SOURCE: "Leonid Leonov," in Forum for Modern Language Studies, Vol. II, No. 2, April, 1966, pp. 264-73.

[In the essay below, Thomson examines themes of flight, genius, and morality in Leonov's works.]

Leonid Leonov (born 1899), novelist and playwright, might seem to be the most conventional of Soviet writers. He has written a novel about the Civil War (The Badgers, 1924) and another (The Thief, 1925–7) about the NEP period; in the thirties he produced a novel (The River Sot', 1930) about industrialisation, and devoted another (The Road to the Ocean, 1933–5) to the new "positive hero" of socialist realism. The Second World War drew three more works from him, and the death of Stalin was followed by the last of his novels to date, (The Russian Forest, 1950–3) often regarded as the first swallow of the "thaw". His work might almost serve as a miniature history of Soviet literature.

This seeming conventionality disappears on closer acquaintance. Of all Soviet writers Leonid Leonov is the most individual. His elaborate style, his highly personal thought and imagery, his characteristic range of heroes, and above all the acute conflicts on which his works are built; all these features distinguish his books from those of his compatriots and contemporaries.

Leonov has drawn his material principally from the clash of human individuality and personal morality, and throughout his life he has attempted to find some equation relating them. Over the years, however, the balance of these two themes in his work has shifted gradually but conclusively, to such an extent that his works of the last decade effectively reverse the values affirmed in his early work.

For Leonov, human individuality is synonymous with creativity—and the basic conflict of his works sets the tragic but creative hero against the sterile and envious villain. This theme is not new in Russian literature; it goes back to Pushkin's "little tragedy", Mozart and Salieri, a work, incidentally, to which Leonov frequently makes explicit reference in his own novels and plays. In Pushkin's dramatic poem the genius and the craftsman are confronted with one another. No one can appreciate the genius Mozart better than the honest craftsman Salieri: "You are a god, Mozart, and you don't realise it"; but at the same time Salieri revolts against a system of values which can allow the irresponsibility of a genius to outshine the painstaking industry of the craftsman: "There is no justice on earth, but there is none above either". In a vain attempt to redress this injustice, Salieri poisons Mozart. In terms of earthly justice, Salieri certainly has a better claim to inspiration—but it is still Mozart who remains the genius. Morality is no guarantee of creativity.

Dmitry Vekshin, the hero of Leonov's first important novel, The Thief, had been one of the most brilliant commissars in the Red Army during the Civil War; but his mercurial temperament had led him into a grave breach of discipline—he murdered a prisoner—and he has been expelled from the Party. At the end of the War he is faced not only by the traditional difficulties of the demobilized service-man, but also by the stigma of expulsion from the Party. He is further demoralized by the introduction of the New Economic Policy, a temporary relaxation of the controls on private enterprise; Vekshin regards this as a betrayal of the Communist ideals for which he had fought in the Civil War, and he becomes a thief, devoting his ingenuity and courage to undermining a society which he now repudiates. His protest, however, is made in the name of the Revolution, and however low he sinks he remains loyal to this goal. Accordingly Vekshin is not regarded as a traitor; and Leonov plays down the criminal and anti-social aspects of his activities. It is rather Communism that is on trial, and its ability to harness and make creative use of Vekshin's boundless energies. It is this dilemma which lies at the heart of the novel; it also dominates the course of Leonov's later development.

Leonov's admiration for his hero runs very deep. Vekshin is [Leonov stated in Vor (1928)] "the best that mankind can produce", and he is associated with an image that is to colour Leonov's work for many years, the image of "flying". The word carries many overtones; there is the idea of being raised above the rest of humanity, of being conspicuous, of being superior; then again there is the idea of danger and therefore heroism; finally there is the suggestion of aspiration, the inability to be satisfied with what has been achieved. All these ideas are present in the comment that Vekshin is a "planet that has broken out of its orbit", and its associated images.

