SOURCE: "Leonid Leonov," in From Gorky to Pasternak: Six Writers in Soviet Russia, 1961. Reprint by Vintage Books, 1966, pp. 276-303.

[A Russian-born American educator and critic, Muchnic has written extensively on Russian literature. In the following excerpt originally published in 1961, she remarks on Leonov's influences and his artistic development.]

In 1932 an article on Leonov in the Soviet Encyclopedia spoke disparagingly of his early work as having been "abstract" in the manner of the Symbolists and influenced by Dostoevsky, and congratulated him on having "surmounted" Dostoevsky. Leonov, then thirty-three years old, had been publishing for about ten years. He had begun with short stories; had written a play, Untilovsk, and four novels, The Badgers, The Thief, Sot' (translated as Soviet River), and Skutarevsky, which had brought him to the attention of the public and elicited the praise of Gorky, who declared that the writing of this very gifted young man would one day merit "serious study," if he abandoned his "aestheticism" and turned his vigorous prose to good account.

Leonov's earliest work was not social-minded. His stories were stylistic experiments, inspired by a purely literary interest. Some were fairy tales, "Buriga," "The Wooden Queen," "The Jack of Diamonds," "Valya's Doll," in which woodland sprites or playthings figured as main characters; others were essays in various forms: in the uncanny and the grotesquely humorous, "Egorushka's Destruction" and "An Incident with Jacob Pichunk"; in the Biblical parable and the Oriental prose poem, "Ham's Departure," "Khalil," "Tuatamur"; in pathos, "The End of an Insignificant Man," "Petushikhin Notch"; in satire, "A Record of Certain Episodes Made in the Town of Gogulev by Andrew Petrovich Kovyakin." All were derivative; manifestly Leonov was "playing the sedulous ape," copying E. T. A. Hoffmann, Remizov, Blok, Leskov, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Gorky. Endowed with an unusually acquisitive ear, he enjoyed making the most of his verbal facility, mastering dialects—including Tartar for the sake of "Tuatamur"—steeping himself in all manner of rhythmic prose; interested, in short, in making himself a writer. He gives the impression of one for whom the activity—one is tempted to say the game—of writing was, initially, more important than any theme, much less any "message." No personal experience, no belief compelled him. He tried out subjects and styles, was dexterous in playing with artistic effects; but since he was a man of neither passion nor conviction, his work, unlike Blok's, Mayakovsky's, Pasternak's, even Gorky's and Sholokhov's, was the work of a follower, not a leader.

The stories with which he began were semiserious, gently tender, romantically pathetic. And there was implicit in them a teasing, insoluble comparison between the artificial and the real, between the game and actual being, between toys or fairy-tale creatures and real men and women. When the black chessboard queen becomes a woman with whom a chess player falls in love and then turns out to be the bride of his best friend, "Even in chess," he remarks, "as I have long since felt, the kind of situation must exist in which a woman is unfaithful only for the sake of unfaithfulness, a situation in which there is mystery and all kinds of magic." A fancy such as this, on the borderline between the dream and actuality, is the kind that Blok and the Symbolists were using to express their most intimately evanescent, their most complicated experiences. In Leonov's hands it turns to sentimentality and triteness; and the manner in which a potentially original and personal theme is here made platitudinous is indicative of a characteristic duality of Leonov's mind: fascination with excursions into unknown realms on the one hand, and desire for comfort on the other. Leonov was affected by the atmosphere of experimentation which prevailed when he started to write, just as later he was to fall in with another dominant tendency. But his experiments were differently motivated from those of the introspective Symbolists, or of such speculative novelists as Pilnyak and Olësha, or even of such limelight seekers as Mayakovsky. There was less boldness in him, a kind of cautious effacement of personality, an unwillingness to cultivate whatever capacity for individual experience he might have had. From the first, he seems eager to use his unquestionable cleverness not to impose himself but to get a hearing, and without being natively devoid of distinctiveness and intensity, chooses to suppress the one and to dilute the other.

