The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

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 far 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: