Nikolai Leskov - The Enchanted Wanderer & Other Stories

Nikolai Leskov - The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories (Knopf, 2013). Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

ISBN: 9780307388872 | 608 pages | ePUB + MOBI


NIKOLAI LESKOV (1831-1895) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, playwright, and journalist. Praised for his unique writing style and innovative experiments in form, and held in high esteem by Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky among others, Leskov is credited with creating a comprehensive picture of contemporary Russian society. His short stories exploded the prevailing traditions of 19th-century Russian fiction and paved the way for such famous literary successors as Mikhail Bulgakov.

The seventeen classic stories in this new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsy are visionary and fantastic, and yet always grounded in reality, an uneasy synthesis of Orthodoxy and Old Believers, peopled by outsized characters that include serfs, princes, military officers, Gypsy girls, wayward monks, horse dealers, nomadic Tartars, and, above all, the ubiquitous figure of the garrulous, enthralling, not entirely trustworthy storyteller.

It is the great gift of this new translation that it allows us to hear the many vibrant voices of Leskov’s singular art.


Reviews

"Vibrantly translated. . . Thanks to this delicious new collection, the time is once again ripe for Leskov's resurgence." -- The New York Times Book Review

"Surreal, gripping, violent but comic tales." -- Margaret Atwood

"We can recognize this Leskov, in English, as a king among Russian storytellers. . . It is a testament both to his own resilience and to the unmatched talent of his translators that he has arrived in such brilliant color." -- The Quarterly Conversation

"Leskov remains pungently and overpoweringly Russian. . . Leskov was in many regards, if not in his language, a very modern writer, being, together with Zola and Dickens, among the very greatest journalist-novelists of the nineteenth century." -- Times Literary Supplement

"Russians have revered Nikolai Leskov's artistry for over a century, but he is little known in the West because the story-telling voices from deep in the Russian heartland that he skillfully ventriloquizes in his tales are notoriously difficult to translate. Pevear and Volokhonsky's collection of Leskov's best-known works bears all the hallmarks of their previous successes -- absolute faithfulness to the author's meaning and manner, ingenious finds and formulations, and fluency in English." -- Vladimir Alexandrov, B. E. Bensinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Yale University

"Without Leskov there would be no Bulgakov, no Chekhov, but also no García Márquez and Julio Cortázar. . . Leskov is the essential storyteller: he does not portray life, he creates it in all its wonder and terror and magic." -- Alberto Manguel