The messengers said, “He’ll eat us alive before then and won’t even leave our souls for the funeral.�
When Platov had stopped beating h
The messengers said, “He’ll eat us alive before then and won’t even leave our souls for the funeral.�
When Platov had stopped beating him, Lefty straightened himself out and said, “That’s the way all my hair got pulled out while I was an apprentice. I don’t know what need there is now to go through all that again.�
Oh boy, and so it goes…replete with awes and guffaws that follow this folklore-styled novella.
The Steel Flea by Nikolai Semyonovitch Leskov, is a fantastic novella that also goes by several other names: Lefty, The Tale of the Crosseyed Lefthander from Tula and the Steel Flea, etc. Absolutely the kind of book I needed after a hectic work-week, with this hilarious, satirical blitz from Russia’s master of satire: Nikolai Leskov. I am going to have this as a � for my friends to read, as I was left in splits. The sardonic flares of ingenuity are peppered throughout the 19 chapters.
One of the things, one notices is the kind of neologism-induced weird spellings� I have heard a lot about the folksy, neologisms that Leskov can ad lib at whim, which can be a nightmare for his translators. Am sure, this work would be better appreciated by those who may have read it in the Russian original, but, even in this translation, the subtle potshots that Leskov takes at the Westerners and the Slavophiles are too good to be ignored.
Albeit written more than 100 years ago, in the penultimate para, where Leskov casually muses, �…machines have evened up the inequalities in gifts and talents, and genius no longer strains itself in a struggle against diligence and exactness�, he is probably holding out a mirror for us � in this very 21st century, when robots are already replacing humans at various spheres of work.
Absolutely enjoyed this novella! Laughed enough for a week!...more
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