Vekshin's career is paralleled in the figure of his sister, Tanya, the trapeze artist. Her star turn, the shtrabat, a dangerous leap across the circus, with no safety-net below her, provides another version of his "flight", or challenge to the accepted conventions of humanity. Like her brother, she takes a pride in constantly inventing new difficulties and overcoming them. She too can never rest on her laurels. But for Tanya the end is tragedy; she misses her footing and falls to her death.

Vekshin himself is driven by the same urge to self-destruction. His motto is "upwards and onwards"; he refuses to be satisfied, even when his immediate goal has been achieved. Above all, he rejects happiness, for that implies a final achievement, or at least a coming-to-terms, and consequently an abrogation of man's duty to aspire "upwards and onwards", "Happiness is always bourgeois: happiness is when there's no further to go, when everything has been achieved". On the other hand, his antithesis, the loathsome bureaucrat Chikilev dreams of the day when men will be happy to order. And even the Communists in the book regard happiness in terms of social and physiological organization: "You'll be able to manufacture it like goloshes or light-bulbs". But the world is not to be judged by the logic of an earth-bound Salieri. Creativity and tragedy are not to be measured in terms of morality and happiness.

In Leonov's scheme of values suffering and tragedy are inseparable from "flight". They provide the only evidence of spiritual vitality, evidence that has to be constantly reasserted by new exploits. Indeed, a tragic outcome is the only really consistent end for Vekshin himself. Leonov, however, holds out a tentative prospect of regeneration for his hero: "How Mitya fell among lumberjacks, how he was beaten at first, and then welcomed … how he regained the name that he had lost: all this lies outside the scope of the present narrative". This ending hardly provides a satisfactory solution to Vekshin's restless aspirations, but oddly, this idea of salvation through communal labour contains a prophecy of Leonov's own later development.

Leonov's need for an optimistic end to Vekshin's career comes from his belief that the same qualities are inherent in the Bolshevik Revolution. Vekshin cries: "The Revolution is first and foremost a flight, upwards and onwards, upwards and onwards". On the other hand the doubters see the Revolution in terms of a brave but pedestrian slog. The déclassé aristocrat Manyukin writes: "Perhaps you'll tell me that the train is still deep in the tunnel, hasn't yet burst out into the blue glimmer at the far end? But hasn't the tunnel gone on rather long? What if there's no way out of it?" The whole idea of flying is an assertion of the creative leap, the stroke of genius, the very negation of the patient but earth-bound industry of Salieri. Not surprisingly, however, Leonov baulked at associating the tragic overtones of this image with the Revolution. On the other hand the "tunnel" raises the question: if the Revolution is no more than that, is it worth anything at all?

With the publication of The Thief Leonov won instant recognition as one of the most important Soviet Writers. Gorky marked him out for special attention and his works began to be translated in the West. By 1929 he had been elected first chairman of the new Party-controlled Union of Soviet Writers. He had arrived. One could guess at this change in Leonov's status from the works alone. His heroes are now no longer underdogs and rebels, but men at the top of the tree, prominent commissars and world famous scientists. The concern with creativity and tragedy, morality and happiness, however, still remains the dominant motif in the work of Leonov's second period (1929–1936), though these values are now subtly redistributed.

With the intensification of the drive towards industrialization and collectivization in 1928, the cult of individualism, so characteristic of Soviet literature during the earlier twenties, began to be officially discouraged in favour of the new ideal of collectivism. This convention, too, is reflected in Leonov's novels of the period. Thus the individualist scientist Skutarevsky (in the novel of the same name) is finally reconciled with the party and the rest of his people in the closing pages. On a deeper level the commissar Kurilov, in The Road to Ocean, debarred from Party activity by a fatal illness, is amazed to discover that Communism has richly equipped him for human relationships. He makes new friendships and finds himself actually capable of love.

Yet these men are recognizably Leonov heroes. Professor Skutarevsky is working on the wireless transmission of electricity, a new variant of the leap of creative energy, depicted in The Thief. He actually drives his car like an aeroplane, commenting: "Flight—that's man's natural state: everything else is just a blasphemous lowering of the norm". Kurilov indulges in flights of imagination, dreaming of his Utopia Ocean, "the capital of men who fly naturally and effortlessly". So it is not surprising that Leonov still speaks in the same terms of the Revolution. "You're a pedant. you're afraid of risks: but the Bolsheviks too took a risk in 1917".

