Nel nome di Lady Macbeth: la tragica storia di una mercantessa della provincia russa

Resumen

In Nikolai Leskov’s celebrated novella Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1865), the titular epithet encapsulates the tragic story of a morally compromised
woman who diverges from Shakespeare’s famous character in crucial ways. Unlike Shakespeare’s protagonist, she lacks noble lineage, harbors no political ambitions, and exhibits a psychological complexity that proves far less unambiguously malevolent – as the novella’s ending suggests. Despite committing heinous crimes, she is not fundamentally evil. The appellation ‘Lady Macbeth,’ far from merely provocative, opens avenues for deeper exploration of Katerina Izmajlova’s dual onomastic identity. This duality operates on two registers: first, it invokes two other literary Katerinas – Petrovna from Aleksandr Ostrovsky’s The Storm (1860) and the eponymous heroine of Taras Shevchenko’s poem (1840); second, it evokes the Shakespearean legacy that profoundly shaped the worldview and artistic output of nineteenth-century Russian literature. This paper constructs an onomastic-literary portrait of Leskov’s Lady Macbeth to illuminate the complexities and contradictions of her character, ultimately seeking to clarify the author’s deliberate choice of title.