He was published in experimental journals—Shipovnik, Literaturnaya Misl', Krug, Russkiy Sovremennik; in a literary quarrel with Vakhtangov, he defended what was later scornfully referred to as "personal psychologism"; and when in 1927 he was asked by an interviewer: "Whose method, among classical writers, do you consider most appropriate for depicting our contemporary world?" he answered, "F. M. Dostoevsky's, given sufficient strength and understanding." Three years later, however, on a similar occasion, he replied that although he himself had learned most from Dostoevsky, "by the irony of fate" he had "flunked" because of him. Dostoevsky's psychological analysis was "static," he had decided, not suitable for describing the contemporary world, and his style was "long drawn out, verbose." Between these two opinions had come friendship with and encouragement from Gorky, and the publication of the Dostoevskian novel which had "flunked" him, The Thief. Now his consciousness became a battleground on which Dostoevsky and Gorky fought for his allegiance. Gorky scored an easy victory. For despite his earlier enthusiasm, Dostoevsky had never been firmly entrenched in his mind. It had been Dostoevsky's trappings and gestures that had impressed Leonov, not his essence; and just as from Leskov he had borrowed the form of the skaz (i.e., of the extended anecdote, comically related in semiliterate speech) but not that starkness of tragedy which makes Leskov's work powerful, and from Gogol the element of grotesque humor but not his sense of terror, so he had caught Dostoevsky's fascination with complex and abnormal states of mind but nothing of his philosophic depth or psychological imaginativeness.

And yet, however naïve his use of Dostoevsky, he was apparently more deeply stirred by him than by the other writers whom he imitated, for in the works that lean most heavily on Dostoevsky, there is a subjective strain, a touch of intimacy, which has always been rare with Leonov, and which was completely "surmounted," it would seem, under the influence of Gorky and other Soviet commentators. Strongly Dostoevskian was the short story of 1922, "The End of an Insignificant Man." It had to do with a geologist, Likharëv, who, caught in the hard days that followed the Revolution, obliged to endure cold, hunger, illness, and intellectual isolation, becomes involved with a set of "arty" characters, whose pretentious arguments are a cover for mental chaos and the absence of moral principles, and who finds it all but impossible to continue his writing; but having returned to it, Likharëv is persuaded by a demonic hallucination, a "Fop" who visits him during his heart attacks, that his work is of no importance, while the paper it is written on might serve a useful purpose in warming his room. Although the "Fop" is an obvious replica of Ivan Karamazov's bourgeois devil, though he talks and looks and acts like him, and has the same function of belittling a thinker's efforts and forcing him to doubt himself, the scene in which Likharëv burns his manuscript is genuinely moving. So also is another Dostoevskian episode, his sister's death. This occurs at the moment when, at long last, Likharëv has found it possible to resume his work. He is so engrossed in it that when his sick sister calls to him, he selfishly refuses to be interrupted; and she, realizing the situation, stifles her cries of pain and, to spare him the death agony, sends him out on a fictitious errand. He goes, aware of the ruse, but, too cowardly and selfish not to take advantage of it, wanders about the streets until he knows she must have died. Passages such as this indicate that Leonov had a feeling for the intricacies and ironies of Dostoevsky's moral situations, the poignant tragedy of his pathetically isolated men, but more for the Dostoevsky of Poor Folk than of the major novels.

In "The End of an Insignificant Man," just as in Poor Folk, society forms the background for the pitiful individual. But in The Badgers, his first novel, which followed immediately upon this story, Leonov reversed the design and made a social theme its center. He dealt here with one aspect of the establishment of Soviet power, the struggle between city and country, which he represented in the fortunes of two brothers, Simon and Paul Rakleev, who, taken as children from their native village to Moscow, part company there and meet again only at the end of the story. Paul, rebelling against maltreatment at the hands of his employer, runs away to become a factory worker and a Communist; Simon, after a period in the army, returns to the village, ends up as leader of a guerilla band that defies the Bolsheviks, and is in the outcome confronted by his brother, who, transformed into Comrade Anton, has arrived as commander of a punitive expedition. After a hazardous and daring struggle, Simon submits to the new power: the forward-looking Communist city has overcome the backward, recalcitrant country….

