Fiction Series: On Love, Madness, and Murder - Nikolai Leskov & Walter Benjamin
Details
Hi everyone!
Welcome back to the fiction series!
Please join us on May 21st to discuss the acclaimed novella The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Nikolai Leskov. This piece will be accompanied by Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov.” A bit on the nose for an accompanying piece, but it will round out the focal themes in the novella.
A wonderful introduction to Russian short fiction, The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk follows bored merchant’s wife Katerina Lvovna Izmailova as she descends into a righteous, passionate, and murderous madness after she begins an affair with a laborer, Sergei, whilst her husband is away on business. A parodical rumination on the unmoored forces of sexual passion and power, this novella is engaging, fashionable, and gruesome.
In the midst of contemporary social anxieties that marry (ha) marriage and horror (see films like Ready or Not and the recent Netflix hit Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen), Leskov comes in with a heavy hand.
We will be reading both the novella and the Benjamin piece in their entirety. Both are required for the meetup! Please feel free to use the linked versions below:
- The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Nikolai Leskov (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) (64 pages)
- “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov” by Walter Benjamin (14 pages)
I believe the most common and accessible print version of the Leskov piece is from NYRB, translated by Donald Rayfield. The rest of the stories in this collection are also a joy to read, so please feel free to continue on!
“The Storyteller” is less hard philosophy and instead focuses more on Leskov’s style, along with the nature and historical positioning of Leskov’s writing. I hope you enjoy!
We will be meeting on Thursday, May 21st at 7pm at Talea in Williamsburg. If you have any difficulty finding us, please don’t hesitate to message me directly.
See you there!
As an aside: The main photo for this post is from Dmitri Shostakovich's opera adaptation of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which softened quite a few of the plot points from the novella. The opera is sometimes directly attributed to Leskov's later success/recognition outside of Russia!
