Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District

Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District is a novella by the Russian writer Nikolai Leskov, published in Russian in 1865 under the title Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo uyezda, first appearing in Fyodor Dostoevsky's magazine Epoch. The story follows Katerina Lvovna Izmailova, a bored young merchant's wife in provincial Russia, whose affair with a young estate employee, Sergei, draws her into committing a series of murders to protect the relationship, and it concludes with Katerina drowning herself and another prisoner in the Volga River while being transported to forced labor in Siberia. The novella's title deliberately invokes Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth and echoes Ivan Turgenev's earlier story Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District, and it explores the constrained social position of women in provincial nineteenth-century Russia alongside themes of infidelity and violence, drawing frequent comparison to Flaubert's Madame Bovary; it is a distinct literary work from Dmitri Shostakovich's later opera of the same title, which is based on it.