The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

The form of the journey as a narrative structure is embodied most fully in “The Enchanted Wanderer,” which Leskov began in 1872, after journeying himself around Lake Ladoga, an area of ancient monasteries, fishing villages, and isolated peasant communities north of Petersburg. The full title in its first magazine publication in 1873 was “The Enchanted Wanderer: His Life, Experiences, Opinions, and Adventures,” which clearly echoes the titles of works in the picaresque tradition, but in its “opinions” also gives a nod to Tristram Shandy. Here again Leskov chose a loose, accumulative form of storytelling, looped together by the “enchantment” that leads his hero in his wanderings from one chance encounter to another and one part of Russia to another, until it finally brings him to the place he was intended for by his mother’s prayers before he was born. The story is told by the hero himself in response to questions from his fellow passengers as they sail across Lake Ladoga to the monastery of Valaam.

Leskov made use of various other forms of storytelling, giving them names like memoir, potpourri, paysage and genre, rhapsody, sketch, stories apropos (“I very much like this form of story about what ‘was,’ recounted ‘apropos,’ ” he once wrote to Leo Tolstoy), and sometimes subtitling them “a story told on a grave,” “a Moscow family secret,” “a fantastic story,” “a spiritualistic occurrence.” Later in life, when he allied himself with Tolstoy, he wrote fables for publication by the Tolstoyan popular press, The Mediator, and he also wrote a series of legends set in the ancient Near East, Egypt, Byzantium, in early Christian times. He wrote a number of Christmas stories, and also a series of what he called “stories of righteous men,” several of which are included in this collection (“Singlemind,” “Deathless Golovan,” “The Spook,” “The Man on Watch,” “The Enchanted Wanderer,” “Lefty”). Leskov considered these last the most important part of his work. “The real strength of my talent lies in the positive types,” he boasted in a letter to a friend. “Show me such an abundance of positive Russian types in another writer.”^c As Walter Benjamin says in “The Storyteller”: “The righteous man is the advocate for created things and at the same time he is their highest embodiment.”

All of these forms are based essentially on the anecdote, which serious critics tend to scorn. Mirsky enthusiastically defends Leskov’s practice:

His stories are mere anecdotes, told with enormous zest and ability, and even in his longer works his favorite way of characterizing his characters is by a series of anecdotes. This was quite contrary to the traditions of “serious” Russian fiction and induced the critics to regard Leskov as a mere jester. His most original stories are packed with incident and adventure to an extent that appeared ludicrous to the critics, who regarded ideas and messages as the principal thing.

Boris Eikhenbaum, in his essay “An ‘Excessive’ Writer,” published in 1931 in honor of Leskov’s hundredth birthday, says: “the anecdote … can be considered a sort of atom in Leskov’s work. Its presence and action are felt everywhere.” The anecdote is the most elementary form of story, told for its own sake or apropos of some more general topic of discussion in a group of friends, at a Christmas party, or among travelers stranded at an inn during a blizzard.