After The Badgers came The Thief. Its central figure, the passionate Mitka Vekshin, is modeled on Dmitry Karamazov and is, like raskolnikov, an honest criminal who is ultimately regenerated; the woman he loves, Man'ka Dolomonova, nicknamed Viuga (i.e., blizzard), reminds one of both Grushenka and Nastasya Fillipovna (as well as of the enchantress who inspired Blok's Snow Mask and Faïna). Manyukin is another Marmeladov, and there are several more minor personages in the tradition of Dostoevsky's insulted and injured. It was noted by Gorky that in this novel one had, as with Dostoevsky, "the elemental riot of instinct," and by others that the idea of the contradictions between the individual and society was basic in the book; that its leading characters were "individualists" and "sufferers" whose suffering "purified" their souls; that all of them were more or less unbalanced and full of reflectiveness, doubt, and inward struggle; and that structurally its main figures, like Dostoevsky's, served as "crooked mirrors" in which the others were reflected, so that they came to play an almost symbolic role, Manyukin standing for the "disintegration of personality," Ageyka for the "descent of the individual to crime," Pchkov for rejection of the world, etc. Today Leonov is spoken of as having been influenced by the "psychologism" of the twenties, and The Thief does not appear in the six-volume edition of his collected works. But although The Thief is so obviously Dostoevskian that it often reads like a pastiche, Leonov's differences from Dostoevsky are more striking than the similarities. He writes for a different reason; his interests, themes, emphases are all different. The intricate plot of this novel, more intricate than that of The Badgers, and more justifiably so, is closer to André Gide's structures than to Dostoevsky's; and its basic theme, which, elaborating the speculations of his early stories, is a musing on how art is related to life, is also Gide's kind of theme, not Dostoevsky's. Like that of The Counterfeiters it is developed on two levels: there is the story itself of Mitka Vekshin, the thief, and the story that the writer Firsov writes about him, the "real" events and their literary version proceeding along parallel lines. The characters themselves want to be written about; they take the writer into their confidence and comment on his work both while it is in process and afterwards, while Firsov is more than an observer: he takes part in the action, even, to a degree, manipulates events, and his book about Mitka comes out before Mitka's story is finished. All this creates an atmosphere of mystification, in which a drama of guilt and passion is acted out. The implication is that however close to life the writer may think himself to be, however much involved he may be in it, life itself escapes him. For his involvement is never complete; and with all the influence he may exercise, he is primarily an observer and commentator, not an actor.

But another kind of artist is introduced in this novel, one whose art is not of the intellect but of skill and daring. And so often does Leonov subsequently return to the experience represented by this type of artist that, as one soon realizes, it must be fraught with symbolic import for him, must stand in his mind for some cherished ideal, perhaps the one most intimately cherished of all. Like that moment in Thomas Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree, when the plaintive cry of "the small bird being killed by an owl" pierces the stillness and passes "into the silence without mingling with it," so in The Thief there is an incident which, though it has no vital bearing on the plot, remains most memorable and most poignant. This is an episode which concerns Mitka's sister Tanya, who, having been lost for many years, is finally rediscovered as the famous Guella Vel'ton, a daring performer on the trapeze, the chief attraction of a traveling circus. Her act is called shtrabat and we are told that

it was considered old-fashioned, but Vel'ton had complicated it with hazardous details, and her unaffected grace welded the whole of it into the complete triumph of a youthful, skillful body…. Her agility rose to deadly daring that gave shtrabat a cruel and terrible beauty.

She had been trained in this work by a pathetic, lonely old clown, part of whose story is given as follows:

At the height of his career he earned his bread with his "little ones." In circus language this is called "strap-turning the mill." Head down, his feet grasping the trapeze, he held the strap in his teeth and slowly unwound his children who hung on it. A rapid drum roll, as at executions, accompanied the fateful moments. In the buzzing shaft of the spotlight the children fluttered about, over the sand, the pitiable tinsel of their wings glistening: butterflies!… The calamity was trite, as if invented by a bad author. When the mill was unwound, the piece of strap which is clenched in the teeth, and which had rotted, tore apart, and the butterflies fluttered to the sand. An agitated, uniformed attendant was already running toward them, but the father hung with the bit of strap in his teeth, afraid to understand its sudden lightness.

