One of Walter Benjamin's most famous essays is ‘The Storyteller’, a celebration of the fiction of Nikolai Leskov, which he published in 1936. Benjamin's argument is that the traditional oral tale represented a ‘community of listeners’, with the teller of the tale existing in close proximity to his audience. What was heard was the voice of experience, which was highly valued. There was a wisdom implicit in the very act of narration: ‘After all, counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding. To seek this counsel one would first have to be able to tell the story. … Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom’ (Benjamin 1, 86).

Now, he reflects, the story has been replaced by the novel, just as a predominantly oral culture has been replaced by a printbased culture, and wisdom has been replaced by information. This is something we should understand, for it is part of the process of secularization which we call modernity, and which pervades our lives. The novel is a literary, contrived attempt to offer a substitute for the moral authority of the directly narrated story. It cannot rely on community, but functions by means of indirect communication from one individual, the author, to another individual, the reader, who is unknown to him. ‘A man listening to a story is in the company of the storyteller; even a man reading one shares this companionship. The reader of a novel, however, is isolated, more so than any other reader. (For even the reader of a poem is ready to utter the words, for the benefit of the listener)’ (Benjamin 1, 100). However, it might just be possible for the writer in a secular, literate age to recapture the power of storytelling, if he has retained knowledge of, and respect for, the community which sustained it. At any rate, Leskov is a writer who, according to Benjamin, has retained the power of the story, and is able to transcend the alienation of print.

One of the more interesting proposals of this essay is that there is a particular kind of story which is formative of the whole genre: