Styling Russia: Multiculture in the Prose of Nikolai Leskov by Knut Andreas Grimstad

Abstract

MLR, 105.3, 2010 933 Styling Russia: Multiculture in theProse ofNikolai Leskov. By Knut Andreas Grimstad. (Slavica Bergensiana, 7) Bergen: Institutt for fremmedsprak. 2007. 256 pp. NOK 150. ISBN 978-82-90249-32-3. After all the eloquent proselytizing of JamesMuckle and Hugh McLean, strangely enough, a new generation of Leskov critics is still badly needed. Why Leskov, even in Russia, is less esteemed and less loved than Dostoevsky or Tolstoy is a mystery: the anglophone reader can be excused on the grounds of the difficulties of translating a writer so deeply embedded in his own language (although recent translations, such as Robert Chandler's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (London: Hes perus, 2003), are more than adequate); Russian critics are perhaps offended by Leskov's refusal to propound simple ideological tenets, or perhaps they sense what Leskov's contemporaries sensed: a cantankerous, even cruel person underlying the tolerant and affectionate narrative persona. Just as a reading of Trollope's Phineas Finn provides the clearest insight into the development of English parliamentarianism, so Leskov's Cathedral Folk (the ghastly translation of Soboriane) explains the history of theRussian Church better than any history, how a priest and an atheistic schoolmaster can find that theyhave more in common with each other thanwith the state thatgoverns them.Above all, Leskov redefines Russianness, not quite as Trollope does Englishness, as a mix of the dominant ethnos with itsaborigines, immigrants, and conquered peoples. Knut Andreas Grimstad's book focuses primarily on that redefining (which he terms 'styling'). He does so by a close and sympathetic reading of Cathedral Folk, The Enchanted Wanderer, The Sealed Angel, and Childhood Years. These are all works of Leskov's miraculous 1870s, so thatwe get no sense of Leskov's own evolution over the two decades that preceded and followed. Nevertheless, the reading is sensitive and persuasive. This monograph is a version of a doctoral dissertation and thus burdened with excessive theoretical terminology; italso underplays Leskov's humour and playfulness. Grimstad fails to remark the importance ofmoments of mystical empathy with nature, which are perhaps as important in the evolution of Father Tuberozov or Ivan Fliagin, the enchanted wanderer, as their encounters with Poles or gypsies in humanizing them. After all, ifLeskov is the equivalent of a Trollope, he is also Russia's Thomas Hardy. Grimstad has done what he has set out to do, and his examination of Leskov's application of a Protestant ethos to Orthodoxy, ofmulti-culturalism toRussian nationalism, is farmore welcome than yet another treatise on skaz (narrative voice), the usual obsession of Leskov critics. Nevertheless, in this book a littlemore context would have been helpful, particu larly since themonograph has inmind a wider audience than Russian specialists. There is, after all, a very strong historical background that Leskov assumes his reader shares with him. Leskov, however indirectly, says perhaps even more than Dostoevsky about the changes between 1830 and 1870 in Russian life and views, from servile obedience to dissident questioning, from isolation to both integration and conflictwith western Europe. The considerable time-span in both The Cathed ral Folk and The Enchanted Wanderer requires the critic to take amore diachronic 934 Reviews view of thework: Leskov is showing the evolution of his country, as well as the life story of his heroes. As an expert on Polish politics and attitudes, Grimstad deals very perceptively with Father Tuberozovs prejudices against and subsequent sympathywith Poles; but he misses an opportunity to comment more fully on the enchanted wanderer's extraordinary transformation into a figurewhich is both archaically Byzantine and prophetically Russian, the 'warrior-monk\ Queen Mary, University of London Donald Rayfield ...