Our Lady of Mtsensk and the Sealed Angel

Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District is an 1865 novel by Nikolai Leskov. It was originally published in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s magazine Epoch. Among its themes are the subordinate role expected from women in 19th-century European society, adultery, provincial life (thus drawing comparison with Flaubert’s Madame Bovary) and the planning of murder by a woman, hence the title inspired by the Shakespearean character Lady Macbeth from his play Macbeth. The title also echoes the title of Turgenev’s story Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District (1859).