Initially, the work was a sketch from a series of female portraits, conceived at the end of 1864. In a letter to N. N. Strakhov, an employee and critic of the Epoch magazine, on December 7, 1864, N. Leskov writes: Volga) area. I propose to write twelve such essays...”
As for the rest of the essays, the idea of writing remained unfulfilled.
As for "Lady Macbeth ...", from an essay, according to the original idea of \u200b\u200ba local character, this work, when it was created, grew into an artistic masterpiece of world significance.
Katerina Izmailova is a "villain involuntarily", and not according to subjective data, a killer not by birth, but by the circumstances of her life. Being a slave of her own feelings, Katerina consistently overcomes a number of obstacles, each of which seems to her the last on the way to complete liberation and happiness. The persistence with which the heroine tries to subjugate circumstances to her will testifies to the originality and strength of her character. She stops at nothing, goes to the end in her terrible and, most importantly, useless struggle and dies, only having completely exhausted the remarkable supply of spiritual and vital forces released to her by nature.
Leskov, with a slight self-irony, expressed in the title of the story, as it were, points to the transfer of Shakespeare's character to a "lower" social sphere.
At the same time, self-irony is a purely Leskovian feature of social satire, deliberately used by the writer, giving it an original coloring within the framework of the Gogol direction of Russian literature.
Pikhter - a large wicker basket with a bell for carrying hay and other livestock feed.
Quit steward - a headman from the peasants, appointed by the landowner to collect quitrent.
Yasman the falcon is a daring fellow.
Kisa - a leather tightening bag, purse.
Paterik - a collection of the lives of the venerable fathers.
Throne - the patronal, or temple, holiday - the day of memory of the event or the "saint", in whose name this temple was built.
Forshlyag (German) - a small melodic figure (of one or more sounds) that adorns the melody, trill. Local - common.
Job is a biblical righteous man who meekly endured the trials sent down to him by God.
“Outside the window it flickers in the shadows ...” - an excerpt from Ya. P. Polonsky’s poem “The Challenge”, not quite accurately conveyed, in the original - not “hollow”, but “cloak”.
Sources:
- Leskov N. S. Novels and stories / Comp. and note. L. M. Krupchanova.- M.: Mosk. worker, 1981.- 463 p.
The post was inspired by the reading of Nikolai Leskov's story "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District".
Summary of Leskov's story "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District"
The main character of the story is Katerina Lvovna Izmailova, a young girl married to a wealthy merchant Zinovy Borisovich Izmailov. Zinovy Borisovich is much older, works a lot and does not spoil his wife much. Katerina Lvovna lives without special joys and sorrows.
Once, when Zinovy Borisovich was on a long absence (they were repairing a mill), Katerina Lvovna became interested in her husband's young and handsome clerk Sergei. She succumbs to his pressure and falls in love with him. Sergey becomes her passion. Katerina Lvovna's father-in-law catches Sergei, who comes down from Katerina Ivanovna's bedroom, punishes him and locks him in the basement. Katerina Lvovna poisons her father-in-law and frees Sergei. The death of the father-in-law did not arouse suspicion, and the lovers lived on, not hiding much.
Meanwhile, Zinovy Borisovich is returning from his absence. He traveled a long way on foot to try to get the lovers together, but he didn't succeed. He begins to reproach his wife for infidelity, and the lovers kill him and hide the body in the basement. After that, they begin to live together openly, Katerina Lvovna takes over the management of her husband's enterprise. She soon becomes pregnant.
The happiness of Katerina Lvovna and Sergei was short-lived: Zinovy Borisovich had a relative claiming a part of the fortune. This relative was Fedya's nephew, who lives with his grandmother. Katerina Lvovna and Sergei are strangling him so that he does not claim the inheritance. Behind this occupation they are caught by people. Lovers are tried and exiled to hard labor.
For many days the criminals walk along the stage. Katerina Lvovna is trying to be close to Sergei, but he has completely cooled off towards her. The situation of Katerina Lvovna is worsened by the fact that Sergei begins to court other convicts, openly laughing and mocking Katerina Lvovna. The same, when crossing the Volga, grabs her rival and drags her under water. Both drown.
Meaning
Leskov's story "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District" tells about the strong and passionate love of a young woman. This passion swept away everything in its path: decency, morality, human life. Everything started well, Katerina Lvovna had everything to live an ordinary, unremarkable life. This suited her until the moment she found out what crazy passion and love are. In the end, it turned out to be a completely unsightly and gloomy finale, which gave everyone what they deserved.
Conclusion
If I remember correctly, Leskov's story "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District" was part of the school curriculum. It was at school that I read it for the first time. Now, a decade and a half later, I re-read it with great pleasure. I highly recommend you too!
Chapter first
Katerina Lvovna was a very pleasant woman in appearance, she was twenty-four years old. De-vushka was married to a wealthy merchant Izmailov. Their family consisted of Boris Timofeevich's widowed father-in-law, Katerina's husband Zinovy Borisovich, and Katerina Lvovna herself. The couple had no children. Boredom in the merchant's house more than once made a woman sad, her childlessness upset her. Katerina Lvovna was an ardent woman and accustomed to simplicity and freedom. Katerina Izmailova did not like to read, and there were almost no books in the house. For five years she lived the most boring life with an unkind husband, but no one paid attention to this boredom.
Chapter Two
In the sixth year of Katerina's marriage, the mill dam broke through at the Izmailovs, and the woman yearned for days at home alone. Once she drew attention to the merchant clerk Sergei. He was handsome and, upon meeting, began to shower Katerina Lvovna with compliments. From the cook Aksinya, Katerina Lvovna learned that Sergei had previously worked for the Kopchonovs, and he had an affair with the hostess herself.
Chapter Three
Sergei comes to Katerina and says that without love his life is boring. The clerk tries to hug Katerina, but she weakly resists. Unable to resist hot kisses, a woman cheats on her husband.
Chapter Four
Boris Timofeevich sees the clerk as he descends the pole from Katerina Lvovna's window. He takes Sergei to the pantry and beats him with a whip. The clerk did not even groan, but he ate half of the sleeve of his shirt with his teeth. Boris Timofeevich decides to lock the man in the pantry until his back heals. Katerina begs her father-in-law to let Sergei go, which makes him even angrier and promises to flog the woman in the stable upon her son's arrival.
Chapter Five
Katerina Lvovna puts rat poison into the porridge with mushrooms, after which the old man dies. Everyone believed in the natural death of Boris Timofeevich and hastily buried him. The woman rescues Sergei from the pantry and no longer hides their romance from anyone.
Chapter six
In a dream, Katerina Izmailova imagines that a big cat is crawling between them and Sergei.
The woman asks Aksinya what this dream means. The cook replies that someone will beat her up or "something else like that will come out." Sergei continues to win the heart of the hostess, convincing her of his sincere and passionate love. Katerina Lvovna tells her beloved that if he ever cheats on her, then she will not part with him alive.
Chapter Seven
Katerina again dreams of a cat, which this time starts talking to her: “What a cat,” he says, “I am! Why on earth! You are very clever, Katerina Lvovna, you argue that I am not a cat at all, but I am the eminent merchant Boris Timofeich. The woman hears someone climb over the gate and the dogs bark. She hastily hides Sergei in the bedroom. Zinovy Borisovich goes to the door leading to the matrimonial bedroom and listens. Not catching a rustle, he decides to knock.
Chapter Eight
The husband reports that he has heard rumors about his wife's infidelities. Katerina, together with Sergei, hit Zinovy Borisovich on the head with a heavy cast candlestick, and then strangle him. The victim is hidden in the cellar and all traces of the crime are destroyed.
Chapter Nine
They missed Katerina Lvovna's husband, but all searches were unsuccessful. Katerina Izmailova announces that she is expecting a child from her husband, and she is allowed to inherit, stopping the search for Zinovy Borisovich. But another heir is announced - Izmailov's nephew Fyodor Lyamin, who turned out to be a small boy and arrived with his old aunt. Sergei begins to complain to his beloved that because of this boy he has become the most unfortunate person.
Chapter Ten
The young merchant's wife begins to understand that the boy is a real obstacle to her upcoming happy life with her beloved: “How is it? Why should I really lose my capital through him? How much I suffered, how much sin I took on my soul ... and he came without any hassle and takes it from me ... And it would be good for a person, otherwise a child, a boy ... "
Chapter Eleven
On a holiday, the old woman goes to church, and Katerina Izmailova calmly suffocates the boy with a pillow.
Chapter Twelve
Several men watch the murder through the gap between the shutters, and a crowd begins to break into the house. Sergei confesses to all the murders and calls Katerina his accomplice. The woman confesses everything and says that she killed for the sake of her beloved. Zinovy Borisovich is removed from the cellar and buried. Criminals are punished with whips and exiled to hard labor. Having given birth to a child in a prison hospital, Katerina Izmailova refuses him.