Tanya also dies in the performance of her act. Before stepping into the arena for what is to be the last time, she says to the old clown—she who is now famous, who is "that night the center of attention, precisely she herself and not the mysterious name of her performance":

"You know, I still haven't got used to the idea that I am a regular circus performer. My whole life seems an attempt to do what is impossible for man to do. I love my work, Pugel, because I know how much labor I put into it when I first started. How I cried when I couldn't do it!… Do you remember?… Work, when you love it, is jolly; then even failures are jolly."

There follows a description of Tanya beneath the enormous dome, gracefully poised on the trapeze, fastening herself to it in the midst of thunderous applause, her body "yearning to fly."

With quickened consciousness Tanya measured the distance to that point in the air beyond which the noose would not permit her to go. A colossal recklessness took possession of the artist as she glanced at the rows, where like a mountain of vegetables, human faces lay close together; a terrible fear floated up from them. The moment split into a thousand particles and they crumbled into other moments, imperceptible to the mind. Tanya darted down, and it was as if time had stopped. Then, everyone saw the light blue, longish body hanging like a faded flower; but this in no way entered their consciousness. Tanya hung there; dead, she seemed to be looking at the dead light of the lampion; the noose had lifted her chin.

This episode appears to be unintentionally symbolic, not of Leonov's themes but of himself, the only instance in all his productions when unconscious experience has been permitted to take conscious, artistic form. Just as the pitiful cry of the unseen bird expressed all Hardy's bitterness at the tragedy of innocent and helpless creatures and was the most intense note in his book, although its suggestion of fatal cruelty was not borne out in the story, so Tanya's death, in my opinion, strikes the central, deepest note of Leonov's work, and is emotionally, if not structurally, the climax of The Thief. In somewhat the same way as the poor, anonymous small bird sums up the core of Hardy's tragic tales, the irrational and irremediable suffering of inoffensive creatures, and as the leap from a high tower, the sudden fall, and the moment of vision or dazzling illumination stand in Dostoevsky's work for passion or a supreme act of will, so the perilous circus stunt seems to express Leonov—the daring exploit that requires skill and training as well as courage, an artistic defiance of death, in which a human being attempts to do what is superhuman before a frightened and fascinated audience. Presently, as the sound of Dostoevsky's voice recedes to be replaced by Gorky's, this symbol is metamorphosed into a useful and rational form, suitable for conveying the message of Socialist Realism….

Among Soviet authors, Leonov stands out for what Gorky called his "strong, clear, juicy" prose, and for his genuine feeling for elemental forces. His writing throbs with the excited sense of the chaotic and destructive violence of nature which stimulates man to incredible exertion. He needs enthusiasm to write, and it is adventure, danger, the utmost straining of nerve and muscle that rouse him to enthusiasm. But he cannot let nature stand alone. Like the medieval theologians for whom gross earth had meaning only as an allegory of the divine—the shining sun signified Jesus Christ, the unplowed field the unregenerate mind of man, and the frisking lambs in spring the happily converted heathen—so Leonov sees swarming locusts as "the enemy," floods and fires as unbridled passion, and the forest as the greatness of Russia's land and people. Nature rages in his novels only that man may subdue it; the Russian man, that is, the good citizen of the U.S.S.R., who conquers it in time of peace as he conquers enemy nations in time of war. Clearly enough, Leonov's predilections jibe with the official demands of the state, and it is unlikely that he has needed to change himself to become accepted; he has simply utilized a native admiration for strenuously won success to both political and literary advantage. Early in his career, his docile, acquisitive mind had welcomed a publicly authorized theory and method; it gave him opportunity to indulge his thirst for knowledge, his verbal facility, and a genially unreflective optimism. Gorky's formula had proffered, in effect, the means of letting the mind rest, while giving it the illusion of discovery. Once the subject was supplied, the method indicated, the feeling ordained—once, in short, Leonov had adopted Socialist Realism—it became his duty to do what he most liked to do: extol great enterprise and the valor of his countrymen, assimilate their modes of speech, and acquire information about their processes of labor. His duties and tastes so happily coinciding, he followed his inclinations and filled his works with narratives of success, portraits of victorious men, and borrowed erudition: disquisitions on lumbering and forestry, on power plants and railroads, with settings and dialects that ranged over the length and breadth of Russia, and a whole gallery of scientists with their stores of specialized knowledge of engineering, surgery, mathematics, theoretical physics—not to mention more recondite fields, such as the history of chronometry. Thus for an understanding of power transmission one might read Skutarevsky, for railroad engineering Road to the Ocean, for the theory of conservation and the practice of forestry The Russian Forest, and any novel or play for a lesson in elevated patriotism.

