SOURCE: "Leonid Leonov: The Psychological Novelist," in Soviet Russian Literature: Writers and Problems 1917–1977, second revised edition, Oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 198-212.

[A Russian-born American critic and educator, Slonim wrote extensively on Russian literature. In the following excerpt, he provides an overview of Leonov's works, focusing on psychological themes, and argues that Leonov placated official Soviet tastes to the detriment of his talents.]

In introducing Leonov to the Soviet readers of the 'twenties Gorky called him a disciple of Dostoevsky. What made him say this was not any similarity of ideas—Leonov did not share the political and religious opinions of the master—but a similarity of approach to character and to plot structure. Like Dostoevsky, the young Soviet writer possessed an almost morbid curiosity about the complexities of mind and flesh, a bent for exploration of the unconscious, and an unfailing interest in hidden motivation and subterranean drives. When critics blamed Leonov for not showing his heroes at work, he answered that he preferred to take them out of their daily environment and to leave them alone, facing their own thoughts and conscience. "It is difficult to remain in solitude and have oneself as the interlocutor, in such a situation we discover what a man is worth." If Leonov were left alone, in creative solitude, he would have undoubtedly followed the "Dostoevskian" line. Yet this genuine and natural psychological bent was curbed and at times distorted by external pressure. Too often he was compelled to yield to the social demands of his times, and many of his artistic failures or lengthy periods of silence were due to his incapacity to solve a conflict within himself or to rise above historical contingencies. Whenever he dealt with tragic characters in crisis, describing twisted minds and depraved passions in a highly romantic, ornamental, and symbolic prose, he attained literary fulfillment; but as soon as he attempted to pursue the weary road of didactic realism and to produce stereotyped happy endings and socially useful "new heroes," he became redundant and unconvincing. This rift undermined his work and prevented him from realizing fully the possibilities of his unusual literary talent. In fact, he remains, even with all his defects, one of the most original Soviet writers. Fortunately, the Moscow critics do not try to pretend that he is a true socialist realist: his work is outside the official literary encampment.

Leonid Leonov, born in Moscow in 1899, the son of a journalist who was of peasant stock, graduated from a gymnasium, and then served in the Red Army. In 1922 he settled in the capital and published his first tales: "The Wooden Queen," obviously suggested by the Serapion Brethren with whom Leonov had a great deal in common; "Tuatamur," written in a rhythmic poetic prose, the story of a Tartar khan who suffers from unrequited love for the beautiful Ytmar; and Kovyakin's Diary, the description of a sleepy provincial town, where the Revolution has degenerated into a caricature of itself because it has to deal with "smug citizens" and "dead souls." The striking stylistic qualities of these tales attracted general attention. They certainly indicated that their young author owed a great deal to Leskov, Remizov, Bely, and Zamyatin, but they showed too, that he had his own approach to literary material. The opulence of his language, which was studded with flowery epithets and involved metaphors, was matched by the emotional complexity of his chief characters.

An opponent of naturalism and of the novels of manners or environment, Leonov was mainly interested in man's doubts and sufferings. He was attracted by problems which he regarded as the natural outgrowth of the individual's intricate relationship with the universe and society. In The End of the Little Man (1925), Leonov's first important short novel, he raised the same problem that Zamyatin had dealt with in "The Cave." His scholarly hero, Likharev, who is about to complete a study on Mesozoic fossils, is so disturbed by the bloodshed and horrors of the revolutionary upheaval that life loses all its meaning for him. A catastrophe has smashed his old world to smithereens and nobody needs books or scientific research any longer: all that people actually care for is food and fuel. A morsel of bread and a stick of wood are of far greater importance than culture; a holocaust leaves little room for illusions. People of Likharev's own class are no better than the "new barbarians," and all this had become clear "from that very day when the steel wing of a tremendous earthquake had swept over Russia, and somebody armed with a whip had hustled her out of darkness into a new, flame-breathing space where hundreds of thunderous tubas were bellowing like steers—whereupon the earth had begun to spin around the sun twelve times faster than before." Likharev knows that "the soul is frozen just like the water in the pipes," there is no salvation for a little man, crushed by the Revolution, and he burns his manuscript. This short novel belongs to a whole series of stories devoted to the collapse of the old intelligentsia and its culture.

