SOURCE: "Leonid Leonov (1899–)," in A History of Soviet Literature: 1917–1964, From Gorky to Solzhenitsyn, translated by Mirra Ginsburg, 1963. Reprint by Anchor Books, 1964, pp. 203-21.

[A Russian-born critic, Alexandrova originally published the book from which the following excerpt is taken in 1963. Below, she provides an overview of Leonov's career, focusing on his novels.]

Many young writers begin their literary careers with a work they call a novel. On closer acquaintance it quickly becomes obvious that their book can scarcely be called a novel by the standards normally set for this literary form. "In order to construct a novel," said Chekhov, "it is necessary to have a good knowledge of the law of symmetry and the balance of masses. A novel is an entire palace, and the reader should feel free in it, neither astonished nor bored as in a museum. Sometimes he must be given a rest both from the hero and the author. This can be accomplished with a landscape, or something amusing, or a new twist in the plot, new characters…." [Quoted by A. Serebrov in Chekhov in the Recollections of Contemporaries, Moscow: State Publishing House for Fine Literature, 1952.]

Leonid Leonov is one of the relatively small company of genuine novelists who know "the law of symmetry and the balance of masses."

Leonov was born in 1899 in Moscow, the son of a self-educated peasant poet who was at one time the chairman of the Surikov Literary and Musical Circle (the poet Surikov was also of peasant origin). Later, Leonov's father joined the literary group which called itself "Sreda" (Wednesday) and which attracted at the turn of the century many young men who subsequently became famous writers, including Bunin, Leonid Andreyev, and others. Leonov's grandfather owned a grocery store in Zaryadye, the market district in the old section of Moscow. A stern manner and great kindness were the most striking characteristics of this unusually colorful man, whom Leonov later used as the model for Bykhalov in his novel The Badgers.

Leonov's earliest memories were of 1905, when the terrorist Kalyaev assassinated the Grand Duke Sergey Alexandrovich. During the same year the future writer's father was arrested for publishing two pamphlets. The boy was twice taken by his grandmother to visit his father in prison. After twenty months in prison his father was released, but was exiled soon afterward to Arkhangelsk, where he remained even after the expiration of his term of exile. Leonov visited his father in Arkhangelsk several times, and the north made a great impression upon him, later reflected in a number of his works (particularly Sot).

Leonov received his elementary education at the city school in Moscow. His favorite teacher was Mitrofan Platonovich Kulkov. In 1925, when the young writer's works were first translated into German, he wanted to present a copy of the German edition to his old teacher, but the old man was no longer alive: both he and his wife (also a teacher) had died in the early part of the Civil War. Leonov later gave the name of Kulkov to the teacher of General Litovchenko, one of the characters in the novel The Taking of Velikoshumsk (1944).

During the Civil War, Leonov joined the Red Army as a volunteer, but was freed in 1921 in order to continue his education. At that time Leonov planned to study painting. When he returned to Moscow, he found none of his relatives or acquaintances there, except his mother's cousin, the locksmith Vasiliev, who readily accepted the young man into his home. But Leonov insisted on repaying his uncle's hospitality by helping in his locksmith's shop. For a long time afterward, he "toiled over the smoky forge." Later, the famous Russian graphic artist Falileyev took an interest in the young writer, and it was while living in his studio that Leonov wrote The Petushikhino Breakthrough and The End of a Little Man. Falileyev introduced Leonov to some well-known artists and literary figures of the mid-1920s. These included two publishers—Koppelman (of the Shipovnik Publishing House) and Sabashnikov. On hearing several of the young writer's stories, both of them offered to publish a volume of the pieces. This initiated a new phase in Leonov's life—the beginning of professional literary activity.

Leonov's first stories—"Buryga," "The Wooden Queen," and the longer tale The Petushikhino Breakthrough—were merely gropings for a theme, merely attempts to relieve the pressure of ideas and images that filled his mind. "Buryga" is an imp who, after a complicated series of adventures, finds himself far from his native woods, in distant Spain, with the cook of a "Spanish count," and his only friend, an old dog. "The Wooden Queen" is a little poem in prose, inspired by a long December evening and the flute song of a blizzard. The most interesting of these first "trials of the pen" is The Petushikhino Breakthrough. It is a tale of village life on the eve and in the early days of the revolution. Amid a tangle of human destinies the writer singles out the warm image of the quiet boy Alyosha, filled with a tender love of the world, living like a fragile azure flower somewhere at the edge of a forest.

