The Steel Flea: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

The Steel Flea, credited to Nikolai Leskov, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of The Steel Flea by Nikolai Leskov. (Translated by Isabel Florence Hapgood.) Read in English by Expatriate An 1881 comic story by Nikolai Leskov, presented in the form of a traditional skaz or folk-tale, but entirely of Leskov's invention. It tells the story of a left-handed Russian artisan required to impress Tsar Nikolas I with his craftsmanship by outdoing some famous Englishmen who have created a tiny mechanical flea. The Russian smith barricades himself with two skilled colleagues in his workshop until finally forced to come out and reveal the brilliant result of his labor. Far more famous in Russia than in the West, the story of The Steel Flea reveals much about nineteenth-century Russian attitudes toward the West and toward their own country, but is difficult to categorize. Either a celebration of Russian ingenuity or a critique of Russian autocracy, The Steel Flea has established itself as a classic worthy of any of the great Russian authors. [It should be noted that many of the most comical lines in the story are funny only in the original Russian, depending as they do on ridiculous malapropisms or ignorant combinations of words almost impossible to translate. Ms. Hapgood, for example, has had to do the best she could, rendering the mistaken word for "international" as "internecine," for "infusoria" as "nymfozoria," for "Pyramids" as "Keramids," for "stench" as "spiral," and so on.] (Summary by Expatriate)

Recording facts

• Recording title: The Steel Flea
• Author credits: Nikolai Leskov
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 3
• Listed recording duration: 1:16:17

Catalogue topics

• Russian Literature

Track guide

1. 01 - Part I — 25:27
2. 02 - Part II — 25:01
3. 03 - Part III — 25:49

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.