SOURCE: Introduction to Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Other Stories, translated by David McDuff, Penguin Books, 1987, pp. 7-25.

In the following excerpt from the introduction to his translation of selected Leskov tales, McDuff presents an overview of the distinctive elements in Leskov's stories, including his dramatic narrative technique, concern with ecclesiastical themes, and Tolstoian influences.

Much has been written about the tale, which occupies a unique place in Russian literature and indeed, perhaps, in world literature as a whole, as an example of the highest achievement to which the storyteller's art can aspire. As Walter Benjamin pointed out, Leskov is primarily a teller of stories, a journalist turned fiction-writer. It is often the exceptional, eccentric, tragically self-willed individuals, the Musk-Oxes, the Katerina Lvovnas, who fascinate him, and whose personalities seem to generate a wealth of stylistic nuances and associations through which they are transmuted into the stuff of...