In this tale we find Leonov's first use of lyrical digression, reflecting on the meaning of the large events of the time. These digressions were later to be given a firm place in Leonov's works. In this story Leonov devotes his lyrical digression to the distant future: "The troubled days will pass, we shall put on velvet trousers, sit down around electric samovars, and recall, and recall the dance of frantic rainless winds … when our guiltless Mitkas, Nikitkas, and Vasyatkas went without shrouds or coffins to public, crossless graveyards…. We shall recall how we fought for our right to be Red…."

Fame came to Leonov early, with Kovyakin's Journal. This Journal is kept in the name of an old resident of Gogulev, a decaying hamlet forgotten by the powers that be. There is a humbled quality in Kovyakin, reminiscent of Gogol's Akaky Akakievich, but in contrast to Akaky, Kovyakin is a man well pleased with himself.

But neither Kovyakin's Journal nor The End of a Little Man marked Leonov's emergence as a major literary figure. This was accomplished by his first novel, The Badgers (1925), reflecting the early years of the revolution, which "reshuffled the cards" in such a way that the "game" proceeded according to new, unheard-of rules, under which "non-trump yokels beat true-born kings."

The novel is built on two planes: the village and the city. The poor peasant Savelin sends his two sons, Pavel and Semyon, to the city to learn new ways of earning a livelihood. They go to live with a former neighbor who had moved to Moscow and now owns a stall in the Zaryadye district, where the wretchedly poor village has long been disposing of its human "surpluses." The enterprising ones among these "surpluses" survive the harsh ordeal and "make their way in the world." Others, the seekers after "justice," remain at the bottom.

Leonov knew Zaryadye very well from frequent childhood visits to his grandfather. It was like a second home to him, and his novel captures the very air of the bustling market district in pre-revolutionary days. We see Zaryadye both on "a crisp December morning," and on a quiet evening in April, filled with the festive ringing of Lenten church-bells, its odors floating steadily along—"solid and slow, like a procession of well-fed Zaryadye tomcats."

Fate early separates the Savelin brothers. The elder, Pavel, lame, unlucky, and disgruntled, goes to work in a factory. Semyon, thoughtful and more even-tempered, adjusts himself to Zaryadye. Here he falls in love with a merchant's daughter, Nastya, but the merchant refuses the poor suitor, and Semyon harbors a deep grievance against him for this refusal.

With the outbreak of the revolution the brothers' paths diverge still further. Semyon is drawn back home. Their village, called Vory ("Thieves"), has long been engaged in litigation with a neighboring village, Gusaki ("Ganders"), over Zinkin meadow. The revolutionary government resolves this old dispute in favor of Gusaki. Its decision gives a new turn to the ancient quarrel: the Vory peasants, who feel wronged by the new authorities, become enemies of the Soviets, secretly hoping that "all this smashing business may make the city crumble into dust."

The pretext for an open rising against the new government is provided by the searches and requisitioning of grain. Semyon becomes the leader of the rebellious villagers. The peasants leave the village, intending to withdraw into the woods. A procession of carts loaded with the wretched peasant belongings heads for the forest, but on the way one of the ringleaders breaks down and exclaims: "Brothers, peasants … there's really no place for us to go!" And this cry from the depth of his heart serves as a signal for retreat. Most of the peasants turn back. But Semyon, with a group of other intransigents, becomes a partisan. They make their headquarters in the woods, living in dugouts like badgers (hence the title of the novel). They are joined by Nastya, Semyon's old love. She puts on trousers, and lives and fights together with the partisans.

Supported by the local peasantry, the partisans make flying raids against the representatives of the government, terrorizing them. The center sends army units to fight the rebels. With them comes Semyon's brother, Pavel, who became a Communist in the early days of the revolution. When he learns that Semyon leads the "badgers," Pavel arranges a meeting with him, at which, without revealing his present mission, he tries to convince his brother that, "historically," the village must follow the "Soviets," and that "there is no future for it without the Communists." But even without this naïve propaganda, the "badgers" are shaken with the coming of spring: their longing for the land becomes too strong.

Leonov was one of the first writers to depict the "Green" village—the village which rebelled against the Reds, but did not accept the Whites. He also sought to show the socio-political development of the peasant masses, awakened by the revolution.

The reader will encounter many of the characters of The Badgers in the writer's later works. The quiet, inwardly illuminated hatmaker Katushin will reappear in The Thief as the master mechanic Pchkhov. In the same novel Manka Vyuga (also Masha Dolomanova) is reminiscent of Nastya, of The Badgers. But there is one quality in The Badgers which makes it difficult for the reader to become involved in the novel's narrative flow: the writer does not seem to be genuinely interested in the destinies of his heroes. Leonov attempted to overcome this flaw in The Thief (1927).