On the other hand "flight" still retains its tragic associations for Leonov. The cosmonauts, envisaged by Kurilov, return from their first space-flight, dead or blinded by their experiences. "We learnt that in Ocean too there were tragedies, but ones more worthy of man's lofty estate". For Skutarevsky: "Flight—that's the only way for a man to die". Accordingly Skutarevsky recognizes the ominous signs of a heart-attack just at his moment of triumph; and Kurilov collapses just when love seems to have humanized him finally.

For all this, however, the tragic images of Skutarevsky and Kurilov are somewhat muted. They are sick men, middle-aged, and, ironically, they are even more isolated and conscious of their isolation than Vekshin had been. They are both aware that the best of life is behind them, that they will not live to see the glorious future for which they have worked. Their devotion to the cause has left them with no personal interests or private life. This gives them a pathetic, almost sacrificial, air which overshadows their more obviously heroic qualities. Skutarevsky joins the Party only after a series of shattering blows in his private life and his work. But there is no real tragedy here: the safety-net of Party-membership is waiting for him. As for Kurilov, the act of flying has been suspended and made static: "he was like a bridge and people passed over him into the future".

These new heroes are loyal, respectable Soviet citizens. They find fulfilment, not in flying in the face of society, but in identifying themselves with it. Individualist though they are, they achieve their happiness only when they have finally shed their individuality. In The Thief, the idea of flight had been a condition of life, an expression of the need to intensify experience by danger and courage, and as such it contained for Leonov and his heroes a sort of happiness, even though this sometimes involved the rejection of happiness in its more conventional forms. But now happiness has become a different sort of right, one that can, and indeed must, be earned: "All work entitles a man to bread, but only creativity entitles him to happiness; and tomorrow all work will be creative". Chikilev, with his desire to make people happy to order, would have welcomed the suggestion.

The word "creativity" too has changed its meaning; it is no longer opposed to patient industry, but has become a consequence of it. Kurilov's service to the Party has been loyal and persevering, but no more than that; his life is an example, not a challenge. Creativity now is simply a reward for services rendered. It is no longer an aesthetic concept, but an ethical one. Undeniably, Salieri deserves to be a better composer than Mozart. Does this necessarily make him so?

Somewhat apart from these heroes stands the ex-White officer Gleb Protoklitov, the villain of The Road to Ocean, Because of the need to conceal his past with the Whites, his life since the Civil War has been a succession of false-hoods, fake biographies and desperate bluffs. Yet in this deeply compromised character, and his hopeless situation (for Gleb's ultimate ruin is never in doubt), Leonov discovers unsuspected riches. At times the figure of Gleb dominates the entire work.

Leonov tries in vain to alienate the reader from his villain—notably in the horrific scene where Gleb attempts to murder one of his old comrades, now blackmailing him—but Gleb obstinately retains the reader's sympathy. The men who hunt and betray him are infinitely more repulsive than Gleb himself. Admittedly, he speaks of Kurilov as enviously as Salieri of Mozart: "He is like a great planet, and I his insignificant satellite", but he too shares in this image of flight. Kurilov even observes that Gleb "would make a good airman". This is not just a coincidence. Gleb Protoklitov really does recall the Vekshins. His life represents a new variation on theirs. Faced with the prospect of annihilation he refuses to come to terms. He exists in defiance of the law and even of his creator, Leonov. Inevitably, the flying image covers him too. Mozart has been poisoned, but his music is still better than Salieri's.

The Road to Ocean is Leonov's most ambitious novel, in its formal experimentation and the importance of the issues it raises. However, after initial approval, it ran into savage criticism, and within a year of its first appearance it had been virtually suppressed. Leonov must have felt this painfully, for after producing five novels in the twelve years 1924–1935, his next appeared only in 1953. In the meantime, he turned to the stage.

