Lady MacBeth of Mtensk and others - Nikolai Leskov, David McDuff (trans.)

 Wish I had it sooner

Sooner in life. I was obsessed with Gogol, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Bulgakov as a teen. This would have been another corridor to investigate, but I don't have the same sentimental pull as I do with those authors, like the verve to read an obscure Russian author is not the same after the big dogs: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, et cetera.

These stories are imaginative, and full of style to be sure, so I would say go ahead and know Leskov's main works. Yet between Chekhov and Tolstoy, there is some amount of moralizing that always killed my buzz, maybe I detect a little of that here too. I am still continuing to read Leskov in different translations and phases of his work--NYRB has a recent offering that includes Robert Chandler, whose efforts with Platonov are of the utmost echelon.

The Enchanted Wanderer was decent, Lady MacBeth didn't hit me too strong, but Russian prose from this period is always welcome on a dark night--it reads like a friend. Why not have another friend? And the longer the friendship, the better.

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