The cruelty and insensibility of peasants who beat a horse thief to death is the theme of another, earlier work by Leonov, The Breakthrough of Petushikhino (1923), written in a lyrical mood; here, however, the grim picture of evil in man is counterbalanced by the image of Alyosha, a sickly lad who feels the spell of spring as a revelation of God and who longs for justice and kindliness.

From this preparatory stage in his career, Leonov turned to what was his true literary vocation—long, epic-like narratives built on several levels and including various social strata. Gorky believed that Leonov proceeded "by jumps" and that he leaped from the tale to the novel, but such a statement seems very debatable: Leonov's development as a writer was organic, and from the beginning he was much more of a novelist than a short-story-teller.

Leonov's The Badgers (1925) was as typical of the revival of the traditional novel form as Fedin's Cities and Years which came just before it. In this lengthy book Leonov deals with two Russias: the pre-revolutionary Russia of bearded Moscow merchants who rule with an iron hand over their families and employees, and the new Russia of young rebels growing up unsuspected in the merchants' very homes and warehouses. The beautiful and willful Nastya is in revolt against her rich family, and the brothers Senya and Pasha, two peasant lads painfully making their living in Nestya's father's firm are ready to blow up the entire old order. Pasha joins the revolutionaries, and Senya, desperately in love with the unattainable Nastya, goes through many adventures during the war and the Revolution before winning her. Deeply rooted in his rural background, he finally becomes the leader of rebellious peasants who refuse to yield to Communist rule. They hide in the forests like badgers, and it is Pasha who commands the troops sent by Lenin's government to quell the uprising. The village represents the anarchical, instinctual element, and is contrasted with the city, which is hated by the peasants and is symbolized by the Communist Party. "We are millions," says Senya, "we give bread and blood and strength … we are the soil, and we are going to destroy the city." Thus the conflict of the two Russias shown in the first part of the novel acquires an entirely different meaning in the second part in which the peasants are shown as enemies of urban and rational Communism. Although Leonov's interpretation of the Revolution seems close to that of Pilnyak, it is offered more as a hypothesis than as an affirmation, and the author of The Badgers apparently wonders about the philosophical implications of the issue he has raised.

"Legend of Kalafaat," a story-within-a-story in The Badgers, caused a good deal of distress to Soviet censors and was eliminated from further editions of the novel. In it Leonov describes a Tsar of peasant folklore who wants to have all the stars filed away, to issue passports to all the beasts of the forest, and to register every herb. When he finally carries out his project, "everything became sad. The groves turned silent, clearings became overgrown with underbrush … All nature was completely messed up. Even the bear became sickly: what with the passport and all, he did not know any more whether he was a beast or a man." Next Kalafaat decides to build a tower as high as the skies, and it takes him twenty years to do it: "twenty years to him, twenty centuries to us." When the tower is completed Kalafaat begins climbing to its top. He climbs for five years, but when he finally reaches the flat roof and looks around him, he lets out a howl worse than any beast's. While he has been ascending the inner stairs, the tower, under his enormous weight, has been gradually sinking into the ground: for every step he has been taking upward, the tower has been sinking the same distance underground; despite all his trouble he has not gotten an inch above the earth's level. Moreover, during his futile ascent nature has done away with all his seals and passports—and the birds and beasts are enjoying themselves again in the free forests and blooming fields.

The "Legend of Kalafaat" has often been cited as a symbolic interpretation of the peasant's attitude toward the building of Communism. It has, however, a wider significance: Kalafaat personifies the principle of blind bureaucracy, of a mechanical order that challenges nature and kills life and joy. Like Leo Tolstoy, the author of The Badgers hailed simplicity, naturalness, and conformity to organic laws as the highest moral virtues—without, however, sharing either Tolstoy's religious beliefs or his moral dogmatism. In any case, The Badgers did not try to formulate a message and its value, which is unquestionable despite its shaky structure and the strange coincidences in the plot development, lay in the author's gift for presenting in an impressive, dynamic, and yet poetic manner the conflict of generations, classes, mentalities, and temperaments. The psychological characterization of its heroes lacked, perhaps, the depth we will find in Leonov's later novels, but he did succeed in populating his vast narrative with many different kinds of human beings and in giving a broad picture of Russia and its basic problems.