The years following The Road to Ocean were the years of the great purges, and the change in Leonov's fortunes was undoubtedly caused, at least in part, by a spiteful personal campaign, which can be traced back as far as November, 1933. This campaign took various forms: attacks on Leonov's personal vanity, distortions of the content and meaning of his works, and, more insidiously, suppression of all his pre-1936 works. Altogether some forty editions of his novels had appeared up to 1936; none was to be issued again until 1947, one of them (Skutarevsky), only after Stalin's death, while another (The Thief) has never been re-published in its original form. This campaign continued with a series of vicious attacks on Leonov's plays of 1937–40, culminating in violent denunciations of The Snow Storm, then (November 1940) undergoing rehearsals at the Maly theatre. The play, which had been performed successfully in the provinces, was immediately suppressed and Leonov himself disgraced. It seems likely that only the war saved him from annihilation.

Leonov's fall was almost as meteoric as his rise. In 1929 he seemed to be standing at the top of the tree. A personal friend of Gorky, Chairman of the Union of Soviet Writers, and with an international reputation as a novelist, he seemed unchallengeably secure. Yet within seven years he had lost the friendship of Gorky, his books had been virtually suppressed, and after Gorky's death he does not seem to have been considered even as a candidate for a post in the Union.

These changes are inevitably reflected in his works. His new heroes are no longer men with important positions at the hub of affairs, but provincial figures, in agriculture, industry or local administration. They lack the individuality of Leonov's earlier heroes; the stress is on modesty, efficiency, unobtrusiveness; one of these plays is actually called An Ordinary Man, and the characters in it drink a toast to "heroic ordinariness". Many of these men are engaged in "creative" work, but they are no longer associated with images of flight. Like Kurilov, they are at best "bridges". Professor Skutarevsky had driven his car as if it was an aeroplane; Professor Vikhrov, the hero of The Russian Forest, prefers to go on foot.

Leonov's heroes are almost always older than their creator. None of them has found personal happiness; each of them is sadly aware that he will not live to see the entry into the Promised Land, whose prospect has dominated and given meaning to his life. Inevitably it seems to the older figures that their successors will enjoy the triumph too easily, without having shared in the efforts or sacrifices that had made it possible; they look for some evidence that their children appreciate their work and are worthy of inheriting it. Leonov himself perhaps shared the feelings of his ageing heroes, for from 1936 onwards he begins to depict the younger generation.

It is here that the image of flying re-appears. The younger heroes—or more often heroines—are associated with gliding or parachute-jumping; sometimes, by extension, they serve in tanks or submarines. These militaristic images reflect, of course, the years in which the plays were written; but these displays of courage and heroism, while seeming to echo the Vekshins' self-destructive challenge to the void beneath, are no longer sought for their own sake, but serve as demonstrations that these boys and girls are "entitled to happiness". Where the Vekshins had been testing their potentialities to their furthest limits, these new heroes are simply undergoing initiation, or rather confirmation, ceremonies, which they invariably complete successfully.

In the better works of this period, the younger heroes and heroines prove their mettle by moral, as much as physical courage. Both aspects can be seen in The Russian Forest, where the heroine, Polya Vikhrova, is parachuted behind the German lines in the Second World War, and falls into Nazi hands. As she prepares for interrogation, "she realized that she was nearing the critical, decisive moment, for which the whole of her previous life had been only a preparatory run-up—and then a selfless, headlong flight, whose height and duration determine a man's true value". This image might seem to recall the Vekshins, but there are important differences. For the Vekshins flying had been a continual challenge; for Polya it is a performance once and for all. The Vekshins prove nothing beyond their own vitality; once Polya's "true value" has been determined, the main business of her life has been settled.

This leads to a re-appraisal of the whole ideal of flying. Leonov now concentrates less on the creative leap involved, and more on the training and preparation of his parachutists and gliders. This in turn produces a new image, the mountains, "the eternal heights of human happiness" in An Ordinary Man, "glaciered heights" in The Russian Forest, the Pamir mountains in The Golden Coach, and the patient endeavour involved in climbing them. To the Salieris of the world all flight is an affront.