Chapter Thirteenmaterial from the site
The child is given to be raised by the sister of Boris Timofeevich, since he is considered the legitimate heir of the Izmailovs. Sergei went to hard labor in the same party with the hostess, which made the latter incredibly happy. She gives money to stage underers in order to be at least a little with her beloved, to talk to him. Sergey calls this stupidity and behaves rather coldly towards Katerina. Along with the heroes in the party are the luxurious woman Fiona and the seventeen-year-old blonde Sonetka.
Chapter Fourteen
Sergei is cheating on Katerina Lvovna with Fiona. The deceived woman finds out about this and feels that she loves the betrayer even more. Fiona says that she and Sergei have no love, and this is confirmed by his courtship of Sonetka. Sergei makes an attempt to reconcile with Katerina and complains about the cold. The woman gives her beloved stockings.
Chapter fifteen
Katerina Izmailova sees her stockings on Sonetka. Sergey hugs and kisses the new object of adoration in front of the whole party. Katerina Lvovna has become the subject of ridicule, but Fiona stands up for her. When the prisoners, soaked under the snow, were waiting for the ferry, Katerina sees in the Volga the faces of the people she killed. Grabbing Sonetka by the legs, she throws herself over the side of the ferry with her. For a while, both women appear in the waves, but then they are gone.
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A story about a remarkable Russian character and the disastrous consequences of unbridled passion, the first story of a woman - a serial killer in Russian literature.
comments: Varvara Babitskaya
What is this book about?
Bored young merchant Katerina Izmailova, whose violent nature finds no use in the quiet empty rooms of a merchant's house, starts an affair with a handsome clerk Sergei and, for the sake of this love, commits terrible crimes with amazing composure. Calling "Lady Macbeth ..." an essay, Leskov, as it were, refuses fiction for the sake of the truth of life, creates the illusion of documentary. In fact, "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District" is more than a sketch from life: it is an action-packed short story, a tragedy, an anthropological study, and a household story imbued with comedy.
Nikolay Leskov. 1864
When was it written?
Author's dating - "November 26. Kyiv". Leskov worked on "Lady Macbeth ..." in the fall of 1864, visiting his brother in an apartment at Kiev University: he wrote at night, locking himself in a room in a student punishment cell. He later recalled: “But when I wrote my Lady Macbeth, under the influence of overwrought nerves and loneliness, I almost reached delirium. At times I felt unbearably terrified, my hair stood on end, I froze at the slightest rustle, which I made myself by moving my foot or turning my neck. Those were hard moments that I will never forget. Since then, I have avoided describing such horror" 1 How Leskov worked on "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District". Sat. articles for the production of the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District by the Leningrad State Academic Maly Theatre. L., 1934. .
It was assumed that "Lady Macbeth ..." will mark the beginning of a whole series of essays "only some typical female characters of our (Oka and part of the Volga) area"; of all such essays about representatives of different classes Leskov intended to write twelve 2 - “each in the amount of one to two sheets, eight from the folk and merchant life and four from the nobility. “Lady Macbeth” (merchant) is followed by “Graziella” (noblewoman), then “Mayorsha Polivodova” (old-world landowner), then “Fevronya Rokhovna” (peasant schismatic) and “Grandmother Bloshka” (midwife). But this cycle never came to fruition.
The gloomy coloring of the story reflected the difficult state of mind of Leskov, who at that time was practically subjected to literary ostracism.
On May 28, 1862, fires broke out in the center of St. Petersburg at Apraksin and Shchukin courtyards, and markets were burning. In an atmosphere of panic, rumors blamed nihilist students for the arson. Leskov made an editorial in Severnaya pchela urging the police to conduct a thorough investigation and name the perpetrators in order to stop the rumors. The progressive public took this text as a direct denunciation; scandal erupted and "Northern Bee" Pro-government newspaper published in St. Petersburg from 1825 to 1864. Founded by Faddey Bulgarin. At first, the newspaper adhered to democratic views (it published the works of Alexander Pushkin and Kondraty Ryleev), but after the Decembrist uprising, it dramatically changed its political course: it fought against progressive magazines like Sovremennik and Otechestvennye Zapiski, and published denunciations. Bulgarin himself wrote in almost all sections of the newspaper. In the 1860s, the new publisher of the Northern Bee, Pavel Usov, tried to make the newspaper more liberal, but was forced to close the publication due to a small number of subscribers. sent an unsuccessful correspondent on a long business trip abroad: Lithuania, Austrian Poland, the Czech Republic, Paris. In this semi-exile, the irritated Leskov writes the novel Nowhere, an evil caricature of the nihilists, and on his return in 1864 he publishes it in "Library for reading" The first large-circulation magazine in Russia, published monthly from 1834 to 1865 in St. Petersburg. The publisher of the magazine was the bookseller Alexander Smirdin, the editor was the writer Osip Senkovsky. The "Library" was designed mainly for the provincial reader, in the capital it was criticized for its protection and superficiality of judgments. By the end of the 1840s, the magazine's popularity began to decline. In 1856, the critic Alexander Druzhinin was called to replace Senkovsky, who worked for the magazine for four years. under the pseudonym M. Stebnitsky, thereby radically worsening his only emerging literary reputation: “Nowhere” is the fault of my modest fame and the abyss of the most serious insults for me. My opponents wrote and are still ready to repeat that this novel was written by order III Divisions The third branch of His Imperial Majesty's Own Chancellery is a police department dealing with political affairs. It was created in 1826, after the Decembrist uprising, headed by Alexander Benckendorff. In 1880, Section III was abolished, and the affairs of the department were transferred to the Police Department, formed under the Ministry of the Interior. ».
How is it written?
Like a thrilling novel. The density of action, the twisted plot, where corpses are heaped up and in each chapter a new twist that does not give the reader a break, will become Leskov's patented technique, due to which, in the eyes of many critics who valued ideas and trends in fiction, Leskov for a long time remained a vulgar "anecdotist ". "Lady Macbeth ..." looks almost like a comic book or, if without anachronisms, like a popular print - Leskov consciously relied on this tradition.
In "Lady Macbeth ..." that "excessiveness", pretentiousness, "linguistic foolishness", in which modern criticism of Leskov reproached him in connection with "Lefty", is not yet evident. In other words, the famous Leskovsky tale is not very pronounced in the early essay, but its roots are visible.
"Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District" in our today's ideas is a story, but the author's genre definition is an essay. At that time, artistic things were also called essays, but this word is inextricably linked in the mind of the reader of the 19th century with the definition of “physiological”, with journalism, journalism, non-fiction. Leskov insisted that he knew the people firsthand, like democratic writers, but close and in person and showed them what they are. The famous Leskovsky tale also grows out of this author's attitude - according to Boris's definition Eichenbaum 3 Eikhenbaum B. M. Leskov and modern prose // Eichenbaum B. M. About literature: Works of different years. Moscow: Soviet writer, 1987. , "a form of narrative prose that, in its vocabulary, syntax, and selection of intonations, reveals an attitude towards the oral speech of the narrator." Hence - lively and different, depending on the estate and psychology, the speech of the characters. The author's own intonation is dispassionate, Leskov writes a report on criminal events, without giving moral assessments - except for allowing himself an ironic remark or giving free rein to lyricism in a poetic love scene. “This is a very powerful study of the criminal passion of a woman and the cheerful, cynical callousness of her lover. Cold merciless light pours on everything that happens and everything is told with a strong "naturalistic" objectivity" 4 Mirsky D.S. Leskov // Mirsky D.S. History of Russian literature from ancient times to 1925 / Per. from English. R. Grain. London: Overseas Publications Interchange Ltd, 1992. .
What influenced her?
First of all - actually "Macbeth": Leskov definitely knew Shakespeare's play - the four-volume "Complete Collection of Dramatic Works ..." by Shakespeare, published in 1865-1868 by Nikolai Gerbel and Nikolai Nekrasov, is still kept in Leskov's library in Orel; plays, including Macbeth, are punctuated with many Leskian litter 5 Afonin L. N. Books from the Leskov Library in the State Museum of I. S. Turgenev // Literary Heritage. Volume 87. M.: Nauka, 1977. . And although "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District" was written a year before the release of the first volume of this edition, "Macbeth" in the Russian translation by Andrei Kroneberg was published in 1846 - this translation was widely known.
