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Stifled by her marriage of convenience to a man twice her age, the young Katerina Lvovna goes yawning about the house, missing the barefoot freedom of her childhood, until she meets the feckless steward Sergei Filipych. Sergei proceeds to seduce Katerina, as he has done half the women in the town, not realising that her passions, once awoken, will attach to him so fiercely that Katerina will stop at nothing to keep hold of him. Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is an unsettling tale of a woman's struggle for happiness and control in the midst of a society that watches, constrains and judges her. The simple and dramatic plot inspired Shostakovich's acclaimed opera of the same name, whilst in Katerina herself, whose unselfconscious passion and calculating brutality is narrated in startlingly detached detail, Leskov has created an anti-heroine of almost superhuman stature and compelling intensity who now stands as one of the archetypes of European literature.
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