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  • Published: 13 January 2021
  • ISBN: 9781681374901
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $40.00

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

Selected Stories of Nikolai Leskov



A new collection of the renowned Russian writer's best short work, including a masterful translation of the famous title story.

A new collection of the renowned Russian writer's best short work, including a masterful translation of the famous title story.

Nikolai Leskov is the strangest of the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century. His work is closer to the oral traditions of narrative than that of his contemporaries, and served as the inspiration for Walter Benjamin's great essay "The Storyteller," in which Benjamin contrasts the plotty machinations of the modern novel with the strange, melancholy, but also worldly-wise yarns of an older, slower era that Leskov remained in touch with. The title story is a tale of illicit love and multiple murder that could easily find its way into a Scottish ballad and did go on to become the most popular of Dmitri Shostakovich's operas. The other stories, all but one newly translated, present the most focused and finely rendered collection of this indispensable writer currently available in English.

  • Published: 13 January 2021
  • ISBN: 9781681374901
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $40.00

About the author

Nikolai Leskov

Nikolai Leskov was born in 1831 in the village of Gorokhovo in Russia. He began his writing career as a journalist living in Kiev, and later settled in St. Petersburg. He published his first piece of fiction in 1862 in The Northern Bee, and continued on to write and publish many short stories and novellas, including The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1865), The Sealed Angel (1873), The Enchanted Wanderer (1873), and Lefty(1882). He died in February 1895.

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