Merchant life was well known to Leskov due to his mixed origin: his father was a modest official who received personal nobility by rank, his mother was from a wealthy landowner family, his paternal grandfather was a priest, his maternal grandmother was from merchants. As his early biographer wrote: “From early childhood, he was under the influence of all these four estates, and in the person of courtyard people and nannies, he was still under the strong influence of the fifth, peasant estate: his nanny was a Moscow soldier, his brother’s nanny, whose stories he heard, — serf" 6 Sementkovsky R. Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov. Full coll. cit., 2nd ed. In 12 vols. T. I. St. Petersburg: Edition of A. F. Marx, 1897. S. IX-X. . As Maxim Gorky believed, “Leskov is a writer with the deepest roots among the people, he is completely untouched by any foreign influences" 7 Gebel V. A. N. S. Leskov. In the creative lab. Moscow: Soviet writer, 1945. .
In artistic terms, Leskov, forcing the characters to speak in a folk language and only their own language, undoubtedly studied with Gogol. Leskov himself said about his literary sympathies: “When I had the opportunity to read I. S. Turgenev’s Notes of a Hunter for the first time, I trembled all over from the truth of ideas and immediately understood: what is called art. Everything else, except for one more Ostrovsky, seemed to me done and wrong.
Interest in lubok, folklore, anecdote and all sorts of mysticism, which was reflected in "Lady Macbeth ...", writer must 8 Gebel V. A. N. S. Leskov. In the creative lab. Moscow: Soviet writer, 1945. also to the now less famous writers of fiction - ethnographers, philologists and Slavophiles: Nicholas Nikolai Vasilyevich Uspensky (1837-1889) - writer, cousin of the writer Gleb Uspensky. He worked in the Sovremennik magazine, was friends with Nekrasov and Chernyshevsky, and shared revolutionary democratic views. After a conflict with the editors of Sovremennik and leaving the magazine, he worked as a teacher, from time to time published his stories and novels in Otechestvennye Zapiski and Vestnik Evropy. After the death of his wife, Ouspensky wandered, gave street concerts, drank a lot, and eventually committed suicide. And Gleb Uspensky Gleb Ivanovich Uspensky (1843-1902) - writer. He published in Tolstoy's pedagogical journal Yasnaya Polyana, Sovremennik, worked most of his career in Otechestvennye Zapiski. He was the author of essays on the urban poor, workers, peasants, in particular the essays "The Morals of Rasteryaeva Street" and the cycle of stories "Ruin". In the 1870s he went abroad, where he became close to the populists. Towards the end of his life, Ouspensky suffered from nervous disorders, spent the last ten years in a hospital for the mentally ill. , Alexander Veltman Alexander Fomich Veltman (1800-1870) - writer, linguist, archaeologist. For twelve years he served in Bessarabia, was a military topographer, participated in the Russian-Turkish war of 1828. After his retirement, he took up literature - Veltman was one of the first to use the time travel technique in novels. He studied ancient Russian literature, translated The Tale of Igor's Campaign. The last years of his life served as director of the Armory Chamber of the Moscow Kremlin. , Vladimir Dal Vladimir Ivanovich Dal (1801-1872) - writer, ethnographer. He served as a military doctor, an official for special assignments with the Governor-General of the Orenburg Territory, participated in the Khiva campaign of 1839. From the 1840s he was engaged in literature and ethnography - he published collections of stories and proverbs. For most of his life he worked on the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language, for which he was awarded the Lomonosov Prize and the title of academician. , Melnikov-Pechersky Pavel Ivanovich Melnikov (pseudonym - Pechersky; 1818-1883) - writer, ethnographer. He served as a history teacher in Nizhny Novgorod. In the early 1840s, he became friends with Vladimir Dal and entered the service of the Ministry of the Interior. Melnikov was considered one of the main experts on the Old Believers, published in the journals "Letters on the Schism", in which he advocated giving the schismatics full rights. Author of the books "In the Forests" and "On the Mountains", novels about the life of the Trans-Volga Old Believer merchants. .
Unlike Katerina Izmailova, who did not read patericons, Leskov constantly relied on hagiographic and patristic literature. Finally, he wrote his first essays under a fresh impression of service in the criminal chamber and journalistic investigations.
Lubok "Kazan cat, Astrakhan mind, Siberian mind..." Russia, 18th century
Lubok "Spin, my spin". Russia, around 1850
Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images
In No. 1 of "Epoch" - the magazine of the Dostoevsky brothers - for 1865. The essay received its final title only in the 1867 edition of M. Stebnitsky's Tales, Essays and Stories, for which the magazine version was heavily revised. For the essay, Leskov asked Dostoevsky for 65 rubles per sheet and “one hundred stitched prints for each essay” (author's copies), but he never received the fee, although he repeatedly reminded the publisher of this. As a result, Dostoevsky gave Leskov a promissory note, which, however, the impoverished writer, however, did not present for receipt out of delicacy, knowing that Dostoevsky himself found himself in difficult financial circumstances.
Fedor Dostoevsky. 1872 Photograph by Wilhelm Lauffert. Leskov's story was first published in Epoch, the journal of the Dostoevsky brothers.
Epoch Magazine, February 1865
Mikhail Dostoevsky. 1860s.
How was it received?
By the time Lady Macbeth was released, Leskov was actually declared persona non grata in Russian literature because of the novel Nowhere. Almost simultaneously with Leskov's essay in "Russian word" Monthly magazine published from 1859 to 1866 in St. Petersburg. Founded by Count Grigory Kushelev-Bezborodko. With the arrival of editor Grigory Blagosvetlov and critic Dmitry Pisarev at Russkoye Slovo, the moderately liberal literary magazine turned into a radical social and political publication. The popularity of the magazine was largely due to Pisarev's scathing articles. Russkoye Slovo was closed simultaneously with Sovremennik, after Karakozov's assassination attempt on Alexander II. Dmitry Pisarev’s article “A Walk in the Gardens of Russian Literature” appeared - from the chamber of the Peter and Paul Fortress, a revolutionary critic angrily asked: “1) Is there now in Russia - apart from the Russky Vestnik - at least one magazine that would dare to print something on its pages issued by Mr. Stebnitsky and signed with his name? 2) Is there at least one honest writer in Russia who will be so careless and indifferent to his reputation that he will agree to work in a magazine that adorns itself with short stories and novels by Mr. Stebnitsky? 9 Pisarev D. I. A walk through the gardens of Russian literature // Pisarev D. I. Literary criticism in 3 volumes. T. 2. Articles of 1864-1865. L.: Artist. lit., 1981.
Democratic criticism of the 1860s, in principle, refused to evaluate Leskov's work from an artistic point of view. Reviews of "Lady Macbeth ..." did not appear either in 1865, when the magazine was published, or in 1867, when the essay was reprinted in the collection "Tales, Essays and Stories by M. Stebnitsky", or in 1873, when this publication was repeated. Not in the 1890s, shortly before the death of the writer, when his "Complete Works" in 12 volumes was published by the publishing house Alexey Suvorin and brought Leskov belated recognition from readers. Not in the 1900s, when the essay was published Adolf Marx Adolf Fedorovich Marx (1838-1904) - book publisher. At the age of 21, he moved from Poland to Russia, at first he taught foreign languages, served as a clerk. In 1870, he founded the massive weekly magazine Niva, and in 1896, his own printing house, where, among other things, he published collections of Russian and foreign classics. After the death of Marx, the publishing house turned into a joint-stock company, most of whose shares were bought by the publisher Ivan Sytin. attached to "Niva" Mass weekly magazine, published from 1869 to 1918 in the St. Petersburg publishing house of Adolf Marx. The magazine was aimed at family reading. Since 1894, free supplements began to appear for the Niva, among which collections of Russian and foreign writers were published. Due to the low subscription price and high-quality content, the publication became a great success with readers - in 1894, the annual circulation of the Niva reached 170,000 copies. . The only critical response is found in the devastating article by Saltykov-Shchedrin about the “Tales of M. Stebnitsky”, and it sounds like this: “... In the story “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”, the author talks about one woman - Fiona and says that she never refused anyone to a man, and then he adds: “Such women are highly valued in robber gangs, in prison parties and social democratic communes.” All these additions about revolutionaries tearing off everyone’s noses, about Baba Fiona and about nihilist officials are scattered here and there in Mr. Stebnitsky’s book without any connection and serve only as proof that the author from time to time has some special kind seizures…” 10 Saltykov-Shchedrin M.E. Novels, essays and stories by M. Stebnitsky // Saltykov-Shchedrin M.E. Collected works: in 20 volumes. T. 9. M .: Khudozh. lit., 1970.
"Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District". Directed by Roman Balayan. 1989
Boris Kustodiev. Illustration for "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District". 1923
“Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” over time was not only appreciated, but also became one of the most famous Leskovsky works, along with “Lefty” and “The Enchanted Wanderer”, both in Russia and in the West. The return to the reader of "Lady Macbeth ..." began with a brochure, which in 1928 was published by the Red Proletarian printing house in a thirty-thousandth edition in the series "Cheap Library of Classics"; in the preface, the story of Katerina Izmailova was interpreted as "a desperate protest of a strong female personality against the stuffy prison of a Russian merchant's house." In 1930 the Leningrad Writers' Publishing House A publishing house founded on the initiative of Leningrad writers in 1927. It published books by Konstantin Fedin, Marietta Shaginyan, Vsevolod Ivanov, Mikhail Koltsov, Boris Eikhenbaum. In 1934, the publishing house merged with the Moscow Association of Writers, on this basis the publishing house "Soviet Writer" arose. publishes "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District" with illustrations by Boris Kustodiev (already deceased by that time). After that, "Lady Macbeth ..." is reprinted in the USSR continuously.
However, we note that Kustodiev created his illustrations back in 1922-1923; Katerina Izmailova had other admirers in the 1920s. So, in 1927, the constructivist poet Nikolai Ushakov Nikolai Petrovich Ushakov (1899-1973) - poet, writer, translator. He spent most of his life in Kyiv, writing poetry, feuilletons, film scripts, and articles about literature. He gained fame thanks to the poetry collection "Spring of the Republic", published in 1927. He translated into Russian the works of Ukrainian poets and writers - Ivan Franko, Lesya Ukrainka, Mikhail Kotsyubinsky. wrote the poem "Lady Macbeth", a bloody story of a forester with an epigraph from Leskov, which can not be cited:
You are alive, no doubt
but why did they bring you
in a sleepy trap
fears,
shadows,
furniture?
And also the ending:
It's not a fight at the gate,
lady -
I don't want to hide,
then follow us
lady,
rides
mounted police.
In 1930, after reading a Leskovsky essay republished in Leningrad and especially inspired by Kustodiev's illustrations, Dmitri Shostakovich decided to write an opera based on the plot of Lady Macbeth.... After the premiere in 1934, the opera was a stormy success not only in the USSR (however, it was removed from the repertoire in January 1936, when the famous article in Pravda appeared - "Muddle instead of music"), but also in the USA and Europe, providing the long popularity of the Leskovian heroine in the West. The first translation of the essay - German - was published in 1921 in Munich; by the 1970s, Lady Macbeth had already been translated into all the major world languages.
The first film adaptation of the essay that has not been preserved was the silent film directed by Alexander Arkatov Katerina the Murderer (1916). It was followed, among others, by Andrzej Wajda's Siberian Lady Macbeth (1962), Roman Balayan's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1989) starring Natalia Andreichenko and Alexander Abdulov, Valery Todorovsky's Moscow Evenings (1994), which moved the action to modernity, and the British film Lady Macbeth (2016), where director William Allroyd transplanted a Leskian plot into Victorian soil.
The literary influence of "Lady Macbeth ..." is difficult to separate from Leskov's line in Russian prose as a whole, but, for example, the researcher found an unexpected trace of it in Nabokov's "Lolita", where, in his opinion, a love scene in a garden under a blooming apple tree echoes: "Grid shadows and bunnies, blurring reality, there is clearly from "Lady Macbeth…" 11 , and this is much more significant than the analogy that suggests itself Sonnetka - nymphet.
Lady Macbeth. Directed by William Oldroyd. 2016
"Katerina Izmailova". Directed by Mikhail Shapiro. 1966
"Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District". Directed by Roman Balayan. 1989
"Moscow Nights". Directed by Valery Todorovsky. 1994
Is the essay "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District" based on real events?
Rather, on observations of real life, which Leskov owed to his unusually colorful career for a writer. Orphaned at the age of 18, Leskov was forced to earn a living himself and since then served in the Oryol Criminal Chamber, in the recruitment department of the Kiev Treasury Chamber, in the office of the Kiev Governor-General, in a private shipping company, in the management of estates, in the ministries of public education and state property. Working in the commercial firm of his relative, the Russified Englishman Alexander Shkott, Leskov traveled on business to almost the entire European part of Russia. “To this cause,” the writer said, “I owe literary creativity. Here I received the entire store of knowledge of the people and the country. Statistical, economic, everyday observations, accumulated in those years, then sufficed for decades of literary comprehension. The writer himself called "Essays on the distillery industry (Penza province)", published in 1861 in "Domestic Notes" A literary magazine published in St. Petersburg from 1818 to 1884. Founded by writer Pavel Svinin. In 1839, the magazine passed to Andrei Kraevsky, and Vissarion Belinsky headed the critical department. Lermontov, Herzen, Turgenev, Sollogub were published in Otechestvennye Zapiski. After part of the staff left for Sovremennik, Kraevsky handed over the magazine to Nekrasov in 1868. After the death of the latter, the publication was headed by Saltykov-Shchedrin. In the 1860s, Leskov, Garshin, Mamin-Sibiryak published in it. The magazine was closed by order of the chief censor and former employee of the publication Evgeny Feoktistov. .
Katerina Izmailova did not have a direct prototype, but Leskov’s childhood memory was preserved, which could tell him the plot: “Once an old neighbor who had lived for seventy years and went to rest under a blackcurrant bush on a summer day, an impatient daughter-in-law poured boiling sealing wax into her ear ... I remember how he was buried... His ear fell off... Then on Ilyinka (in the square) "the executioner tormented her." She was young and everyone wondered what she was white…” 12 Leskov A. N. The life of Nikolai Leskov: According to his personal, family and non-family records and memories: In 2 vols. T. 1. M .: Khudozh. lit., 1984. S. 474. - a trace of this impression can be seen in the description of "Katerina Lvovna's naked white back" during the execution.
Another possible source of inspiration can be seen in a much later letter from Leskov, which deals with the plot of the story. Alexey Suvorin Aleksey Sergeevich Suvorin (1834-1912) - writer, playwright, publisher. He gained fame thanks to the Sunday feuilletons published in the St. Petersburg Vedomosti. In 1876, he bought the Novoe Vremya newspaper, soon founded his own bookstore and printing house, in which he published the reference books Russian Calendar, All Russia, and the Cheap Library series of books. Suvorin's famous dramas include Tatyana Repina, Medea, Dmitry the Pretender and Princess Xenia. "Tragedy over trifles": the landowner, having unwittingly committed a crime, is forced to become the mistress of a footman - her accomplice, who blackmails her. Leskov, praising the story, adds that it could be improved: “She could tell in three lines how she gave herself to a lackey for the first time ...<…>She had something like a passion for perfume that had never been before ... she kept wiping her hands (like Lady Macbeth) so that she would not smell of his nasty touch.<…>In the Oryol province there was something of this kind. The lady fell into the hands of her coachman and went insane, wiping herself with perfume so that she “did not smell of horse sweat.”<…>Suvorin's lackey is not felt enough by the reader - his tyranny over the victim almost does not appear, and therefore there is no compassion for this woman, which the author certainly had to try. summon…” 13 . In this letter of 1885, it is difficult not to hear the echo of Lesk's own essay, and the incident that occurred in Orel, he should have known from his youth.
Mtsensk. Early 20th century
What is in Katerina Lvovna from Lady Macbeth?
“Sometimes such characters are set in our places that no matter how many years have passed since meeting with them, you will never remember some of them without spiritual awe,” Leskov begins the story of the merchant’s wife Katerina Lvovna Izmailova, whom “our nobles, with someone's easy word, they began to call ... Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District". This nickname, which gave the name to the essay, sounds like an oxymoron - the author emphasizes the ironic sound, attributing the expression not to himself, but to an impressionable public. Here it should be noted that Shakespeare's names were in general use in an ironic context: there was, for example, Dmitry Lensky's vaudeville operetta "Hamlet Sidorovich and Ophelia Kuzminishna" (1873), the parody vaudeville "Othello on the Sands, or Petersburg Arab" (1847) by Pyotr Karatygin ) and Ivan Turgenev's story "Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky district" (1849).
But despite the author's mockery, constantly breaking through in the essay, by the end of his comparison of the county merchant's wife with the ancient Scottish queen proves its seriousness, legitimacy, and even leaves the reader in doubt - which of the two is more terrible.
It is believed that the idea of the plot could have been given to Leskov by a case from the time of his childhood in Orel, where a young merchant's wife killed her father-in-law by pouring melted sealing wax into his ear while sleeping in the garden. As Maya points out Kucherskaya 14 Kucherskaya M.A. On some features of the architectonics of Leskov's essay "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District" // International scientific collection "Leskoviana. Creativity N. S. Leskov. T. 2. Orel: (b.i.), 2009. , this exotic method of murder "reminiscent of the scene of the murder of Hamlet's father from Shakespeare's play, and, perhaps, it was this detail that prompted Leskov to think of comparing his heroine with Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, pointing out that quite Shakespearean passions can play out in the Mtsensk district."
