SOURCE: "The Gathering Clouds: On the Eve of War" and "The War Years," in Twentieth-Century Russian Drama: From Gorky to the Present, Columbia University Press, 1979, pp. 295-304, 305-17.

[An American educator and critic, Segel has written extensively on Russian literature. In the following excerpt, he discusses The Orchards of Polovchansk and The Invasion, two of Leonov's plays.]

International events in the 1930s were followed with intense interest in the Soviet Union. The triumph of fascism in Italy and Germany and the Japanese invasion of China were viewed as ominous developments of profound potential danger to the Soviet state. The defeat of the Loyalist cause in Spain and the gradual clarification of German and Japanese political goals in Eastern Europe and Asia, respectively, made the threat of war no longer merely a possibility but a virtual certainty. The necessary preparations began to be undertaken in the late 'thirties; this meant above all the raising of the military to a level of preparedness but also the psychological conditioning of the people to the hardships and sacrifices that lay ahead.

This preparedness for war became the focus of much literature of the period. Of the plays devoted to the subject, only a few succeeded in rising above the level of outright propaganda. The best of these were: Polovchanskie sady (The Orchards of Polovchansk, 1938), by the major Soviet novelist Leonid Leonov (1899–); Feldmarshal Kutuzov (Field Marshal Kutuzov, 1939), by Vladimir Solovyov (1907–), one of the more able writers of historical drama in the USSR; and Aleksandr Afinogenov's Nakanune (On the Eve, 1941).

Apart from dramatizations of his novels Barsuki (The Badgers, 1927) and Skutarevsky (1934), Leonov has a number of original plays to his credit; Untilovsk (1928), about life in an out-of-the-way community in Siberia; Provintsialnaya istoriya (A Provincial Story, 1928), a somber picture of rural life; Usmirenie Badadoshkina (The Taming of Badadoshkin, 1930), about a NEP profiteer; The Orchards of Polovchansk (1938); Volk (The Wolf, 1939), also about preparedness for war and the efforts to quash enemies within the Soviet state; Metel (The Snowstorm, 1939, 1962), the (better) original version of which develops a novel contrast between two brothers, a corrupt Soviet official and a sympathetically conceived émigré, and was suppressed during rehearsals at the Maly Theater; Obyknovenny chelovek (An Ordinary Person, 1940–41), Leonov's only designated "comedy," about false values in life represented by the ultimately unsuccessful materialistic ambitions of a mother for her daughter; Nashestvie (Invasion, 1942) and Lyonushka (1943), both about Russian heroism during the war; and Zolotaya kareta (The Golden Coach, 1946–55), the original version of which was another casualty of Party suppression, dealing with the psychological and emotional complexities of readjustment to peace among the residents of a devastated provincial town immediately after the war.

The Orchards of Polovchansk is Leonov's best-known and, at the same time, most problematic play. It can also serve as something of a paradigm of the acrobatics—and compromises—of revision in which Leonov has had to engage, especially in the 1930s and '40s, in order to overcome objections that his stylistic individualism and psychological complexity obscure ideological purpose.

Reminded of Chekhov by the summertime country setting, the orchard motif, the family milieu, and the play's largely static quality, critics have long imputed a Chekhovian character to The Orchards of Polovchansk. At some level, Chekhov clearly figured in the conception of the work, but in its conceptualization aspects of Chekhovian dramatic technique barely extend beyond the external. The Orchards of Polovchansk dramatizes the intrusion of hostile, alien elements into a tranquil and happy family atmosphere. The family is that of the Makkaveevs, headed by the family patriarch, the earthy, life-loving, and hardy Adrian Makkaveev, a character more familiar to readers of Gorky than of Chekhov. Makkaveev's accomplishments are a testament to his productive capacity. On the former estate of a nobleman he has cultivated a magnificent fruit orchard in which he can justifiably take pride. This is the most obvious Chekhovian element in the play. Makkaveev's orchard is meant to recall that of The Cherry Orchard and his successful working of the land is intended as an example of what could be accomplished in Soviet times. The orchard that symbolizes a way of life coming to an end in Chekhov's play now becomes a symbol of a reborn Russia. Because of his rough-hewn and dynamic character the temptation also exists to view Makkaveev as an extension of Chekhov's Lopakhin. There are similarities, certainly, but Makkaveev's gilt-edged revolutionary background (he underwent campaigns of the Civil War) and immense love for the land set him far apart from Lopakhin. Given his origins, his shrewd business sense, and his drive, Lopakhin could more easily have become a NEP speculator than a Makkaveev.

