechism: See note 3 to “The Enchanted Wanderer.” Metropolitan Filaret’s catechism, written in the strict manner of Roman Catholic catechisms and first published in 1823, presented the fundamentals of Orthodox teaching. It was continually reprinted until 1917 and has been republished, to the dismay of many, since the collapse of the Soviet regime in the 1990s.

  3. the Yar: A famous restaurant, founded in 1826 and still in existence, located in the Petrovsky Park, which was then a suburb of Moscow.

  4. neither … them: See the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Luke 16:26 (“And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence”).

  5. the Black King in Freiligrath: Ferdinand Freiligrath (1810–76) was a German poet and liberal activist. In his poem “A Negro Chieftain,” a captured black chieftain, when forced to beat a drum at a fair, beats so furiously that he breaks the head.

  6. Walpurgisnacht: The eve of May 1, the day of St. Walburga, an eighth-century English missionary and martyr. On that night, according to German tradition going back to the seventeenth century, witches hold their sabbath on Mount Brocken, the highest of the Harz Mountains.

  7. Kuznetsky: Since the eighteenth century, Kuznetsky Most (literally “Blacksmith’s Bridge”) has been one of the most fashionable and expensive shopping streets in Moscow.

  8. the All-Glorious: An icon of the All-Glorious Mother of God in one of Moscow’s convents.

  9. the trepak: A fast Cossack dance in 2/4 time.

Deathless Golovan

(1880)