Narrative
Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District
Леди Макбет Мценского уезда
Nikolai Leskov · 1865
Opening lines
Иной раз в наших местах задаются такие характеры, что, как бы много лет ни прошло со встречи с ними, о некоторых из них никогда не вспомнишь без душевного трепета.
Sometimes in our parts such characters come into being that, however many years have passed since one met them, there are some one can never recall without a tremor of the soul.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from ru.wikisource.org
Synopsis
Katerina Lvovna Izmailova, the young wife of a wealthy provincial merchant, is bored in a large house where her husband, always busy with business, leaves her alone; he and his father reproach her for having no child. A young clerk, Sergei, courts her insistently. She falls in love with him, and little by little the attraction becomes passion: the lovers spend nights together during the husband's absences, and Katerina feels ready to do anything to keep him.
Context
Written in the autumn of 1864, the tale appeared in January 1865 in Epokha, Dostoevsky's journal, under the title Lady Macbeth of Our District. It was meant to open a series of portraits of women of the region, which the closing of the journal interrupted; the definitive title dates from 1867, after a heavy revision of the style. It echoes Turgenev's Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District, and the town can be recognised: Mtsensk. Shostakovich made an opera from it in 1934.
Who it is for
A short tale, to be read in one sitting; a recent French critical edition gives the text with notes.
Prizes and reception
Turned into an opera by Shostakovich and into films several times, up to William Oldroyd's English film in 2016.