Makkaveev's productive capacity is emphasized by the family situation as well: seven children by two wives (the second much younger than himself), six of them boys. With the exception of his youngest son, a cripple, the men of the family are all successful in their careers, all patriotic and heroic—true sons of their father. The exception of the youngest son is explained by a moral code of Russian drama …, namely that the offspring of an illicit union is stigmatized by some physical defect. With Makkaveev's youngest son the suspicion is firmly implanted that his birth resulted from a wartime affair between Makkaveev's second wife, Aleksandra, and a shadowy character named Pylyaev.

The surprise reappearance of Pylyaev after an absence of eighteen years offsets the mood of joyful family reunion occasioned by the return home for a brief stay of Makkaveev's oldest sons and his daughter, Masha, and injects into the play its major element of intrigue.

The return of Makkaveev's children sets the stage for a Chekhovian drama of family relationships explored against the background of a provincial estate in summer. But the anticipation of the Chekhovian mood is unfulfilled. The arrival of the children is unobtrusive and undramatic, and the children themselves are paragons of virtue in their respective ways. Hence, the placid family setting remains essentially unchanged in dramatic terms. There is a great deal of the usual sort of family small talk and the incidents that go together to make up a family reunion, but none of the subtle character interaction of a Chekhovian drama materializes.

Leonov attempts to create interest by injecting a note of suspense regarding the delay of one son, Vasili, who is in the navy and has been away on a secret and dangerous submarine assignment, presumably in the Baltic. Late in the play, the Makkaveevs learn that Vasili was killed in an accident while on the assignment, but since he is then invested with the aura of a national hero no scene or scenes of visible remorse occur and the suspense evoked by the anticipation over his arrival and failure to appear really leads nowhere. To compensate, as it were, for the loss of Vasili, Leonov introduces the character of a young officer (Otshelnikov) who was a friend of Vasili, who is the bearer of the sad tidings of his death and with whom Makkaveev's daughter will become romantically linked.

Whatever dramatic interest The Orchards of Polovchansk generates stems from the play's negative forces—Pylyaev and the gathering clouds of war. Neither of these, to be sure, has anything to do with Chekhovian drama. Pylyaev emerges instead out of the ample Soviet tradition of the "wrecker," who filled the Soviet stage to overflow in the paranoid 1930s. In an earlier version of the play, Leonov's conception of the character was considerably different. Related more to the common figure of the unassimilable malcontent of Soviet literature of the '30s, Pylyaev (named Usov in the earlier version) was originally an unsuccessful, bitterly frustrated, Salieri-like man envious of his friend Makkaveev's accomplishments and determined to ruin his domestic happiness. Bowing to criticism principally from theatrical administrative quarters that the play lacked political content, Leonov reworked Usov into the sinister anti-Soviet schemer Pylyaev, thereby transforming the drama itself from a psychological study of Ibsenian resonance into a sociopolitical play in which themes of patriotism, heroism, obscure political intrigue, and impending conflict contend awkwardly for balance with ingredients of Chekhovian style. The problems raised by the transformation of the character of Usov-Pylyaev eluded a satisfactory solution; once the integrity of the original conception was compromised, neither the dramatic characterization nor the play itself fully recovered. The Moscow Art Theater rehearsed the play for fifteen months before its première in 1939, delayed largely by the difficulties the actor N. N. Sosnin experienced in trying to infuse life into the role of Pylyaev. After nearly three years work on the play, and the exceptionally long rehearsal period, The Orchards of Polovchansk had a run of just thirty-six performances and to generally poor reviews.

