Lecture | Rewriting Leskov: On Three Adaptations of Lefty (online)

Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov (1831 - 1895) was a Russian novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and journalist, who also wrote under the pseudonym M. Stebnitsky. 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 using mostly short literary forms.

The Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea is among Leskov's most famous and most ambiguous works. After reconstructing the story's elusive main idea, this talk will review several striking episodes in the 20th- and 21st-century reception of Lefty: Soviet editions of the 1920s and 1930s, the literary adaptation by Babette Deitch and Avraham Yarmolinsky published in New York in 1943, Boris Alexandrov's ballet Lefty (1950, first staged in 1954 in Sverdlovsk and then in 1976 in Leningrad), and finally, the newest production of Leskov's story at the Moscow Theater of Nations directed by Maxim Didenko and playwright Valery Pecheykin (2021). Which of Leskov's co-authors was closest to his idea and why? In search of an answer to this question, we will consider each of these adaptations in political and historical context.

Maya Kucherskaya is a professor of literature, writer of fiction and nonfiction and head of the first MFA program in Russia (National Research University "Higher School of Economics") and currently a Visiting Scholar at the Columbia University Harriman Institute. Her research interests include a variety of aspects of the history of Russian literature such as the era of the 1860s, Leskov's prose and the history of literary education in the 20th century. She is the author of more than 60 academic articles on these and other topics.