Leonov's next and perhaps his best novel, The Thief (1927), was a great step forward from The Badgerrs. It deals with modern Moscow and with a very special section of life there, and its tone and structure are obviously inspired by Dostoevsky. Here the characters and events are depicted under a double aspect: through the author's exposition and through the eyes of Firsov, a writer, whose diary carries notes for a novel about the same characters and the same environment. This device of a "mirror gallery" (which André Gide used so successfully in The Counterfeiters) makes the structure of The Thief somewhat sophisticated. No less intricate is its plot, which unfolds a startling panorama of the Moscow underworld under the NEP. [In a footnote, Slonim adds: "The theme of the criminal underworld appears very seldom in Soviet literature; between 1930 and 1955 it was banned from fiction, and the reader of Soviet novels had the impression that crooks, thieves, and murderers simply did not exist in Soviet society."] Mitya Vekshin, the central figure of the novel, a former commissar in the Red Army and a Party member, is a kind of Soviet Raskolnikov. A romantic rebel, disappointed with the "retreat" of the NEP, he becomes a thief and the leader of a gang of criminals. He challenges law and society but is tormented by remorse and persecuted by the furies: once he had killed in cold blood a captive White officer, and a sense of guilt gnaws him still. The "anti-heroic" NEP adds to his anxiety and feeling of frustration. Temperamentally he is an individualist, politically an idealist disgusted with surrounding reality. His pals are the grim, taciturn bandit Ageika, haunted by his own isolation; Manyukhin, a former landowner who earns his living by telling off-color stories in dives and taverns and behaves like Marmeladov, his literary predecessor; and the heartless Chikilyov, a cynical nihilist who distrusts and loathes his fellow men, striking the pose of the Dostoevsky's "Notes from the Underground." Chikilyov says that "thought is the source of suffering, and whoever will destroy it will be eternally honored by mankind." Mitya is also surrounded by "infernal" women, such as the proud Masha Dolomanova, whose love is a torture and a delight, and by prostitutes and gangsters. They all move in a feverish twilight of danger and passion; they spend hours in morbid introspection while drinking in clandestine night clubs; they humiliate, hurt, and offend one another. Masha, who both adores and fights Mitya, makes him alternatively miserable and ecstatic, without ever arriving at the fulfillment of her love. "The best fictions of old mankind are God and Love," says Leonov, and all his protagonists search for truth and warmth as a possible escape from their impasse. They are all plagued by pain, anguish, and struggle, and they know that such is their human lot. The Communist Matvey tells his sister Zina, who is also in love with Mitya, that some day man will know and measure everything, and that great happiness will result from such rational awareness. But the voluptuous Zina laughs at him: "Happiness without torment? Made on an assembly line? Impossible!" The writer Firsov does not wish to depict socially useful types and exclaims: "But what if I am interested in the hidden roots of man?… There is no other task as poignant as to scrutinize man face to face."

The pathologically warped characters and the dramatic plot of The Thief, which depends on murder, suicidal drives, and the clash of passions, remind us quite obviously of Dostoevsky. The moral denouement of the novel is, however, not a religious one. Mitya is purged by suffering, "the fire of his soul burns him clean," but his recovery and his awakening to new life are due to social causes: the rebel promises to become a citizen and accepts the pattern of the Soviet community. The Communist critics felt that this ending was not strong enough, and that the individualist Mitya had not passed through an "ideological conversion." They also reproached Leonov for the morbid atmosphere of his novel and the "decadent psychological introspection." They missed the fact that The Thief, despite all its melodramatic devices, has a variety of excellently drawn characters, and is striking in its use of different levels of the Russian language, including the slang and vernacular of various social groups. [In a footnote, Slonim adds: "Leonov, unfortunately, took these criticisms quite seriously, and began to rewrite The Thief. He published in 1959 a new, expurgated version of the novel in which the pernicious effects of individualism are clearly condemned."]

