Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: Selected Stories by Nikolai Leskov, Robert Chandler & William Edgerton (Translators), Donald Rayfield (Introduction/Translator); 2020. Softcover. (New York Review Books) (CO)

Leskov is the strangest the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century. His work is closer to oral traditions of narrative than that of his contemporaries, and served as the inspiration for Walter Benjamin's great essay "The Storyteller," in which Benjamin contrast the plotty machinations of the modern novel with the strange, melancholy, but also worldly-wise yarns of an older, slower era that Leskov remained in touch with.

The title story here is a tale of illicit love and multiple murder that could easily find its way into a Scottish ballad and did go on to become the most popular of Shostakovich's operas. The other stories, all but one newly translated, present the most focused and finely-rendered collection of this indispensable writer currently available in English.