Again, the same Russian boredom, the boredom of a merchant's house, from which it is fun, they say, even to hang yourself
Nikolay Leskov
Leskov took from Shakespeare not only the common name of the heroine. There is a common plot here - the first murder inevitably entails others, and blind passion (lust for power or voluptuousness) launches an unstoppable process of spiritual corruption, leading to death. Here is a fantastic Shakespearean entourage with ghosts personifying an unclean conscience, which Leskov turns into a fat cat: “You are very clever, Katerina Lvovna, you argue that I am not a cat at all, but I am an eminent merchant Boris Timofeich. I’ve only become so bad now that all my intestines inside have cracked from the bride’s treat.
A careful comparison of the works reveals many textual similarities in them.
For example, the scene in which the crime of Katerina and Sergei is revealed seems to be entirely composed of Shakespearean allusions. “The walls of a quiet house that hid so many crimes shook from deafening blows: the windows rattled, the floors swayed, chains of hanging lamps trembled and wandered along the walls in fantastic shadows.<…>It seemed that some unearthly forces shook the sinful house to the ground "- compare with Shakespeare's description of the night when he was killed Duncan 15 Here and below, Shakespeare's quotations are based on the translation by Andrey Kroneberg, probably the most famous Leskov. :
The night was stormy; above our bedroom
Demolished the pipe; flew through the air
A dull wail and deathly wheezing;
A terrible voice predicted war
Fire and confusion. Owl, faithful companion
Unfortunate times, shouted all night.
The earth is said to have trembled.
But Sergey rushes to run at full speed in superstitious horror, cracking his forehead against the door: “Zinovy Borisych, Zinovy Borisych! he muttered, flying headlong down the stairs and dragging Katerina Lvovna, who had been knocked down, after him.<…>Here it flew over us with an iron sheet. Katerina Lvovna, with her usual composure, replies: “Fool! get up you fool!" This creepy clowning worthy of Charlie Chaplin is a variation on the theme of a feast, where the ghost of Banquo appears to Macbeth, and the lady urges her husband to come to his senses.
At the same time, however, Leskov makes an interesting gender permutation in the characters of his heroes. If Macbeth, a capable student, once taught by his wife, subsequently floods Scotland with blood already without her participation, then Sergey throughout his criminal career is entirely led by Katerina Lvovna, who “turns into a hybrid of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, while the lover becomes a murder weapon:” Katerina Lvovna bent down, squeezed with her hands Sergei's hands, which lay on her husband's throat" 16 . Perverse self-pity pushes Katerina Lvovna to kill the boy Fedya: “For what, in fact, should I lose my capital through him? I suffered so much, I took so much sin on my soul. Macbeth is guided by the same logic, forced to commit more and more new murders so that the first one does not turn out to be “senseless” and other people's children do not inherit the throne: “So for the descendants of Banquo / I defiled my soul?”
Lady Macbeth remarks that she would have stabbed Duncan herself, "If he weren't / In his sleep he looks so sharply like his father." Katerina Izmailova, sending her father-in-law to the forefathers (“This is a kind of tyrannicide, which can also be considered as parricide" 17 Zhery K. Sensuality and Crime in N. S. Leskova's "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District" // Russian Literature. 2004. No. 1. S. 102-110. ), does not hesitate: “She suddenly turned around in the full breadth of her awakened nature and became so determined that it was impossible to appease her.” The same resolute at first, Lady Macbeth goes crazy and, in delirium, cannot wipe imaginary blood stains from her hands. Not so with Katerina Lvovna, who routinely cleans the floorboards from the samovar: "the stain was washed out without any trace."
It is she, like Macbeth, who cannot say “Amen”, “wants to remember the prayer and moves her lips, and her lips whisper: “how we walked with you, we sat through the long autumn nights, with a fierce death from the wide world people were escorted”. But unlike Lady Macbeth, who committed suicide because of remorse, Izmailova does not know remorse, and uses suicide as an opportunity to take her rival with her. So Leskov, comically reducing Shakespearean images, at the same time makes his heroine surpass the prototype in everything, turning her into the mistress of her own destiny.
The county merchant's wife not only ranks with Shakespeare's tragic heroine, she is more Lady Macbeth than Lady Macbeth herself.
Nikolay Mylnikov. Portrait of Nadezhda Ivanovna Soboleva. 1830s. Yaroslavl Art Museum
Merchant wife. Photographer William Carrick. From the series "Russian types". 1850s–70s
How was the women's question reflected in "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District"?
The sixties of the XIX century, when “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” appeared, were a time of heated discussion of women's emancipation, including sexual emancipation - as Irina Paperno writes, “The Liberation of a Woman” was understood as freedom in general, and freedom in personal relationships (emotional emancipation and the destruction of the foundations of traditional marriage) was identified with social liberation humanity" 18 Paperno I. Semiotics of behavior: Nikolai Chernyshevsky is a man of the era of realism. M .: New Literary Review, 1996. S. 55. .
Leskov devoted several articles to the women's issue in 1861: his position was ambivalent. On the one hand, Leskov liberally argued that the refusal to recognize a woman's equal rights with a man is absurd and only leads to "the incessant violation by women of many social laws through anarchist" 19 Leskov N.S. Russian women and emancipation // Russian speech. No. 344, 346. June 1 and 8. , and defended women's education, the right to adequately earn a piece of bread and follow their calling. On the other hand, he denied the very existence of the "women's issue" - in a bad marriage, men and women suffer equally, but the remedy for this is the Christian ideal of the family, and one should not confuse emancipation with depravity: "We are not talking about forgetfulness of duties, daring and opportunities in the name of the principle of emancipation, to leave her husband and even children, but about the emancipation of education and work for the benefit of the family and society" 20 Leskov N. S. Specialists in the women's part // Literary Library. 1867. September; December. . Glorifying "a good family woman", a kind wife and mother, he added that debauchery "under all the names, no matter what they were invented for him, is still debauchery, not freedom."
In this context, "Lady Macbeth ..." sounds like a sermon of a notorious conservative moralist about the tragic consequences of forgetting the boundaries of what is permitted. Katerina Lvovna, not inclined either to education, or to work, or to religion, deprived, as it turns out, even of her maternal instinct, “violates social laws in an anarchic way,” and this, as usual, begins with debauchery. As the researcher Catherine Géry writes: “The criminal plot of the story is sharply polemical in relation to the model of a possible solution to family conflicts, which was then proposed by Chernyshevsky. In the image of Katerina Lvovna, one can see the writer’s lively reaction to the image of Vera Pavlovna in the novel “What do?" 21 Zheri K. Sensuality and Crime in N. S. Leskova’s “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” // Russian Literature. 2004. No. 1. S. 102-110. .
Oh, soul, soul! Yes, what kind of people did you know that they only have a door to a woman and the road?
Nikolay Leskov
This point of view, however, is not confirmed by Leskov himself in his review of Chernyshevsky's novel. Falling down on nihilists - idlers and phrasemongers, "freaks of Russian civilization" and "trash with pollen" 22 Leskov N. S. Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky in his novel “What is to be done?” // Leskov N. S. Collected works in 11 volumes. T. 10. M.: GIHL, 1957. S. 487-489. , Leskov sees an alternative to them precisely in the heroes of Chernyshevsky, who “work to the sweat, but not out of a single desire for personal profit” and at the same time “converge of their own accord, without any nasty monetary calculations: they love each other for a while, but then, as it happens, in one of these two hearts a new attachment lights up, and the vow is changed. In all disinterestedness, respect for mutual natural rights, a quiet, sure move on your own path. This is quite far from the posture of a reactionary-guardian, who sees in liberal ideas one sermon of sheer sin.
Russian classics of the 19th century did not recommend women to freely express their sexuality. Carnal urges inevitably end in disaster: because of passion, Larisa Ogudalova was shot dead and Katerina Kabanova drowned herself near Ostrovsky, Nastasya Filippovna was stabbed to death at Dostoevsky, Goncharov in a novel on the same topic makes a precipice a symbol of masterful passion, there is nothing to say about Anna Karenina. It seems that "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District" was written in the same tradition. And even brings the moralizing thought to the limit: the passion of Katerina Izmailova is of an exclusively carnal nature, demonic influx in its purest form, not covered by romantic illusions, devoid of idealization (even Sergey's sadistic mockery does not put an end to it), it is opposite to the ideal of the family and excludes motherhood.