Playing on ironic contrast, Leonov times the reappearance of Pylyaev to coincide with the scheduled arrival of Makkaveev's children. Although he is very sparing of details concerning the reasons behind Pylyaev's return visit after so long an absence, he leaves little doubt: a) that Makkaveev's youngest son is really the illegitimate offspring of Pylyaev and Aleksandra and that Pylyaev wants to see him again; and b) that Pylyaev who, it is established, has spent time in prison, has been up to further wrongdoing and is a fugitive from the law. From the instant he appears Pylyaev is wholly unappealing: insinuating, presumptuous, conniving. But at the same time he is presented as so shadowy, that the characterization never truly coheres. The result is that the Pylyaev-Aleksandra-Makkaveev relationship arouses some interest but not enough to sustain the play as a whole. At the end of the work, moved no doubt by what he considered a sense of dramatic symmetry, Leonov has Pylyaev arrested by the same Otshelnikov who brings the news of Vasili's death and with whom Masha falls in love.

More convincing an aspect of The Orchards of Polovchansk is the ominous aura of imminent war. Significantly, Makkaveev's oldest sons are in the armed forces: Vasili, who was killed, and another son on military maneuvers in the very vicinity of Polovchansk. The sounds of tanks, artillery, and rockets reverberate throughout the play underscoring in a sense the fragility of the calm reigning at Polovchansk. It is also made clear against whom the military precautions are being taken. The Germans and Japanese are mentioned directly on a few occasions and as if to emphasize the point Makkaveev frequently recalls his fighting against the Germans (possibly in World War I and certainly in the "intervention" during the Civil War).

Leonov's efforts to re-create the atmosphere of Chekhovian drama and to enrich the intrigue of his play by introducing an evil and mysterious figure such as Pylyaev fail. But where The Orchards of Polovchansk does succeed is in capturing the sense of evil encroaching on a calm, orderly way of life. The sounds of war games are distant at first, but they continue to draw nearer with a portentous insistence. In trying to strengthen the underlying meaning of his play it is possible that Leonov was operating symbolically both with the death of Vasili and the ironically juxtaposed arrival of Pylyaev. If Vasili's untimely death foreshadows the death of many heroic young men in the war to come, then Pylyaev's reappearance seems to suggest the impossibility of ever fully eradicating evil from life….

The years 1941 to 1945 produced, expectedly, a rich harvest of plays about the war. Most were schematic exercises in the propaganda of heroism and nationalism. There were a few, however, that stood above the ordinary, such as Dym otechestva (Smoke of the Fatherland, 1942), a joint effort by the Brothers Tur (the collective pseudonym of Leonid Tubelsky, 1905–61, and Pyotr Ryzhey, 1908–) and Lev Sheynin (1905–); Russkie lyudi (The Russian People, 1942), by the best-known Russian writer of the war period, Konstantin Simonov (1915–); Nashestvie (Invasion, 1942), by Leonid Leonov; and Front (1942), by the popular Ukrainian playwright Aleksandr Korneychuk (1905–72)….

A familiar setting (a small Russian town in the initial period of the war), familiar characters (an anti-Red former Russian émigré, Mosalsky; a heroic Communist, Kolesnikov; compromising Russians anxious to preserve their skins at any cost, Fayunin and Kokoryshkin; "good" Russians, Dr. Talanov and his family; hard-as-rock Germans, Wiebel, Spurre, and Kuntz), and a familiar "happy ending" (the final-curtain liberation of the occupied town by Soviet parachutists) reappear in Leonov's best-known and most frequently performed war play, Invasion. But as the world of the drama is entered, the terrain seems distinctly less recognizable than a first glance indicates. If partisan resistance and heroics dominate the action of such plays as Smoke of the Fatherland and The Russian People, the thrust of Invasion moves in a very different direction. War is the inescapable fact of Leonov's play; it is the background against which everything in the drama has to be viewed and against which everything, indeed, has to be measured. Yet within this context the dramatist's concern shifts from the epic to the lyric, from the drama of the group to the drama of the individual. This shift enabled Leonov to write a play which has flaws (the deus ex machina triumphant ending is trite and weak) but which deserves to be considered one of the most interesting of the war period and one reflecting a sincere effort on the part of the dramatist to work the familiar stuff of war into an intellectually and psychologically more provocative experience than the rousing patriotism of most of his contemporaries' plays.

