Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District

Photograph of Act IV, scene 9 of original Leningrad production of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Unknown photographer, 1934.

Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk Districtis an opera in four acts and nine scenes by Dmitri Shostakovich. The libretto is based on the novella of the same name by Nikolai Leskov.

About this opera Shostakovich said,  “I want to write a Soviet 'Ring of the Nibelungen'. This will be the first operatic tetralogy about, women, of which Lady Macbeth will be the Rheingold. This will be followed by an opera around the heroine of the People's Will Movement 1. Then a woman of our century; and finally I will create our Soviet heroine, who will combine in her character the qualities of the woman of today and tomorrow..... This theme is the leitmotive of my daily thought and will be for the next ten years.” 

It was premiered in Leningrad in 1934 and met initially with great success. By the beginning of 1936 the opera had been running for two years in both Leningrad, where it had been performed 83 times, and in Moscow, where it had had 97 performances. It had also been performed in New York, Cleveland, Philadelphia 3, Buenos Aires, Zürich, Prague, Bratislava and Stockholm 4. But on 26 January 1936 Shostakovich's luck changed. That evening Stalin, Molotov, Mikoyan and Zhdanov attended a performance at the Bolshoi in Moscow. They left abruptly and ominously at the end of the penultimate act, thereby not joining in with the applause that greeted the final curtain. two days later Pravda wrote.

“On the stage singing is replace by screaming. 

The composer of the 'Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District' had to use the nervous, cramped, epileptic music of jazz to give his heroine 'passion'.

Everything is gross, primitive and vulgar.

The composer has obviously not set himself the task of satisfying the musical expectations of the Soviet opera-goer.

[Shostakovich] has ignored the requirement of Soviet culture … “

The performances of the opera were immediately cancelled and Shostakovich retreated into himself, making no effort at any public defense. It was banned in the Soviet Union until 1961. It was only after Stalin’s death that Shostokovich again began to publish his music and be performed. The opera has now become a staple of many of the major opera houses of the world.

Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich

Stalin

Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov

Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov 16 February 1831 – 5 March February] 1895) was a Russian novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and journalist, who also wrote under the pseudonym M. Stebnitsky. He was admired by Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky among others, Leskov created a picture of contemporary Russian society using mostly short literary forms. His major works include Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1865), The Cathedral Clergy (1872), The Enchanted Wanderer (1873), and The Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea (1881). The novella is set in Mtsensk. This  is a town in Oryol Oblast, Russia, located on the Zusha River (a tributary of the Oka) 49 kilometers (30 mi) northeast of Oryol, the administrative center of the oblast. The town is just southwest of Moscow.

In the story, Katerina Katerina is unhappily married to Zinovy, a provincial flour-merchant. Zinovy is called away on business. Sergei, a new clerk, and his comrades are sexually harassing the servant Aksinya and Katerina intervenes. She scolds him saying that women are as brave and capable as men. Sergei is willing to prove her wrong and they wrestle; she is thrown down and Sergei falls on top of her. Boris, her father-in-law appears. She says that she tripped and Sergei in trying to help her, fell down also. The other peasants back her up. Boris however is suspicious and threatens to tell Zinovy all about her behavior.

Katerina prepares to go to bed. Sergei knocks on her door with the excuse that he wants to borrow a book because he cannot sleep. She can’t read, so has no books. As she is about to close the door he continues attempting to seduce her by remembering their wrestling match earlier that day. He forces himself on her. Afterwards she tells him to leave, but he refuses and she agrees to have an affair with him. Boris knocks on the door confirming that Katerina is in bed and locks her in. Sergei is trapped in the room, and the two spend the night together.

A week later. Boris is unable to sleep. He is considering seducing Katerina himself to fulfill his son's marital duties, as he has not produced a child, but spots Sergei climbing out of Katerina's window. He catches him and publicly whips him as a burglar. He locks him in a store room. Katerina witnesses this but cannot stop him. Being exhausted by beating Sergei, Boris demands some dinner, saying that he will whip Sergei again the next day and sends a servant to call Zinovy back. Katerina adds rat-poison to some mushrooms and gives them to him. As he is dying, calling for a priest, she retrieves the keys to free Sergei. The priest finds Boris in agony, : Boris vainly tries to tell him that he was poisoned and falls back dead pointing at Katerina. Katerina, weeping crocodile tears, convinces him that Boris has accidentally eaten poisonous mushrooms and he says a prayer over Boris' body.

In the novella Leskov describes the dish that Boris asks for and Katerina gives him as Fried Mushrooms and Kasha. The english translation says,

“In the evening, Boris Timofeich ate a bit of kasha with mushrooms and got heartburn; then suddenly with a pain in his stomach; he was seized with terrible vomiting and towards the morning he died, just as the rats died in his storehouses, Katerina Lvovna having always prepared a special food for them with her own hands, using a dangerous white powder entrusted to her keeping.”

The white powder was probably arsenic as it was used for rat poison and other things in the 19th century.

A recipe for fried mushrooms from that period and place can be found in a cook book by Elena Ivanovna Molokhovets who was Russia’s equivalent to America’s Fannie Farmer and Britain’s Mrs Beeton.

Elena was born in 1831. Her father, whose last name was Burman, was a customs official in Arkhangel on the White Sea, and a minor noble. She was educated by the Imperial Educational Society for Noble Girls. She married Franz Molokhovets, an architect; together they had nine sons and one daughter. One son went on to become a general; another died in 1905 at sea during the Russian-Japanese war; the daughter died in the same year as her father.

In 1861, she published her book, “A Gift to Young Housewives or a help to reduce housekeeping charges”  She was then 30, and the family had moved to Kursk, in south central Russia, near the Ukraine border, where her husband worked for the government there.

The 1861 edition of her book had twenty-two chapters and 1,500 recipes. In the 1880s, she added sections on caring for domestic animals, health and hygiene, and caring for children and sick adults, but these were dropped in later editions. The book remained the handbook for middle-class and upper-class women in Russia until the revolution of 1917; she herself kept revising it herself up until 1917, by which time it had over 4,000 recipes in it.

A Gift to Young Housewives - Elena Ivanovna Molokhovets

• Russian Fried Mushrooms - click here for recipe
  For Russians, mushrooms are creatures that live in the forest and you have to hunt for them. Mushroom picking is one of our favorite activities in Summer. Russian’s collected porcini, birch bolete, red-capped bolete, slippery jack, chanterelle, saffron milk cap, honey mushrooms and milk mushrooms. But it wasn’t all that rare that a poisonous variety was mistakenly collected and killed it’s forager. That is the excuse Katarina gives the priest and is believed