Sexuality is shown in Leskovsky's essay as an element, a dark and chthonic force. In the love scene under a blooming apple tree, Katerina Lvovna seems to dissolve in the moonlight: “These whimsical, bright spots have gilded her all and so they flicker and tremble on her like living fiery butterflies, or as if all the grass under the trees was taken by the moon net and walks from side to side”; and around her mermaid laughter is heard. This image resonates in the finale, where the heroine rises up to her waist from the water to rush at her rival "like a strong pike" - or like a mermaid. In this erotic scene, superstitious fear is combined with admiration - according to Zheri, the entire artistic system of the essay “violates the strict tradition of self-censorship in depicting the sensual side of love that has long existed in Russian literature”; the crime story becomes, over the course of the text, "a study of sexuality in its purest form" 23 McLean. N. S. Leskov, the Man and his Art. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, 1977. P. 147. Op. by K. Zhery. . Whatever opinion Leskov held about free love at different periods of his life, the talent of the artist was stronger than the principles of a publicist.
Boris Kustodiev. Illustration for "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District". 1923
"Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District". Directed by Roman Balayan. 1989
Does Leskov justify his heroine?
Lev Anninsky notes the “terrible unpredictability” in the souls of Leskov’s heroes: “What kind of “Thunderstorm” by Ostrovsky is there - this is not a ray of light, here a fountain of blood beats from the bottom of the soul; here "Anna Karenina" is foreshadowed - the vengeance of demonic passion; here Dostoevsky matches the problematic - it is not for nothing that Dostoevsky published “Lady Macbeth ...” in his journal. You can’t put Lesk’s four-time murderer for the sake of love into any “typology of characters.” Katerina Lvovna and her Sergey not only did not fit into the literary typology of the characters of the 1860s, but directly contradicted it. Two hard-working, pious merchants, and then an innocent child, are strangled for their own benefit by two traditionally positive heroes - people who come from the people: a Russian woman, ready to sacrifice everything for her love, “our recognized conscience, our last justification”, and the clerk Sergei, reminiscent of Nekrasov "gardener". This allusion in Anninsky seems justified: in Nekrasov's ballad, the noble daughter, like the merchant's wife Izmailova, comes to admire the curly-haired worker; a joking struggle ensues - "It darkened in the eyes, the soul shuddered, / I gave - I did not give a golden ring ...", which develops into love joys. Katerina’s affair with Sergey also began in the same way: “No, but let me take it like that, set-ups,” Seryoga treated, spreading his curls. “Well, take it,” replied Katerina Lvovna, cheered up, and lifted her elbows up.
Like the Nekrasov gardener, Sergei is caught when he makes his way from the master's burner at dawn, and then they are exiled to hard labor. Even the description of Katerina Lvovna - "She was not tall, but slender, her neck seemed to be carved out of marble, her shoulders were round, her chest was strong, her nose was straight, thin, her eyes were black, lively, her high white forehead and black, even blue-black hair" - as if Nekrasov predicted: “Chernobrova, stately, like white sugar! .. / It became terrible, I didn’t finish my song.”
Another parallel to the Lesk story is Vsevolod Krestovsky's ballad "Vanka the Keymaker", which has become a folk song. “There was a lot of wine in Zinovy Borisych’s bedroom during those nights, and wine from the mother-in-law’s cellar was drunk, and sweet sweets were eaten, and lips were kissed on sugar hostesses, and played with black curls on a soft headboard” - like a paraphrase of a ballad:
There was a lot to drink
Yes, you have been abused
And in the red something is alive
And loving kiss!
On the bed, into the will of the prince,
There we lie down
And for the chest, the chest of a swan,
More than once was enough!
Krestovsky's young princess and Vanya the housekeeper perish like Romeo and Juliet, while Nekrasov's noble daughter is the unwitting culprit of the hero's misfortune. The heroine of Leskova, on the other hand, is evil incarnate herself - and at the same time a victim, and her beloved turns from a victim of class differences into a tempter, accomplice, and then an executioner. Leskov seems to be saying: look how living life looks in comparison with ideological and literary schemes, there are no pure victims and villains, unambiguous roles, the human soul is dark. The naturalistic description of the crime in all its cynical efficiency is combined with sympathy for the heroine.
The moral death of Katerina Lvovna takes place gradually: she kills her father-in-law, standing up for her beloved Sergei, beaten by him and locked up; husband - in self-defense, in response to a humiliating threat, grinding his teeth: “And-them! I can't stand it." But this is a trick: in fact, Zinovy Borisovich has already “steamed his master’s darling” with tea poisoned by her, his fate was decided, no matter how he behaved. Finally, Katerina Lvovna kills the boy because of Sergei's greed; it is characteristic that this last - by no means excusable - murder was omitted in his opera by Shostakovich, who decided to make Katerina a rebel and a victim.
Ilya Glazunov. Katerina Lvovna Izmailova. Illustration for "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District". 1973
Ilya Glazunov. Bailiff. Illustration for "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District". 1973
How and why do different storytelling styles overlap in Lady Macbeth?
“The writer’s voice setting consists in the ability to master the voice and language of his hero and not stray from altos to basses. ... My priests speak in a spiritual way, nihilists - in a nihilistic way, peasants - in a peasant way, upstarts from them and buffoons - with frills, etc., - Leskov said, according to his recollections contemporary 24 Cit. by: Eikhenbaum B. "Excessive" writer (On the 100th anniversary of the birth of N. Leskov) // Eikhenbaum B. About prose. L.: Artist. lit., 1969. S. 327-345. . - From myself, I speak the language of old fairy tales and church-folk in a purely literary speech. In "Lady Macbeth..." the narrator's speech—literary, neutral—serves as a framework for the characteristic speech of the characters. The author shows his own face only in the last part of the essay, which tells about the fate of Katerina Lvovna and Sergei after the arrest: Leskov himself never observed these realities, but his publisher, Dostoevsky, the author of Notes from the House of the Dead, confirmed that the description is plausible. The writer accompanies the “dreadful picture” of the hard labor stage with a psychological remark: “... Whoever the thought of death in this sad situation does not flatter, but frightens, should try to drown out these howling voices with something even more ugly. The common man understands this very well: sometimes he unleashes his bestial simplicity, begins to be stupid, to mock himself, people, feelings. Not particularly gentle and without that, he becomes purely angry. A publicist breaks through in the fiction writer - after all, "Lady Macbeth ..." is one of the first literary Leskov essays, the polemical lining is close to the surface there: it is no coincidence that Saltykov-Shchedrin answers these author's remarks in his response in his response, ignoring the plot and style. Here Leskov indirectly polemicizes with the idealistic ideas of contemporary revolutionary-democratic criticism about the "common man". Leskov liked to emphasize that, unlike the people-loving writers of the 60s, ordinary people know firsthand, and therefore claimed the special reliability of his everyday life: even though his heroes are fictional, they are written off from life.
As you and I walked, the autumn long nights sat out, with a fierce death from the wide world people were escorted
Nikolay Leskov
For example, Sergey is a “girl”, expelled from his previous place of service for having an affair with the mistress: “The thief took everything - both in height, in face, in beauty, and will flatter and lead to sin. And what is fickle, scoundrel, fickle, fickle!” This is a petty, vulgar character, and his love speeches are an example of lackey chic: “The song is sung: “sadness and melancholy seized without a dear friend,” and this longing, I tell you, Katerina Ilvovna, is so, I can say, sensitive to my own heart that I would take it and cut it out of my chest with a damask knife and throw it at your feet. Here another murderous servant comes to mind, bred by Dostoevsky twenty years later - Pavel Smerdyakov with his verses and claims: “Can a Russian peasant have a feeling against an educated person?” - cf. Sergey: “We have everything because of poverty, Katerina Ilvovna, you yourself deign to know, lack of education. How can they understand anything about love properly! At the same time, the speech of the “educated” Sergey is distorted and illiterate: “Why am I going to get out of here.”
Katerina Lvovna, as we know, is of simple origin, but she speaks correctly and without antics. After all, Katerina Izmailova is “a character ... which you won’t remember without spiritual awe”; By the time of Leskov, Russian literature could not yet conceive of a tragic heroine speaking "tapericha." The cute clerk and the tragic heroine seem to be taken from different artistic systems.
Leskov imitates reality, but still on the principle of "shake, but do not mix" - appoints different characters responsible for different layers of being.
"Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District". Directed by Roman Balayan. 1989
Boris Kustodiev. Illustration for "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District". 1923
Does “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” look like a lubok?