Psychology is the key word here, the indisputable focus of Invasion. At the core of the drama is an inquiry into the psychologically transformative power of war's suffering, a power sufficient to metamorphose an arrogant, self-centered, young ne'er-do-well into a man possessing the spiritual courage to sacrifice himself so that a better man (in a civic sense) might live. The subject of this metamorphosis is the erring son, Fyodor, of the town doctor, Talanov. In the first draft of the play the cause of Fyodor's rupture with his family is his (innocent) involvement in a political crime. In the final version, it is because of a sordid love affair about which, perhaps wisely—from a dramatic point of view—Leonov is very sparing of details. Apparently incapable of killing himself (rather than the woman he is involved with), Fyodor breaks with her—temporarily—and returns to his father's home after an absence of three years. Shortly thereafter, the town is occupied by the invading Germans. The residents begin to adjust to the drastically changed pattern of their lives and it is the process of adjustment that Leonov chooses to dramatize rather than the more conventional heroics of resistance. The restlessness and recalcitrance of Fyodor seem impervious to change, however, until the pivotal episode of the play occurs: the brutal assault by Germans on the teen-age Aniska, the granddaughter of the Talanovs' servant, Demidevna. Typical of Leonov's low-keyed approach throughout the play, the assault on Aniska (like all other brutalities in Invasion) is relegated to an offstage action, only the effects of which are shown onstage. Aniska's assault becomes the turning point in Fyodor's life. The horrible violation of innocence succeeds in cracking the wall of arrogance and self-interest narcissistically nurtured over several years. An inner compulsion to atone, to reestablish contact with the collective is born and requires only the proper catalyst to realize itself. This comes when a local Communist official, Kolesnikov, now presumably a partisan fighter (again, this is implied by Leonov but not spelled out in the dramatic action) is given shelter in the Talanov home after he is brought there, wounded, by Fyodor's sister, Olga, a schoolteacher. Fyodor's earlier relationship with Kolesnikov (in Act I) was marked by a kind of resentful acrimoniousness. But now the wounded (and hunted—there is a price on his head) Kolesnikov crystallizes as the instrument of Fyodor's self-transformation and regeneration.

When it becomes apparent that the Germans have traced Kolesnikov to Dr. Talanov's house and will arrest him the moment he leaves it, Fyodor takes Kolesnikov's place. Since neither Fyodor nor Kolesnikov are familiar faces to the Germans, the ruse goes undetected. The possibility of revelation arises in the third act of the play during the interrogation of Fyodor at which his own parents are present. But at the crucial moment, when they perceive what is happening, the Talanovs resist the naturally human impulse to divulge their son's true identity and thus save his life, aware perhaps intuitively of Fyodor's spiritual need. The final act of Fyodor's personal drama, when his self-fulfillment at last is attained, comes in the fourth and last act. In a prison cell awaiting execution Fyodor is not at once automatically accepted by his fellow Russians as Kolesnikov's surrogate, worthy of being executed as Kolesnikov. The inmates debate the matter and finally accept Fyodor in recognition of his undeniable heroism. He and two other prisoners die before the others are rescued in a daring surprise raid by Soviet parachutists.