But what is the point of this flight-cum-mountaineering symbol? For now even its "title to happiness" is questioned. Polya says: "What do people aspire to? Some people say—to happiness; but that's not right in my opinion. You should aspire to purity. Happiness is just the chief reward, a sort of makeweight to purity". Sometimes happiness is actually suspect; in The Golden Coach Marka, having got her mother's permission to marry the man she loves, feels "ashamed of her happiness … as if she had committed the gravest crime of her life". In the same play a whole family is disparaged with the words: "They have everything you could ask for, everything—except hardship and happiness". Leonov now rejects conventional happiness as contemptuously as he had done in The Thief: "Happiness is always bourgeois", but his standpoint has completely changed. He does so no longer in the name of human aspiration, but of moral purity.

These developments are only logical extensions of the tendencies revealed in The Road to Ocean. In the case of the "villains" the progression is equally clear. But, where Protoklitov had been merely doomed, the later villains are described as "corpses", "ghosts", or "returned from the dead", until in The Golden Coach the cast-list is headed by the name of Shchelkanov, who is characterized simply by a yawning blank, since no actor is required to play the part. Although Shchelkanov is heard knocking on the door, scurrying up and down the passages outside, he never actually materializes on stage. He is the logical culmination of Leonov's villains: his very existence is, as it were, questioned, while at the same time his character is brilliantly delineated. Yet, in another sense, Shchelkanov is also the final statement of that will to self-destruction that drives so many of Leonov's characters to their doom.

The villain of The Russian Forest is a similar type. Gratsiansky had been trapped into working as an informer for the Tsarist secret police; but instead of emigrating after the Revolution, he had elected, like Protoklitov, to stay in the Soviet Union. This only increases his difficulties—he is subjected to various pressures from anti-Soviet agents abroad, and finally, during the Second World War, blackmailed into spying for the Nazis.

Like Shchelkanov, Gratsiansky's life too is a void. His much-vaunted work in the archives proves to be the destruction of all record of his past before it can fall into the hands of the Soviet Secret Police. Even what there is of his life has to be annihilated. He has contributed nothing to the science of forestry except malicious attacks on the hero Vikhrov's life and work. Finally, when these attacks seem to have been crowned with success, and Vikhrov's disgrace is imminent, Gratsiansky intervenes on his behalf: "The destruction of his opponent would have involved annihilation for him too". Vikhrov's life allows Gratsiansky a vicarious existence and provides him with an identity; without it he would be revealed as nothing.

Is Gratsiansky then just another envious Salieri? The Tsarist chief of police foretells his later fate thus: "As you decline, so your blood will turn sour with unfruitfulness and envy of your neighbour, his health, his talents, his digestion, and even the torments of his spirit…. No doubt, in failing to make yourself a Prometheus, you will contrive to turn yourself into a vulture feeding on one; with the years, you will come to love this intense, almost creative delight in devouring his liver, drowning his voice, blackening his character, in the hope of resembling him at least in the colour of your face". Fated to survive for another thirty years after these words, Gratsiansky, even though no Prometheus, yet creates such an illusion of independent life that, as prophesied, it is "almost creative".

So Leonov's treatment of the subject of Mozart and Salieri comes full circle. Professor Vikhrov is [according to Leonov, as quoted in F. Vlasov, Poeziya zhizni (1961)] "good, wise, industrious, well-educated, talented, but no more than that": it is Vikhrov who is the Salieri. For Shchelkanov and Gratsiansky, as once for the Vekshins and Gleb Protoklitov, merely to continue to be constitutes a fantastic challenge to non-existence: it is a trapeze-act that cannot but end in disaster. Even though he is only halfalive, perhaps even because of it, Gratsiansky's existence is nearer to a creation out of nothing ("almost creative") than Vikhrov's patient industry.

It is hardly possible to envisage any further development of the types of Vikhrov, Gratsiansky and Shchelkanov. They are all in their different ways final statements, and indeed in the twelve years since The Russian Forest Leonov has produced only one new work, the unworthy and unrepresentative Mr. McKinley Runs Away. Instead, he has devoted his energies to revising his most controversial works, notably The Thief, The Snowstorm and The Golden Coach.