It was obvious from whatever Leonov wrote in the 'twenties that his fiction was rooted in moral and psychological problems, and in the late 'twenties, when the first Five-Year Plan demanded new sacrifices, he began wondering whether the requirements of the collective state could be reconciled with the aspirations of the individual. In his remarkable Stories About Unusual Muzhiks (1930) the basic conflict is impressively illustrated. Ivan, a deaf-mute carpenter who has never known success or love, attends a village meeting that is to decide the fate of a blacksmith, who has been caught stealing horses. There is but one blacksmith in the village, whereas there are several carpenters. The peasants stare at Ivan: everybody knows that he is innocent. Yet crime calls for punishment—the equilibrium between the law and transgression must be restored, and someone has to pay. Ivan is chosen as an expiatory victim, and the villagers embrace him and promise him a good burial as he is led off to his death. The community has demanded and obtained human blood to furnish a deterrent and to maintain justice.

The same contradiction between the blind rules of society and the personal life of an individual is brought out in other works by Leonov, but he gradually began to accept Communism as the supreme judge and settler of such conflicts. Like many fellow-travelers of the period he suppressed his own doubts and hesitations. The industrialization of the country supplied him with a new argument in favor of the rulers who, regardless of the cost in lives and energy, were accomplishing an historic mission in a backward nation. It was not the social command but a sincere feeling for the revolutionary transformation of the country and his desire "to bring literature closer to life" that determined the subject matter of Leonov's next novel.

Sot' or Soviet River (1930), published with a foreword by Gorky that placed Leonov very high among contemporary writers and declared that his words "shine," was inspired by the Five-Year Plan. The action takes place in millennial forests, in forlorn hamlets, in the chapels of the Old Believers (Schismatics), in medieval monasteries, and on the shores of rivers in a remote Northern province. Ignorant muzhiks and superstitious monks still talk of the advent of the Antichrist and listen to seventeenth-century chants, but new men and machines invade the peace of this wilderness. Moscow needs cellulose and paper; the plan calls for an erection of paper mills on the banks of Sot'. Thousands of workmen and technicians shatter the stillness of the forests; a dam is built to harness the turbulent waters of the river. A deadly struggle ensues between the pioneers led by the chief engineer, the Communist Uvadiev, and the monks and peasants, stirred up by Vissarion, a former Imperial army officer. Like Senya of The Badgers, Vissarion hates the city. Man has no need of this crazy realm of machines, huge towns, and artificiality, he declares. Only people who are living in the simplicity of a communion with nature are obeying the Divine Law. To save mankind from the iron age of impiety, corruption, and technology, a new invasion of barbarians is needed: Vissarion has fantastic dreams of Mongolian hordes that will sweep over Europe and Russia in a purifying torrent of blood and fire; Communism will perish along with the old and false civilization, and luxuriant crops of grain will grow freely upon its ruins. But Vissarion's phantasmagoria amounts to no more than impotent raving, and he dies an ignominious death.

The anti-Soviet conspiracy proves less dangerous than the enmity of the elements. Symbolically, they both stem from the same source—from the blind irrational forces man must control within and outside himself. The builders have to conquer land and river inch by inch, and only through perseverance do they finally overcome the fury of the river and the insidiousness of the people's ignorance and reaction. The theme of the "conquest of nature" is parallel to that of the conquest of man; and the opposition of the past to the present takes more dramatic form than the same confrontation in The Badgers. It is curious that in all these conflicts the writer seems ambivalent: he is nostalgic toward the past and has a great love of nature; his sympathy, however, goes finally to the rational man who imposes his will over storms and floods and destructive passions. In The Thief the elemental rages throughout the novel. In Soviet River it explodes but is curbed, despite almost insuperable difficulties. Uvadiev, the leader of the workmen, the puritanical, almost inhuman hero, becomes an abstract symbol: if Leonov wanted to embody the ideal Communist in this "iron-like" character, he most certainly created a misfit.

