The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

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.”