----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Chandler" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 4:05 PM
Subject: Nikolay Leskov at the Pushkin Club
NIKOLAY LESKOV
at the Pushkin Club, 46 Ladbroke Grove, W11 4AP
Tuesday February 17, 7.15 for 7.30 pm.
Robert Chandler will talk about Leskov and read from his newly published
translation of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (Hesperus) as well as from an
unjustly neglected American translation of The Steel Flea.
No great C19 Russian writer is so little known to the English-speaking
reader today as Nikolay Leskov. This is in part because of the remarkable
variety of his novels, stories and journalism; literary historians tend to
prefer writers who are easier to pigeonhole. It is also because of the
complexity of his language. To Leskov, according to one critic, Olanguage
was not simply a medium of communication, but a potential art object in its
own right, something to be played with, sculpted into interesting shapes.¹
The more transparent language favoured by Tolstoy, Turgenev and many other
Russian realists demands less of a translator.
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, is Shakespearean in both its linguistic vigour and
its emotional intensity. None of Leskov¹s contemporaries, not even
Dostoevsky, came so close to recreating the essence of Shakespearean
tragedy. The libretto of Shostakovich's famous opera is based on this
story.
The most famous of Leskov¹s short stories, OThe Steel Flea¹ (1881), is about
a Russian blacksmith who, using nails invisible to the naked eye, contrives
to shoe a dancing steel flea that had been made for the Tsar by some English
blacksmiths. The nails, unfortunately, weigh the flea down; it is no longer
able to dance. Leskov¹s brilliant language, dense with malapropisms and
wordplay, provides an entertaining commentary on Anglo-Russian cultural
differences and misunderstandings.
£3.50, £2.50 conc. Tel: 020-7603-3862. www.pushkinclub.org.uk
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