From the ideological wars that overshadowed Leskov’s literary debut and created an artistic dead end situation, the writer, fortunately, found a practical way out, which made him Leskov: after the novels “Nowhere” and “On the Knives” that were directly journalistic and not particularly valuable in literary terms. “he begins to create an iconostasis of her saints and righteous for Russia” - rather than ridicule people who are worthless, he decides to offer inspiring images. However, as he wrote Alexander Amfiteatrov Alexander Valentinovich Amfiteatrov (1862-1938) - literary and theater critic, publicist. He was an opera singer, but then left the opera career and took up journalism. In 1899, together with the journalist Vlas Doroshevich, he opened the newspaper Rossiya. Three years later, the newspaper was closed for satire on the royal family, and Amfiteatrov himself was in exile. On his return from exile, he emigrated. He returned to Russia shortly before the revolution, but in 1921 he again went abroad, where he collaborated with emigre publications. Author of dozens of novels, short stories, plays and collections of short stories. , “in order to become an artist of positive ideals, Leskov was a man too newly converted”: having renounced his former Social Democratic sympathies, falling upon them and being defeated, Leskov rushed to look for among the people not mummers, but genuine the righteous 25 Gorky M. N. S. Leskov // Gorky M. Collected works: in 30 volumes. T. 24. M .: GIHL, 1953. . However, his own school of reporters, knowledge of the subject and just a sense of humor came into conflict with this task, from which the reader infinitely benefited: Leskovsky's "righteous" (the most striking example) are always at least ambivalent and therefore interesting. “In his didactic stories, the same trait is always noticed as in moralizing children's books or in novels from the first centuries of Christianity: bad boys, contrary to the wishes of the author, are written much livelier and more interesting than good-natured ones, and pagans attract attention much more Christian" 26 Amfiteatrov A. V. Collected works of Al. Amfiteatrov. T. 22. Rulers of thoughts. St. Petersburg: Education, 1914-1916. .
An excellent illustration of this thought is Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Katerina Izmailova was written as a direct antipode to the heroine of another Leskovsky essay - "The Life of a Woman", published two years earlier.
The plot there is very similar: the peasant girl Nastya is forcibly extradited to a despotic merchant family; she finds the only outlet in love for her neighbor Stepan, the story ends tragically - the lovers go through the stage, Nastya goes crazy and dies. There is, in fact, only one conflict: illegal passion sweeps away a person like a typhoon, leaving behind corpses. Only Nastya is a righteous person and a victim, and Katerina is a sinner and a murderer. This difference is resolved primarily stylistically: “The love dialogues of Nastya and Stepan were built like a folk song broken into replicas. Love dialogues between Katerina Lvovna and Sergey are perceived as ironically stylized inscriptions for popular prints. The whole movement of this love situation is, as it were, a template condensed to the point of horror - a young merchant's wife deceives her old husband with a clerk. Not only templates results" 27 .
Boris Timofeyich died, and he died after eating mushrooms, as many people die after eating them.
Nikolay Leskov
In “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”, the hagiographic motif is reversed - Maya Kucherskaya, among others, writes that the episode of Fedya Lyamin’s murder refers to this semantic layer. The sick boy reads in a patericon (which Katerina Lvovna, as we remember, never took into her hands) the life of his saint, the martyr Theodore Stratilates, and marvels at how he pleased God. The case takes place during the Vespers, on the feast of the Entry into the Temple of the Mother of God; According to the Gospel, the Virgin Mary, already carrying Christ in her womb, meets with Elizabeth, who also carries the future John the Baptist in herself: “When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the baby jumped up in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit” (Luke 1:41). Katerina Izmailova also feels how “her own child turned under her heart for the first time, and she felt cold in her chest” - but this does not soften her heart, but rather strengthens her determination to quickly make the lad Fedya a martyr so that her own heir will receive capital for the sake of Sergei's pleasures.
“The drawing of her image is a household template, but a template drawn with such thick paint that it turns into a kind of tragic splint" 28 Gromov P., Eikhenbaum B. N. S. Leskov (Essay on creativity) // N. S. Leskov. Collected works: in 11 vols. M.: GIHL, 1956. . A tragic lubok is, in essence, an icon. In Russian culture, the sublime hagiographic genre and the mass, entertaining genre of lubok are closer to each other than it might seem - it is enough to recall the traditional hagiographic icons, on which the face of the saint is framed in fact by a comic strip depicting the most striking episodes of his biography. The story of Katerina Lvovna is anti-life, the story of a strong and passionate nature, over which the demonic temptation has prevailed. A saint becomes a saint through victory over the passions; in a sense, ultimate sin and holiness are two manifestations of the same great power, which later will unfold in all colors in Dostoevsky: "And I am Karamazov." Leskov’s Katerina Izmailova is not just a criminal, no matter how low and casually the essayist Leskov presented her story, she is a martyr who mistook the Antichrist for Christ: “I was ready for Sergei into fire, into water, into prison and to the cross.” Recall how Leskov describes her - she was not a beauty, but she was bright and handsome: “The nose is straight, thin, her eyes are black, lively, a high white forehead and black, even blue-black hair.” A portrait suitable for depiction in a bright and primitively graphic popular print story like "The Funny Tale of a Merchant's Wife and a Bailiff". But the iconographic face can also be described.
calculation" 29 Gorelov A. Walking after the truth // Leskov N.S. Tales and stories. L.: Artist. lit., 1972. .In reality, Katerina Izmailova is devoid of both class prejudice and self-interest, and only passion gives form to her fatal deeds. Sergei has class and selfish motives, but he alone is important to her - however, socialist criticism needed to read into the essay the conflict of a bold and strong folk nature with a musty merchant environment.
As the literary critic Valentin Gebel put it, “one could say about Katerina Izmailova that she is not a ray of the sun falling into darkness, but lightning generated by darkness itself and only more clearly emphasizing the impenetrable darkness of merchant life.”
She wanted passion to be brought to her not in the form of russula, but under a spicy, spicy seasoning, with suffering and sacrifice.
Nikolay Leskov
An unbiased reading of the essay, however, does not show an impenetrable darkness in the merchant life described by Leskov. Although the husband and father-in-law reproach Katerina Lvovna with infertility (obviously unfair: Zinovy Borisovich had no children in his first marriage, and Katerina Lvovna immediately becomes pregnant from Sergei), but more, as follows from the text, they do not oppress. This is not at all the merchant-tyrant Dikoy and not the widow Kabanikha from "Thunderstorm", who "clothes the poor, but completely ate at home." Both Lesk merchants are hardworking, pious people, at dawn, after drinking tea, they go on business until late at night. They, of course, also restrict the freedom of the young merchant's wife, but they do not eat food.
Both Katerinas are nostalgic about the free life in girls, but their memories look exactly the opposite. Here is Katerina Kabanova: “I used to get up early; if it’s summer, I’ll go to the spring, wash myself, bring water with me and that’s it, water all the flowers in the house.<…>And we will come from the church, sit down for some work, more like gold velvet, and the wanderers will begin to tell: where they were, what they saw, different lives, or they sing poetry.<…>And then, it happened, a girl, I would get up at night - we also had lamps burning everywhere - but somewhere in a corner and pray until the morning. But Izmailova: “I would run with buckets to the river and swim in a shirt under the pier or sprinkle sunflower husks through the gate of a passer-by; but here everything is different.” Even before meeting Sergei, Katerina Lvovna understands freedom precisely as a free manifestation of sexuality - the young clerk simply releases the genie from the bottle - "as if the demons had broken loose." Unlike Katerina Kabanova, she has nothing to do with herself: she’s not a hunter to read, she doesn’t come to needlework, she doesn’t go to church.
In an article of 1867 "Russian Drama Theater in St. Petersburg" Leskov wrote: "There is no doubt that self-interest, baseness, hardness of heart and voluptuousness, like any other vices of mankind, are as old as mankind itself"; only the forms of their manifestation, according to Leskov, differ depending on time and class: if in a decent society vices are made up, then in people “simple, soiled, unrestrained” slavish obedience to bad passions manifests itself “in forms so rude and uncomplicated that for recognition they hardly need any special powers of observation. All the vices of these people walk naked, as our forefathers walked.” It was not the environment that made Katerina Lvovna vicious, but the environment made her a convenient, visual object for the study of vice.
Stanislav Zhukovsky. Interior with a samovar. 1914 Private collection
Why did Stalin hate Shostakovich's opera?
In 1930, inspired by the first Leningrad edition of Lady Macbeth after a long break, with illustrations by the late Kustodiev, the young Dmitri Shostakovich took Leskovsky's plot for his second opera. The 24-year-old composer was already the author of three symphonies, two ballets, the opera The Nose (after Gogol), music for films and performances; he gained fame as an innovator and hope of Russian music. His "Lady Macbeth ..." was expected: as soon as Shostakovich finished the score, the Leningrad Maly Opera Theater and the Moscow Musical Theater named after V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko began staging. Both premieres in January 1934 received thunderous applause and enthusiastic press; the opera was also staged at the Bolshoi Theater and was repeatedly presented in triumph in Europe and America.
Shostakovich defined the genre of his opera as “tragedy-satire”, moreover, Katerina Izmailova is responsible for tragedy and only tragedy, and everyone else is responsible for satire. In other words, the composer completely justified Katerina Lvovna, for which, in particular, he threw out the murder of a child from the libretto. After one of the first productions, one of the audience noticed that the opera should have been called not “Lady Macbeth…”, but “Juliet…” or “Desdemona of the Mtsensk district,” the composer agreed with this, who, on the advice of Nemirovich-Danchenko, gave the opera new name - "Katerina Izmailova". The demonic woman with blood on her hands turned into a victim of passion.
