Catherine Géry is the editor of two volumes on Nikolai Leskov and the author of a previous monograph devoted to “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.” She also has translated two volumes of Leskovs's stories into French. In her latest book, Géry approaches Leskov through the double lens of Walter Benjamin and Boris Eikhenbaum. The German and Russian critic both left substantial comments on Leskov—Benjamin in his 1936 essay “Der Erzähler” (The Storyteller) and Eikhenbaum in his articles “Illiuziia skaza” (1918), “Leskov i sovremennaia proza” (1925) and “‘Chrezmernyi’ pisatel΄” (1931). The common denominator between Benjamin and Eikhenbaum is their focus on the simulation of an oral narrator in Leskov's stories. That said, Benjamin and Eikhenbaum take divergent approaches to the technique of “skaz,” with the former treating it as an ideological and ethical issue and the later concentrating on phonics and acoustics. Their conclusions are different as well: in Benjamin's rather melancholic perspective, Leskov's use of “skaz” belongs to a vanishing world of pre-modern storytelling, while Eikhenbaum detects in his innovative narrative technique an avatar of twentieth-century experimental writing.

Géry's book is divided into four parts. Part One is devoted to Benjamin's essay, which is placed into a larger context of oral literature. There is also a lengthy digression contrasting Benjamin's literary theory with that of Georg Lukács. Part Two discusses Eikhenbaum's approach within a larger summary, or rather apology, of the Russian Formalist movement, which Géry sees as a much-needed corrective to the current “Putinist” attitude in Russian criticism, where Leskov receives praise for his alleged Russian Orthodoxy, anti-intellectualism, and populism (94). Part Three focuses on Leskov's word-creation and the problems of translation it generates, while Part Four combines a discussion of mimesis, parody, and citation in Leskov with a consideration of the afterlife of his “skaz” technique in the works of Sholem Aleichem, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and Sergei Dovlatov.

What is gained by looking at Leskov through the double lens of Benjamin and Eikhenbaum? The seeming double perspective is actually triple: it also includes Géry's own views, which do not necessarily coincide with that of Benjamin or Eikhenbaum. She even points out that, given Benjamin's “canonization” in western criticism since the late 1960s, it is more important than ever to look at him with critical distance (70). Overall, Géry's position seems closer to Eikhenbaum than to Benjamin, even though she deems it necessary to supplement Eikhenbaum's writings on Leskov with the insights of another Russian formalist, Iurii Tynianov. As she argues, Tynianov's 1921 article on Dostoevskii and Gogol΄ provides a sort of missing link for a fuller formalist approach to Leskov. The Leskov emerging from Géry's book is a “parodist” whose verbal performance has little to do with traditional concepts of mimetic realism. Echoing Mikhail Iampolskii, Géry interprets Leskov's seeming folksiness as a simulacrum of popular discourses (192), or essentially a phenomenon of language. Ultimately, in Géry's opinion, Leskov, the contemporary of Dostoevskii and Lev Tolstoi, represents “another nineteenth century” still waiting to be explored (216–17).

An interesting secondary issue raised in Géry's study concerns Leskov's translatability. Leskov himself, in a 1888 letter to his German translator quoted by Géry, expressed the opinion that translating his style into another language was impossible (171). Benjamin, who did not know Russian, read Leskov in German translation. This raises the question—unfortunately not pursued by Géry—whether the translation that Benjamin had really gave him an adequate impression of Leskov's verbal performance. Géry is very critical of the existing French translations, which, according to her, make Leskov sound like Gustave Flaubert (173). Her own approach is inspired by the German romantic tradition and Benjamin's famous essay on the task of the translator: she favors what Lawrence Venuti would call a “foreignizing” rather than a “domesticating” strategy. In her discussion of Leskov's word-creation, Géry makes a few rather ingenious suggestions of how Leskov‘s neologisms could be rendered in French. She also offers praise for William B. Edgerton's English translation (178), without, however, explaining its merits.

In its somewhat meandering style and composition, Géry's book seems to imitate Leskov's (and Benjamin's) own technique of a mosaic-like collage of disparate fragments. As indicated by the subtitle, this is more a series of “reflections” than a sustained argument. Nevertheless, Géry's monograph is a very readable and insightful contribution to the study of a still somewhat neglected author.