On this basis, Leonov has accomplished now and then something like tours de force, as when in The Taking of Velikoshumsk, he succeeds in endowing an armored tank with personality and in making it convincingly the hero of a decisive battle; or as when in The Russian Forest, a long, uninterrupted university lecture becomes the eloquent kernel of an epic tale of war and reconstruction. The latter instance is structurally reminiscent of Dostoevsky. Does not "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" stand in the same relation to The Brothers Karamazov as Vikhrov's lecture does to The Russian Forest? But here, as always with Leonov, the literary echo is purely stylistic. In substance and feeling, nothing could be further from Dostoevsky, or for that matter from any other important Russian writer of the past, since the one element that most inspired Russian literature in its great period was precisely that to which Socialist Realism gives least encouragement and for which no doctrine can make provision: an interest in human beings in themselves, not only as exemplars of a prescribed morality, mere ciphers in an ideological ledger, as Leonov's people always are, even at their most complex—like those three elder brothers conceived in the womb of Socialist Realism, Skutarevsky, Kurilov, Vikhrov, with their marked family resemblance to one another and to their Marxist progenitors Lenin and Gorky. If it be objected that all fictional heroes represent ethical ideals, that Pierre Bezukhov and Andrey Bolkonsky, Prince Myshkin and Ivan Karamazov might also be entered in an account book of virtues and vices, the answer is that these men were not created for purposes of illustration and that the difference in artistic method between them and Leonov's creations is like the difference in logic between induction and deduction. Nowhere in Leonov's novels will one find any revealing comment on the human situation, any subtlety, novelty, or convincing portraiture. His characters are contrived images of human beings. At first, wanderers in search of something they can prize, victims of accident, fate, or circumstance, dissatisfied or miserable rather than unhappy, uncommitted and uninvolved, engaged in play, fantasy, invention, they entertain, pretend, and cheat; their personalities and opinions clash, but they are incapable of passionate debate, and life flows on somewhere beyond and beside them; then, having been made masters of events, "engineers of human souls," they still remain incomplete, peripheral beings of whom life demands a part of themselves only, making use of their specialties, not of their whole selves. There is not one among them whose action involves the entire man. They are cleverly constructed plaster models of civic virtue, presented not in sympathetic understanding, but through a haze of sentimental kindliness toward suffering, which casts a rosy glow on the horizon. This rosy glow is obligatory; it brightens the foreground, shows life sub specie utopiae, makes tragedy impossible.

And yet, through the stereotypes of theme and manner a more personal pattern emerges, the pattern of a romantic admiration for what is individually heroic. The acrobat's fatal act, of course, cannot be meaningful to one who rejects the whole concept of tragedy and does not believe in chance or fate, for whom man himself is fate, tragedy only a sentimental term for weakness, and life is interesting, important, and "true" only when humanity, through supreme ingenuity and effort, wins against tremendous odds. Tanya's leap into the void beneath the dome of a circus tent becomes the aviator's flight into enemy-infested skies or into interstellar space; or it is transformed into the bold experiments of the far-seeing scientist, or the endurance and intrepidity of men and women on perilous missions in wartime. What is man to Leonov? More and more what society wants, or judges him to be, and less and less what he is to himself—a development which is indicative of Leonov's own process of increasing conformity to public demand.

