[In the obituary below, the critic provides an overview of Leonov's career.]

Leonid Leonov, one of the major literary figures of Soviet Russia, received two Stalin Prizes, and was a senior member of the Praesidium of the Union of Soviet Writers. In the 1930s he was a fiction editor of the leading journal Novy Mir. Maxim Gorki spoke of his "strong, clear, juicy prose", and Edmund Wilson wrote that he was possessed of "a literary sophistication very rare in Soviet literature".

But, while widely accepted in the Soviet Union (his books have been published there in editions amounting to more than three million copies), he was a controversial writer in the West. Some have taken him to have been a Marxist dogmatist from the start; others, more perceptive, claimed to see in him the most subversive Soviet writer to have escaped serious persecution. He was seldom called a timeserver.

Leonid Maksimovich Leonov was the son of an "obscure journalist" (as he called him) and village poet who was exiled to the north of Russia from 1905 to 1910 for anti-Tsarist activity. Leonid was educated at Moscow Third Gymnasium, became a reporter on the Red Army newspaper, and fought for the Red Army in the Civil War.

He began writing in 1922 under the aegis of the Serapion Brothers, a literary group of "fellow travellers", of which Zamyatin, author of the famous dystopia We, was the leading theorist. Until about 1928 Russians were more or less free to write as they liked but by 1932, with the promulgation of "socialist realism", they were shackled, as they were to remain until recently.

Leonov's first stories were not at all social in intent nor was he initially much interested in politics; rather, he was influenced by Balzac, the story-teller, and Dostoevsky. In Konets melkogo cheloveka (1924), End of a Trivial Man, he experimented with skaz (the Russian style, started by Leskov, in which a colloquial and idiosyncratic first-person narrator tells the story): it is about a scientist who is led by his double—a transparently Dostoevskian device—to destroy the results of his work. Some have seen in its a creative writer's prophetic despair at things to come, a kind of bitter announcement of literary suicide.

In the same year Leonov published a novel, Barsuki—translated into English as The Badgers (1947)—which moved towards a more conventional realism. But Vor (1927), translated as The Thief (1931), is by common consent his best novel: an ex-commissar with blood on his hands becomes the leader of a gang of criminals, but undergoes a Dostoevskian reformation. Into this book Leonov introduced himself as a novelist who is writing a novel, but about other characters than in this novel.

There is no telling in what direction Leonov might have gone had he chosen to leave Russia. But he remained—and, under later severe criticism from the regime, rewrote and quite ruined this, his best work, in a conformist version published as late as 1959. It is therefore proper to read it in its original version.

But although he stayed, Leonov—who never denounced other writers as his near contemporaries Sholokov and Fadeyev notoriously did—produced the most ambiguous and enigmatic novels of any writer who appeared to toe the official line.

In each of them there is some element that could be taken as critical of the regime, though Leonov always arranged matters so that he could not be seriously criticised. Both Sot (1930), translated as Soviet River in 1931, and Skutarevsky (1932), translated under the same title (a name) in 1936, are ostensibly patriotic "Five Year Plan" novels, and the "good Communists" come out on top. But each deals zestfully with sabotage, describing anti-Communists with Dostoevskian depth and some evident relish. Moreover, the latter novel is openly experimental (it has three story-lines, as well as a novelist as a character) in a manner not supposed by "socialist realists" to be wholesome.

Nor could Leonov shake off the then supposedly bad influence of Dostoevsky. His last novel of substance was Russkiy les (1953), translated in 1966 as The Russian Forest, an allegorical attack—well before the so-called Thaw of 1956—on Stalin's purges and labour camps, with a powerful thread of ecological feeling for Russia's natural resources.

His plays are skilful suspense dramas which had much success on the stage. The filmscript Begstvo mistera Mak-Kinli (1961), Mr McKinley's Flight, was a tedious satire on Western politicians, and could have been written especially to please the Soviet censors. Earlier, just after the war, two plays by him had been suppressed.

In 1942 Leonov gave as his recreations "gardening, rearing cactuses, and motoring". In that year he lost an eye while fighting the Germans outside Leningrad. He married the daughter of the publisher N. V. Sabashnikov in 1923.

He is likely to be remembered as the author of The Thief (original version)—and as a writer who just might have gone on to greatness had he been allowed freedom to write as he wished. His friend Boris Pilnyak, a more original novelist, tried desperately to please the authorities, but was wholly unable to do so—and perished as a result of the purges. Leonov, in one sense more sophisticated, seems to have been able to control his own impulses more efficiently; but it is impossible to decide how ironic he intended to be.

He will always be of interest to the student of Soviet literature, though it is doubtful if the issue of the extent of the sincerity of his commitment to socialist realism, and to Marxist-Leninism itself, will ever be resolved. Do his better novels represent a struggle within himself, or are they deliberately ironic? This is the question critics ask, and will continue to ask. He remains a paradigmatic example of a writer whose genius was eventually crippled by his obligation to an ideology.