The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories, by Nikolai Leskov - review

Though underestimated in the English-speaking world, Nikolai Leskov is one of the greatest of 19th-century Russian writers. Donald Rayfield has described him as
‘Russia’s best-kept secret’.

Richard Pevear’s excellent introduction to this selection includes Anton Chekhov’s account of how Leskov — ‘his favourite writer’ — said to him at the beginning of his career, after a night of carousing, ‘I shall anoint you with oil as Samuel did David. Write.’ This little scene, which could be from one of Leskov’s own stories, perhaps offers a clue as to why he is not more widely recognised. We don’t know whether to laugh at the story or to feel moved by it; similarly, we don’t know how seriously to take Leskov as a whole — and we English have always expected our Russian writers to be unambiguously serious. We want to be shown a character’s spiritual development; we want to be given truths to live by. But what Leskov gives us is something else: story matters more than character, and all we get by way of metaphysical insight is a sense that life’s horrors and beauties are so intermingled as to be beyond all understanding.

Leskov’s ancestry was unusually hybrid. His mother was born to an impoverished gentleman who married a merchant’s daughter. His father came from a line of village priests but ended up farming a small estate. Leskov spent much of his childhood among peasant children. As a young man, he worked for three years in estate management, for a firm called Scott & Wilkins — Scott being the surname of his English uncle by marriage, and he travelled widely throughout European Russia. All this gave him a broad knowledge of Russian society; he wrote later that, since he had grown up among the common people, it was not for him ‘either to place the peasants on a pedestal or to trample them beneath his feet’.