If, however, Leonov is praised in the Soviet Union for his "correctness," is hailed as the "patriot-author," and is held up as an example of one who has been able to overcome the initial error of his views, it must be admitted, in all fairness, that his eminence has been come by honestly. For however strong his love of popularity, he cannot be called a time server. His is apparently the more complicated case of a man who, in need of ready-made dogma, develops, through ambition coupled with the honest weakness of self-distrust, a moral sense so resilient and an intelligence so flexible that the one can adopt astonishing reversals of belief and the other provide ready justifications for them. There is even something like logic in his development, a kind of organic progression from a degree of independence to complete submission. When the critics of his early work, and Gorky most of all, pointed out the "right," indeed the only acceptable, direction to him, he followed it eagerly, since he wanted to be told where to go. His is not, therefore, the story of coercion but of persuasion, operating on a gifted, acquisitive, adaptable being, as curious about ideas as any literary mind of Soviet Russia, the quickest to grasp the ins and outs of scientific enterprises, to catch the forms and intonations of dialects, and to appreciate all processes of reason—all, that is, except that of independent thought, of which he has never been capable. At no time was Leonov's thinking vigorous and original, nor his disposition rebellious. The inquiring attitude and the preoccupation with philosophic questions, exhibited in his early stories, were soon abandoned in favor of accumulating facts; the possibility of rigorous thinking was relinquished for the easier process of gathering information; and an inclination to irony, pathos, and tragedy was replaced by a simple-minded acceptance of men's feelings and a formula for judging human events. By no means merely facile, but intelligent and gifted, Leonov is a very interesting example of talent that lacks independence and needs to lean on well-formulated, officially accepted articles of faith. Nor is it so paradoxical as on the surface it might seem to be, that the best established of Soviet "realists" is, at bottom, an aesthete attracted to schemes of writing rather than to the substance of art.

The truth of the matter seems to be that Leonov is interested in neither people nor ideas, that his major concerns are and always have been dogmatic to a degree, that this was true even in his early work when he experimented with forms of narrative in the manner of his favorite authors, and that this has remained true when experiments in propaganda have succeeded experiments in style. In both stages he has been concerned with effectiveness, not with the matter but the manner of discourse. Intellectual and moral questions were early solved for him; he asked, and the answers were given. There had been a brief moment when restless outlawry, perilous amusements, and uncontrollable passion had seemed enchanting to him. But this was soon made purposeful, and a serious social aim reduced artistic intention to frivolity. For seriousness in "realistic" works is impossible when, as in fairy tales, everything must end happily, whatever outcome may be demanded by the logic of characters and events. At the beginning Leonov had been inspired by that which for the artist is the most serious of all frivolities, the essential, gratuitous delight in invention and expressiveness, although in his case the very nature of delight had been dictated by the favored literary mood at the time of his debut. Then, still moved by the desire to be in favor, and under the influence of an aestheticism which confuses art and propaganda and recognizes no other legitimate motive than the will to "serve" the nation by elucidating and inculcating official dogma, he transformed entertainment to usefulness, drowned his art in mistaken patriotism, and diluted his affection for hard-won achievement and his love of exciting adventure to an insipid, childlike optimism.

But if one sees in his work a progressive relinquishment of fantasy, of the personal vision, of independent speculation, if one sees him as having been persuaded by the enticements of a popular philosophy to reverse his views and interests, one is also bound to recognize that what he gave up never constituted that imperative necessity which rules genuine artists. One cannot see him as another Mayakovsky who "stepped on the throat of his own song." Mayakovsky, having had much to lose, was inspired by his very martyrdom to creative vigor. Exalting at the top of his voice the agony of his self-willed repression, he made himself a tragic hero and endowed literature with the eloquent utterance of his pain and his will. But Leonov has had only a desire to sing, no song to step on, nor much more than his playfulness to sacrifice. If his reversal has reduced a genuine, if timid, gift to commonplace, he has been either unaware of the loss or has thought himself well compensated by the rewards of comfort. At any rate, he seems to have accepted his descent to public favor without qualm or protest. Of the true state of mind of one who has written so little about himself, it is, naturally, impossible to tell. And it may be that the progressive loss of gaiety and humor in Leonov's work, its increasingly ponderous discursiveness, are signs of some unhappiness. But this is pure conjecture. Outwardly there is nothing to indicate dissatisfaction. His themes are the "right" themes, and they are dealt with in the "right" way.