As Solomon Volkov writes, Boris Kustodiev “in addition to “legitimate” illustrations ... also drew numerous erotic variations on the theme of “Lady Macbeth”, which were not intended for publication. After his death, fearing searches, the family hastened to destroy these drawings. Volkov suggests that Shostakovich saw those sketches, and this influenced the clearly erotic nature of his operas 30 Volkov S. Stalin and Shostakovich: the case of "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk district" // Znamya. 2004. No. 8. .
The composer was not horrified by the violence of passion, but glorified it. Sergei Eisenstein told his students in 1933 about Shostakovich's opera: "In music, the 'biological' love line is drawn with the utmost brightness." Sergei Prokofiev, in private conversations, characterized her even more sharply: “This swine music - waves of lust go on and on!” The embodiment of evil in “Katerina Izmailova” was no longer the heroine, but “something grandiose and at the same time disgustingly real, embossed, everyday, felt almost physiologically: crowd" 31 Anninsky L. A. World celebrity from the Mtsensk district // Anninsky L. A. Leskovskoe necklace. M.: Book, 1986. .
Why, allow me to report to you, madam, after all, a child also happens from something.
Nikolay Leskov
For the time being, Soviet criticism praised the opera, finding in it an ideological correspondence to the era: “Leskov in his story drags through old morality and talks like humanist; one needs the eyes and ears of a Soviet composer to do what Leskov could not do - to see and show the true killer behind the external crimes of the heroine - the autocratic system. Shostakovich himself said that he swapped executioners and victims: after all, Leskov’s husband, father-in-law, good people, autocracy do nothing terrible with Katerina Lvovna, and they are almost completely absent - in the fine silence and emptiness of the merchant’s house, she depicted alone with her demons.
In 1936, Pravda published an editorial entitled “Muddle Instead of Music,” in which an anonymous author (many contemporaries believed that it was Stalin himself) smashed Shostakovich’s opera—this article began a campaign against formalism in the USSR and persecution of the composer.
“It is known that sexual scenes in literature, theater and cinema infuriated Stalin,” writes Volkov. Indeed, undisguised eroticism is one of the main points of accusation in Muddle: “The music quacks, hoots, puffs, suffocates, in order to depict love scenes as naturally as possible. And “love” is smeared throughout the opera in its most vulgar form” — it’s no better that, in order to depict passion, the composer borrows “nervous, convulsive, fitful music” from bourgeois Western jazz.
There is also an ideological reproach there: “Everyone is presented monotonously, in animal form, both merchants and people. The predator-merchant, who seized upon wealth and power through murder, is presented as some kind of "victim" of bourgeois society. Here it is time for the modern reader to get confused, because the opera has just been praised along the ideological line. However, Pyotr Pospelov suggests 32 Pospelov P. "I would like to hope that..." On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the article "Muddle instead of music" // https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/126083 that Shostakovich, regardless of the nature of his work, was chosen for a demonstrative flogging simply because of his visibility and reputation as an innovator.
“Muddle instead of music” became an unprecedented phenomenon in its own way: “The genre of the article itself was not so much new - a hybrid of art criticism and a party and government decree - as the transpersonal, objective status of the editorial publication of the main newspaper of the country.<…>It was also new that the object of criticism was not ideological harmfulness ... it was precisely the artistic qualities of the work, its aesthetics that were discussed. The main newspaper of the country expressed the official state point of view on art, and socialist realism was appointed the only acceptable art, in which there was no place for the "gross naturalism" and formalistic aestheticism of Shostakovich's opera. From now on, the aesthetic demands of simplicity, naturalness, general accessibility, propaganda intensity were presented to art - where can Shostakovich: Leskov himself would not fit these criteria, for starters.
All bibliography
The story "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District" was published in January 1865. It was published under the title "Lady Macbeth of our county" by the magazine Epoch. According to the original idea, the work was to be the first in a cycle dedicated to the characters of Russian women. It was assumed that several more stories would follow, but Leskov never realized these plans. Probably not least due to the closure of the Epoch magazine, which intended to publish the entire series. The final title of the story appeared in 1867, when it was published as part of the collection "Tales, Essays and Stories by M. Stebnitsky" (M. Stebnitsky is Leskov's pseudonym).
The character of the main character
In the center of the story is Katerina Lvovna Izmailova, a young merchant's wife. She married not out of love, but out of need. For five years of marriage, she failed to make children with her husband, Zinovy Borisovich, who was almost twice her age. Katerina Lvovna was very bored, languishing in the merchant's house, like a bird in a cage. Most of the time she just wandered from room to room and yawned. However, no one noticed her suffering.
While her husband was away for a long time, Katerina Lvovna fell in love with the clerk Sergei, who works for Zinovy Borisovich. Love broke out instantly and completely captured the woman. In order to save both Sergei and her social position, Izmailova decided on several murders. Consistently, she got rid of her father-in-law, husband and young nephew. The further the action develops, the more the reader becomes convinced that Katerina Lvovna has no moral barriers capable of holding her back.
Love passion at first completely absorbed the heroine, and in the final ruined it. Izmailova, together with Sergei, was sent to hard labor. On the way there, the man showed his true colors. He found himself a new love and began to openly mock Katerina Lvovna. Having lost her lover, Izmailova also lost the meaning of life. In the end, she only had to drown herself, taking Sergei's mistress with her.
As noted by the literary critics Gromov and Eikhenbaum in the article “N. S. Leskov (Essay on creativity)”, the tragedy of Katerina Lvovna “is completely predetermined by the well-established and steadily regulating the life of the individual, the everyday life of the merchant environment”. Izmailov is often contrasted with Katerina Kabanova, the heroine of Ostrovsky's play The Thunderstorm. Both women live with unloved spouses. Both are burdened by merchant life. Both Kabanova and Izmailova's life changes dramatically due to illegal love. That's just in similar circumstances, women behave differently. Kabanova perceives the passion that has gripped her as a great sin and eventually confesses everything to her husband. Izmailova rushes into the pool of love without looking back, becoming determined and ready to destroy any obstacles that stand in her way with Sergei.
Characters
The only character (besides Katerina Lvovna) who receives much attention in the story and whose character is described in more or less detail is Sergei. Readers are presented with a handsome young man who knows how to seduce women and is distinguished by frivolity. He was fired from his previous job because of an affair with the owner's wife. Apparently, he never loved Katerina Lvovna. Sergei struck up a relationship with her, as he hoped with their help to get a better job in life. When Izmailova lost everything, the man behaved meanly and lowly with her.
The theme of love in the story
The main theme of the story "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District" is the theme of love-passion. This kind of love is no longer spiritual, but physical. Pay attention to how Leskov shows the pastime of Katerina Lvovna and Seryozha. The lovers hardly speak. When they are together, they are mainly occupied with carnal pleasures. Physical pleasure is more important to them than spiritual pleasure. At the beginning of the story, Leskov notices that Katerina Lvovna does not like to read books. Sergey is also difficult to call the owner of a rich inner world. When he first comes to seduce Izmailova, he asks her for a book. This request is due solely to the desire to please the hostess. Serezha wants to show that he is interested in reading, intellectually developed, despite his low social status.
The love-passion that seized Katerina Lvovna is destructive, because it is base. It is not capable of elevating, spiritually enriching. On the contrary, something that bears an animal, primitive character awakens from it in a woman.
Composition
The story consists of fifteen short chapters. In this case, the work can be conditionally divided into two parts. In the first, the action takes place in a limited space - the house of the Izmailovs. Here Katerina Lvovna's love is born and develops. After the start of an affair with Sergei, the woman is happy. She seems to be in paradise. In the second part, the action takes place on the way to hard labor. Katerina Lvovna seems to fall into hell, serving her sentence for her sins. By the way, the woman is absolutely not remorseful. Her mind is still eclipsed by love. At first, next to Seryozha for Izmailova, "and hard labor blooms with happiness."
Genre of the work
Leskov called "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District" an essay. The main feature of the genre is "writing from life", but there is no information about the prototypes of Katerina Lvovna. Perhaps, when creating this image, Leskov partially relied on the materials of criminal cases, to which he had access while serving in the Oryol Criminal Chamber.
The genre of the essay was not chosen by the writer by chance. It was important for him to emphasize the documentary nature of "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District". It is known that works of art based on real events often have a stronger impact on the audience. Apparently, Leskov wanted to take advantage of this. The crimes committed by Katerina Lvovna are more shocking if you think of them as real.
- "The Man on the Clock", an analysis of Leskov's story