Stylistically, Soviet River is an accomplishment: the combination of archaisms, of regional idiom, of neologisms originated under the Soviets, and literary stylization forms an attractively bright verbal pattern. Some secondary characters, such as the engineer Burago, an intellectual planner, or Renne, Suzanna's old-fashioned father, or Uvadiev's powerful mother, who is reminiscent of Gorky's creations, are extremely vivid and aesthetically successful. Soviet River, one of the best books about the Five-Year Plan, fortunately lacked the blaring rhetoric which spoiled most of the works devoted to the same subject in the 'thirties; it represented, however, Leonov's official salute to Communism. Like most of the intellectuals of the same decade, he interpreted Communism idealistically, not in terms of a doctrine derived from Marx and Lenin but as one of the variations of radical humanism. He also insisted that the chief motivation of the intellectuals who were giving their support to the regime was their desire to "serve the people," that dream of the Populists, which has always been one of the most powerful determinants in the development of the Russian intelligentsia.

Leonov's effort to make a complete adjustment to the new order is clearest in Skutarevsky (1932), a novel about an old scientist whose cautious, almost hostile, attitude toward the Communists gradually changes into a friendly acceptance of their aims and methods. His son Arseny, however, calls the Five-Year Plan "enthusiastic hysterics," gets involved in a counter-revolutionary conspiracy, and kills himself. The clash between father and son symbolizes, in an inverted fashion, the opposition of two eras and two mentalities. Their strange relationship, Skutarevsky's domestic complications, his love for a young girl whose embrace he refuses, leaving her to a younger rival, and the suggestions of sabotage and imperialistic intrigue make the plot involved and fairly melodramatic, as is often the case with Leonov. It is obvious that the campaign against non-Party technicians and the trials of 1930–31 were to a certain extent reflected in the novel, but Leonov came to the defense of the intelligentsia and affirmed its loyalty; he could not, however, refrain from depicting imaginary or real conspiracies, and accepting the sensational revelations of enemy activities which, according to the claims of the Security Police, were taking place all over the country. But the character of Skutarevsky and the painful process which led him to a political conversion were treated with intelligence and subtlety. As for the new Communist man (this time called Cherimov), Leonov again failed to make him come alive.

More complex but less convincing is Way to the Ocean (1935), a novel with excellent passages that fails to become an artistic whole. It was certainly Leonov's most ambitious attempt to create a truly Communist work, but he succeeded only in the parts devoted to the prerevolutionary past and in the portrayals of negative characters; the sketches of virtuous heroes and the panorama of beautiful times to come seem strained and pompous. The composition of Way to the Ocean is very intricate: it is built on several levels, with the chronological sequence of the narrative being constantly interrupted by flashbacks or predictions of the future. It is quite possible that Leonov, conscious of the prominent place occupied by the problem of time in modern European literature (especially in works by Proust, Joyce, Mann, Virginia Woolf, Faulkner, and others) wished to introduce it into Soviet literature. Unfortunately, he lacked a firm point of view, and his treatment of time often becomes obscure and blurred.

The plot of the novel centers around Kurilov, an old Communist and director of a local Siberian railroad, who is very ill; the approach of death makes him think of the years gone by and of the people he has known—of Liza, whom he loves and who torments and illuminates his last days; of her husband, the surgeon Ilya Protoklitov, whose father, a Tsarist official, had sentenced Kurilov to prison and exile; of Ilya's brother Gleb, a former White officer who had wormed his way into the Party. The unmasking of Gleb and of a conspiracy against the regime and the intricate relationships of Kurilov, Liza, and the surgeon form the core of the story and are described in the present tense. The reminiscences of all the protagonists make up the second level of narrative, and the third level gives a vision of the future (in three separate chapters) along with predictions of war (apparently with Japan), of a revolution in China, of new formidable weapons of destruction, of a Communist army led by a Negro commander. There is a description of Ocean, the world capital somewhere near Shanghai, and a resplendent picture of Communism, toward which all the hopes and achievements of mankind will converge, even as all the streams and rivers find their way into the mighty ocean. Above all individual destinies will shine the bright star of collective action and "service for the people."

