A sentry came down the corridor, stopped for a moment, spat on his
boots, then walked on; from the other side of a door came the snores of
weary convicts; a mouse gnawed at a feather; crickets beneath the stove
tried their best to outchirp one another - and Katerina Lvovna was in
seventh heaven.
But ecstasies tire, and prose always follows.
Number three in my thus-far pretty irregular series of reviews of Russian novellas (previous instalments here and here) concerns punchy melodrama Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1865; translated by Robert Chandler, 2003), by Nikolai Leskov (1831-95).
Mtsensk has minimal plot, but what there is of it is both eye-catching and blood-splattered, played out in bold emotional strokes by larger-than-life characters. It comes as no surprise to learn that it was adapted into an opera, by Shostakovich, in the 1930s; it's that sort of tale (a google image search on the title brings up numerous photographs of recent stagings). In essense, it's about a repressed young woman, driven to utter distraction by the boredom and privileged captivity of her loveless marriage. Add a manipulative clandestine lover, stir, and stand back and watch the bodies start hitting the stage. I mean, ground.
The Shakespearean title is not quite the straightforward signal of the story's trajectory that it might appear, though; for a start, it is not simply the author's gloss on things, but, we're told, the local gentry's reading of events. Originally a "light-hearted quip", it stuck, because the woman in question was "the centre of a drama so terrible". This is a literate tale, inside and out: on several occasions, the narrative highlights its generic nature, describing the trial of the murderous lovers as a "scene", and noting that Katerina is simply "acting her role in the drama of Love", as if she is powerless against the force of her character arc. She even gets her own "Out, damned spot!" moment; when she and Sergei attack and kill her husband, Katerina's exhilerated shock in the aftermath is expressed by her efforts to clean away the evidence, and hide her fear by castigating the dead man from bringing this on himself:
Only in two places on the painted floor could she see spots of blood the size of cherries. Katerina Lvovna scrubbed them with the bast, and they disappeared. "Creeping up on me like a thief, spying on your own wife - this'll teach you!" she said, standing up again and looking down towards the storeroom.
"That's it then," said Sergei, trembling at the sound of his own voice.
But this is not the whole story. Both the narrative's and the local gentry's literacy is misplaced, or misrepresentative; deliberately so, I think. For all the occasional, lofty statements about how Katerina's emotions are entirely typical of all women - such as her lover Sergei declaring he wants to marry her being "a desire that always pleases a woman" - her actions and reactions frequently contradict the narrative's assertions, even to the point of ridicule. If anything, Sergei has the Lady Macbeth role: he cajoles and manipulates, but it is Katerina who takes the lead in the actual murders.
Katerina ("not exactly a beauty") is described as a woman "fiery and exuberant by nature", who is "accustomed to simplicity and freedom" before, at the age of 24, she is "given in marriage" to Zinovy Borisovich Izmailov, whose family owns profitable orchards and "a fine town house", and trades flour. "She did not, however, love him or feel any attraction towards him", we're told; "it was simply that he had asked for her hand and she, being poor, could not afford to be choosy". Five years into the marriage - which, like Zinovy's first, is childless (Katerina, of course, is blamed: "A barren woman should remain a spinster!", she's told, although it's not clear how said barrenness could be determined without marriage, since women are also expected to stay virginal for their husbands) - we meet Katerina stewing within "a boredom so profound that, as people say, it makes even the thought of hanging yourself seem like fun".
In "a state of depression bordering on stupor", Katerina's eye falls upon handsome farmhand Sergei while her husband is away. Although a convenient nearby foreshadower warns her off him because he's "a devil for the lasses" and "fickle" (interestingly, since that's usually an adjective that gets stuck on women), barely three or four pages have passed before she's wrestling (!) with him and then being expertly seduced by him. And Leskov makes no bones about the fact that Sergei gives her access to something life-affirming her marriage with Zinovy denied her (she is "released into the full breadth or her expansive nature") - even though, yes, Sergei's an utterly amoral waste of space and Katerina responds to her father-in-law's rebuke when he discovers what's going on by, um, poisoning him:
Before going to bed, Boris Timofeyevich had some buckwheat kasha with mushrooms, and soon afterwards he began to suffer from heartburn. All of a sudden he was having spasms in the pit of his stomach; he vomited terrible, and toward morning he died, dying exactly the same death as the rats in his barns, for whom Katerina Lvovna used with her very own hands to prepare a special dish containing a toxic white powder that has been entrusted to her for safekeeping.
On this first occasion, the narrative is rather arch about what's going on; at no point does Katerina overtly resolve upon murder (although it must be entirely her idea, because Sergei is locked up in a storeroom at the time), and we get no more direct statement on the matter than this sidling up to the truth. Thereafter, things get much less circumspect, as Sergei wheedles and whines Katerina into expanding her killing spree. The next victim is her husband, whom she essentially goads into what has the ring of habitual spousal abuse, and then retaliates with the reckless glee of the newly liberated:
"Like that, is it? I'm well and truly grateful. I was waiting for something like that," Katerina Lvovna cried out. "Only now, my dear friend, I'm the one who's in charge here."
In a single movement she pushed Sergei out of the way, jumped at Zinovy Borisovich from behind, and, before he could reach the window, grabbed him by the throat with her slender fingers and threw him to the ground like a sheaf of newly cut hemp.
Then there's a young nephew, Fedya, who stands to inherit the greater part of the Izmailov estate, who is marked for death after Sergei says that the thought of the boy "upsets me", "Because my love for you, Katerina Lvovna, makes me want to see you live like a real lady, not the way you've lived until now." Again, Katerina takes the lead in the violence, after Sergei persuades her to it. Fedya's death is met with a suitably Jacobean bout of world-upside-down special effects:
"He's dead," whispered Katerina Lvovna. Hardly had she got to her feet to put everything in order when the walls of the silent house, that had witnessed so many crimes, were shaken by deafening blows; windows rattled, floors shook, and the chains of the hanging icon lamps sent fantastic shadows flitting across the walls.
Once they're caught, and sentence to a camp in Siberia - once Katerina, in other words, has no more wealth to tempt him - Sergei drops Katerina with indecent haste; while she imagines that "with him beside her even the road to Siberia would flower with happiness", he's off sleeping with other prisoners. But she gets the last - completely deranged - laugh by leaping off the side of a boat and taking his new lover with her. The last we see of her, she's dragging her new victim down "like a powerful pike attacking a roach", and hello, opera. Splendidly bonkers.
~~Nic