Here too Leonov might seem to be conforming to one of the "traditions" of Soviet literature; but unlike other Soviet revisions, Leonov's are dictated less by political or ideological considerations than by the logic of the author's own development. In fact he began to produce these revisions at just the time when other Soviet classics were being re-issued in something like their original form.

The most extensive of these revisions is The Thief, of which the last third has been almost completely recomposed. But there is no need to read even that far to see that Leonov has now reversed his earlier verdict on Dmitry Vekshin. In 1927 Leonov had been at pains to justify his thief to the Communists; in the new version he shows that people guilty of this sort of antisocial behaviour are not welcome in Communist or any society. The image of Vekshin's "flight" has accordingly been replaced by that of his "fall". His once noble aspirations are now parodied and Leonov's own earlier enthusiasms unmercifully mocked. Veksin was once "a planet that had broken out of orbit"; that image has been replaced in the later version by the words: "a fragment of human spray, torn from the flame-wrapped crucible of humanity", a phrase equally suggestive of alienation, but now presenting a picture of blind senselessness, rather than of superhuman aspirations.

It is notable too that Leonov now devotes less attention to the brilliance of Tanya's shtrabat than to her training, "the mechanics of this unusually impressive turn"; it is now not the challenge to the void beneath, but "simply the number of difficulties overcome that created the value of her show". The idea of flight is finally compromised when the shallow young suitor in the new version of The Golden Coach talks of taking Marka to the Pamir mountains by aeroplane.

Moreover, by reducing the complexities of human creativity to "morality", and finally "purity", Leonov has killed the idea of tragedy too. Tragedy arises from the incompatibility of conflicting ideals; when there is only one criterion of conduct, then the tension arising from the clash of different systems of value disappears.

The drastic solution of judging all human conduct by the yardstick of "purity" might at least resolve the contradictions in Leonov's attitude to the Revolution. In his early work he had associated it with his tragic imagery: "The Revolution is first and foremost a flight", even though he had shirked the tragic consequences of the image in both The Thief and The Road to Ocean, Now, in The Russian Forest, the Revolution is defined as "not just a struggle for a fairer distribution of the good things of life, but, first and foremost, for human purity."

The contradiction may have been resolved superficially, but Leonov's work still aches with a sense of disenchantment. In the first version of The Golden Coach, Leonov had returned to the doubts expressed in The Thief, and answered them triumphantly: "We have passed the darkest tunnel now—only the last defile remains. Look, you can see the sea and the shore." In the revised version, however, this remark has been omitted. On the other hand, Maria Sergeyevna in the same play, realizing that her life has been ruined by her failure to marry the man she loved, and that it is too late now to repair the error, cries: "Then at least let our children, at least our children!…". But the unfinished sentence carries no assurance that the next generation will be any more fortunate or successful. Indeed, when, in the latest (1964) edition, the children do repair this error, they prove, ironically, only to have perpetuated it.

Leonov has made several attempts to suppress his fascination with the theme of flight; sometimes it was harnessed to the needs of society, as in Kurilov and Vikhrov; sometimes it was sublimated into acts of heroism or self-denial, as in the young heroines of the third period; sometimes, as in Protoklitov and Gratsiansky, it went underground; it seemed indestructible. Now, at last, in the revised versions of his profoundest works Leonov has finally settled his account with creativity. There is no tragedy now. Happiness, in whatever guise, seems further off than ever. Nothing remains but morality.

And Leonov himself? He is always ready to discuss the second version of The Thief, and is fond of recalling, in this connection, a conversation with his former friend and teacher, Maksim Gorky. The older man had raised the idea of an author actually meeting one of his own fictional heroes in real life: "Suppose he saw that he had overrated him and, out of sheer disillusionment, killed him." "Something like this", says Leonov, "happened to me. In this new version I kill Vekshin dead."

Salieri has killed Mozart again.