Despite all his utopian excursions into the future, which merge with Kurilov's dreams, Leonov failed to make Kurilov a new hero: he portrayed him as a nice ordinary fellow, a romantic, who looked no different than other, non-Communist personages. The grandiloquence of style and the overdramatization of plot added to the heaviness of this artificial work. Critics, writers, and readers received it without enthusiasm, and this lack of success affected Leonov so deeply that he decided to stop writing novels and, in fact, his next one did not appear until eighteen years later, in 1953. Between 1936 and 1946 he turned to the stage and wrote twelve plays. Eleven of them were produced by leading Moscow theaters but the twelfth, The Blizzard, was killed by the censors and not released for publication until 1963.

Leonov's ideological and psychological complexity made his plays stand out among Soviet productions, but he often was too eager to fulfill the political requirements of his times. His best play was Untilovsk, an exposé of provincial evil and boredom, staged in 1928 by the Moscow Art Theater; one of its main characters Chervakov, reminiscent of Chikilyov of The Thief, is a cynical philosopher who laughs at idealists and liberals, and who maintains that "everything on earth has the hole in which it is destined to disappear, just as man is gulped up by his grave." Critics reproached Leonov for having made Chervakov more interesting than his life-affirming opponents.

A characteristic dramatic work of Leonov is The Orchards of Polovchansk (1936). In its first version the playwright opposed Makkaveyev, head of a large family, the creator of gardens, and a man of purposeful and fruitful life, with Pylyayev, a superfluous man. With its lyrical and symbolic scenes, the drama had a consistency of mood and tone. But after the purges and trials Leonov wrote a second version in which he made Pylyayev a secret foreign agent, and the whole play became a melodrama centered around the discovery of subversion. The Wolf (1938) was simply a potboiler about saboteurs, cunning villains, and noble police investigators. An Ordinary Fellow (1940), a comedy, is slightly better and does not show that eagerness to please the masters of the day which Leonov had displayed in other dramatic works. During the war he overcame his political servility in two outstanding plays, Invasion (1942) and Lyonushka (1943). The first is a study of an embittered character who changes under the pressure of circumstances; Fyodor Talanov had attempted to kill his wife and was sentenced to hard labor. He is released and returns home just when the Germans overrun his native town. The disappointed and lonely outcast, an enemy of the Soviet regime, emerges reluctantly from his shell and avoids contact with other people. Their sufferings, however, lead him finally to forget his own troubles; he helps the victims of the Nazis and becomes active in the underground resistance. When caught he pretends to be Kolesnikov, the leader of Red guerrillas whom the Germans are vainly trying to arrest. In order to protect Kolesnikov and his men, Talanov is ready to die. His mother understands what he is attempting to do and identifies him as Kolesnikov, thus accepting and blessing his sacrifice. He is hanged by the invaders, and dies at peace with his conscience. This is his redemption: the "lonely wolf," as he called himself, has given his life for the people to whom he belongs, for the country he cannot help loving. The gradual "conversion" of Talanov and the dramatic incidents of Invasion make it one of the most breathtaking of war plays. Some theaters, however, tried to "correct" Leonov and gave undue prominence to Kolesnikov, in order to stress the role of the Party in the ultimate victory over the Germans.