The ending, and the few genuflective references to Stalin's military leadership preceding it, produce the only really discordant notes in an otherwise subdued psychological drama almost wholly devoid of heroics, strident patriotism, and overt political propaganda. The subdued quality of Invasion, which sets it apart from most Russian plays about the war, is carefully developed from the beginning of the action with the lack of hysteria among the townspeople in the face of the German occupation to the very moment when Fyodor quietly confronts his death. As I pointed out earlier, virtually all brutalities and heroics are kept offstage and introduced only in so far as they have any bearing on the activities and relationships of characters onstage. The actual occupation of the town by the Germans is not dramatized as the focus shifts entirely to the process of adjustment by the townspeople and their efforts to preserve a semblance of a normal routine of life within the framework of occupation. Aniska's brutalization occurs offstage and produces no emotional excesses onstage. The murder of German occupation officers by Kolesnikov and his guerrillas is never seen by the audience. The seizure of Fyodor is also kept offstage as well as his death and the appearance at play's end of the parachutists who appear out of nowhere in the sky.

If there is less overt action in a physical sense in Leonov's play than in other Russian war dramas, it is also true that significant character interrelations and transformations proceed from action rather than from words or from the confrontation of opposing personalities. Leonov's technique in this respect is nowhere better observed than in Fyodor's metamorphosis and the emotion-charged (if emotion-less) interrogation scene in Act IV where his parents are faced with the agonizing decision whether or not to reveal to the German authorities that their son is not Kolesnikov. In the first instance, the virtual absence of any "soul-searching" on Fyodor's part articulated in the form of a soliloquy or in dialogue with other characters may create the impression that his metamorphosis is inadequately or improperly motivated. But this is not the case. The transformation is not arrived at suddenly; it is not overt or theatricalized. It springs from the circumstances of Fyodor's private life and his psychological state at the moment he beholds the battered body of Aniska before him. In keeping with the low-keyed mood of the entire play the transformation of Fyodor is not, therefore, thrust suddenly upon the audience but disclosed piecemeal, unobtrusively, and only through action.

On the formal level one further aspect of Invasion invites comment—Leonov's extensive use throughout the play of long, detailed stage directions. These not only fulfill the primary function of providing precise information on attire, gesture, and props but at times are so literary and narrative as to seem aimed principally at a reader. Certainly, to the director and actors their imagery, humor, and irony are of no particular value. Reflected here is not just a concern for the manner in which the dramatist wishes his work brought to the stage, but the dissatisfaction with the limitations of the dramatic form on the part of a writer ultimately more at ease with the expansiveness of the novel. Some of the best examples of such stage directions occur in the dramatically effective third act in which Fyodor, impersonating Kolesnikov, is interrogated in the presence of his parents, and at the very beginning of Act IV. Looking more closely at the directions especially in Act III, one has the distinct impression, moreover, that Leonov was striving for something even beyond narration. The room in which the interrogations are conducted is filled with a variety of characters, Russian and German alike. When the Germans are first introduced into the scene, the stage direction calls for their moving in a rigid, wooden manner reminiscent of pasteboard figures or puppets: "Now guests of a secondary significance are visible. They are pasteboard, with the restricted movements of mannequins. At the non-Russian speech of the new arrivals, Kokoryshkin peeped out and then seemed even to shrink in size."

In the light of other directions in the same act it is apparent that Leonov sought not only to convey the impression of something non-human about the Germans through their physical movements, but also to introduce an element of the grotesque into the scene. Consider, for example, the directions governing the movements of the German officer Spurre and the Russian fulnkey Kokoryshkin. Spurre has just come into the room and Kokoryshkin begins to greet him. But before he finishes Spurre obviously mistakes him for the prisoner Kolesnikov. Kokoryshkin barely perceives what is happening when the German grabs him by the collar and rushes him out of the room. The first part of the stage direction reads as follows: "Like a little feather he turns Kokoryshkin around with his back to the door and leads him with his extended arm. They exit rhythmically, as though dancing, leg to leg and face to face. Kokoryshkin offers no resistance and is just very afraid of stepping on Spurre's toes…." For stage directions such as these employed, above all, to reinforce through physical movement and gesture language the already grotesque character of the entire act one has to go back to the comic art of a Gogol or Sukhovo-Kobylin whose inspiration at least for the act should not be discounted.