In Invasion the hero's parents, the kind and rather Chekhovian doctor Talanov and his forthright wife Ann, are presented as "average Russians." The interest in national traits is even more distinct in Lyonushka, a symbolic drama, "a popular tragedy," as the author calls it. Lyonushka, a peasant girl, is in love with a badly burnt flier whom the guerrillas are hiding in their forest camp. Lyonushka wants to bring hope and joy to the dying man, and stages songs and dances for him. The strange scenes of Russian revelry serve as a symbolic background to the flier's agony. The play has an intricate psychological design and a remarkable merging of tragic elements, folklore motifs, patriotic emotions, and allegorical allusions. Theatrical directors were afraid of it: it was obviously not a realistic drama, and it contained dangerous formalistic devices and ideological deviations. From the literary standpoint it is a very interesting work even though it can be accused of rhetoric and intellectualism. Less intellectual, but also intricate and definitely symbolic is Leonov's short war novel, The Taking of Velikoshumsk (1944), in which the themes of war and defense of the motherland are treated in elaborate prose. It tells the story of an old battered tank and its crew, whose members, despite individual differences, represent the basic unity of Russia. Realistic details of combat mingle with the image of the tank as a living person; characterizations of generals and soldiers are as valid psychologically as they are symbolically, and the whole plot, although perfectly believable in terms of military operations, has a hidden philosophical meaning—again dealing with the essence and fate of Russia, its traditions and its aspirations. The extent to which this problem preoccupied Leonov is shown by The Russian Forest, a huge novel published in 1953. Here again Leonov resorts to multi-level composition. The story deals with the deforestation of Russia and the struggle between Vikhrov, an honest and patriotic scientist for whom the forest is the source of life, and his enemy and rival, Gratsiansky, an embodiment of deception and the death instinct. The exploration in depth of this villain is accompanied by the confrontation of past and present in the light of Russia's historical heritage, by the opposition of the rational and the elemental, of self-centered egotism and creative collectivism—in short by all Leonov's favorite themes. The treatment of time is much more skilled than it was in the Way to the Ocean and Leonov deals now only with the past and the present, making but vague hints about the future.

The beginning of the novel is perhaps its best part: it depicts the arrival in Moscow of Polya, Vikhrov's daughter, her wanderings through the streets, and her youthful intoxication with whatever she sees. She is so thrilled and elated that she sends a telegram of welcome to herself. The charm and freshness of Polya and her wondrous impressions are rendered with a poetic sweep reminiscent of early Leonov. It is not, however, completely devoid of the author's customary ambivalence. Polya makes a pledge to Lenin in the Mausoleum to be a good girl and a good Communist; the scene resembles the taking of a religious vow by a novice in front of the holy relics of a Christian saint. Later Polya is swept into the whirlwind of war and behaves like a heroine when imprisoned by the Germans behind their lines. But neither the description of war nor the treatise on forest preservation, including a thirty-two-page lecture by Vikhrov on the subject, hold the attention of the reader. Dramatic episodes from Gratsiansky's shady past or from Vikhrov's virtuous youth hardly relieve the monotony of an overwritten work in which villains are more interesting than the characters in whom the author wishes to incarnate the high qualities of the new Communist man. Here again, Leonov, eager to march in step with the "army of Communism," tries to be what he is not. It does not suit him to make sermons and glorify dogmas. This is confirmed again by his short novel Evgenya Ivanovna (1965), a moralizing and pseudo-patriotic tale about the fate of a Russian émigré woman.

Leonov's work is long-winded and heavy; verbal twists, bizarre metaphors, poetic embellishments render his style baroque, at times obscure and often artificial. There is an overabundance in his multi-level compositions. His novels resemble old mansions with dark passages, recesses, winding staircases, corridors, wings, and annexes. What saves these voluminous productions from being overwhelmed by their own weight is Leonov's dramatic sense and his psychological insight. He develops his themes like musical motifs, and he is deeply interested in moral and philosophical problems. Above everything else, he is attracted by man's complexity, which is paralleled in his work by linguistic complexity. He likes a rich, inflated, rhetorical, literary idiom just as he likes to portray human beings with emotional deviations, ranging from fads to neuroses and psychoses. Leonov is preoccupied with the ambivalence of human nature, by the drawing power of evil and the need for supreme justice, by our desire for sublimation and the urge for self-abasement. His work is perhaps the only significant counterpart in Soviet literature to the Western psychological fiction of the 1930's. The question remains, however, whether Leonov did use his talent to full capacity; it is probable that his deliberate endeavors to conform limited his freedom of self-expression and curbed his natural development.