In this novel, against the broad background of the outskirts of Moscow during the NEP period—a period of officially acknowledged retrenchment from revolutionary policies in the face of the country's backward economy—Leonov gives us the first picture of the socio-political conflict which has arisen within the revolution. The hero of the novel is Mitka Vekshin, the son of a railroad watchman at a small, out-of-the-way siding. Impulsive, impressionable, and restless, he plunges wholeheartedly into the revolution from its very start; he fights with reckless courage in the ranks of the Red Army at the front, wins a decoration, and soon becomes a commissar.

After the end of the Civil War, Mitka goes to Moscow. The demobilized soldiers look askance at the growing profusion of goods in the store windows which only yesterday were nothing but shattered glass. In the beginning Mitka is not disturbed by these changes. "With mocking attention, he looked at all of this as the work of his own hands, flattering himself with the secret thought: 'I wanted it, and it appeared; I will not want it and it will go.'" But one day, as he stands by a store window, lightheaded with hunger, looking at the tempting display of tasty delicacies, a woman approaches the store. She is obviously the wife of a NEP man, "elegant and splendid like an Arabian morning." "With simple courtesy," Mitka stretches his hand to open the door for her. But she takes his gesture amiss and strikes his hand. That evening Mitka gets drunk and from then on rapidly begins to roll downhill.

Sinking to "the lower depths," Mitka becomes something of a celebrity and virtually the leader of a gang of thieves. Here, too, as at the front, his candid and impulsive character wins him many friends. He is joined by his old chum of Red Army days, Sanka Babkin. But Mitka himself is not impressed with his new career as a safecracker. To him, theft is not a profession, but a "persuasion," (as banditry is to Nomakh, the hero of Yesenin's unfinished play). He steals out of protest, but he does not feel that he has broken with his past. "I belong, I'm one of them," he says with feeling to Manka Yyuga (Masha Dolomanova), his childhood friend whom he meets again "at the depths," where she has become "gang queen." "I can still die if necessary," he continues. "But I am not a man to peep through keyholes. Didn't I fight? No, no! Allow a hero not to boast of his heroism."

The allusion to "keyholes" refers simultaneously to two characters in the novel: the chairman of the house committee, Chikilev, a little Soviet pettifogger, about whom "even the pencil feels too disgusted to write," and Mitka's former fellow soldier Atashez, who now occupies an important post in the economic apparatus. Atashez tries to explain to Mitka that the NEP does not mean the end of the revolution, but merely its adoption of "new forms." With his whole direct and impressionable nature Mitka is repelled by these explanations. And the entire background of the novel—the crowded and squalid life in the little apartment in the Blagusha district, with its kindly but scatterbrained café singer Zinka; the Bundyukovs, who love their quiet so much that they prefer to remain childless; the former landowner Manyukin, who earns a livelihood as an entertainer in the Blagusha all-night taverns—all this background merely brings into sharper relief the moving restlessness of the novel's only sincere and honest character—the thief Mitka Vekshin.

But Mitka is not the only hero of the novel. He has an interesting rival in the person of Nikolay Zavarikhin, a young fellow who comes to Moscow from the village in the hope of striking it rich (his trunk is stolen by Manka Vyuga at the station). "Everything was remarkable about him: his great height, as of a man who drew himself up to deliver a blow, the banked fire of his hard, pale-blue eyes, the leather trimming of his fancy felt boots … and his gay mittens, so brightly decorated, you'd think their maker was singing a song as he worked, and tracing out its wonderful refrains in color" (these gay and vivid colors mark the verbal mastery of Leonov himself). Nikolka hates the city and yet is drawn to it. He despises the city folk for their easy work and agile hands, but he knows that only the city can give him an opportunity to utilize his extraordinary acquisitive talents. He challengingly presents himself as a "bourgeois," adding: "But now there will be a new breed of bourgeois—without bellies. There won't be anything to stick a knife into." Nikolka's sullen, close-mouthed peasant strength is best expressed in his remark denying the assertion that strong men never cry: "That's rot! A strong man cries when he has nothing to put his strength to."

The writer Firsov, in whose name the narrative is often told, and who represents Leonov himself, remarks that "Mitka and Zavarikhin were spawned in the same hour by the earth, indifferent in her creative rage. The first goes down, the second up. When their paths cross, there are catastrophes, revulsion, and hatred. The first will die a death cruel and splendid; the second will make a three-time fool of death. Both are right: the first, in his honesty and will; the second, in his strength. And both are harbingers of the awakened millions."

Official criticism did not wait for the appearance of the last chapters of the novel (it ran serially for several months in the magazine Krasnaya Nov); it descended upon Leonov for exaggerating "the mud-faced danger" supposedly emerging from the NEP-time village. Obligingly, Leonov altered his original intention in mid-course: Mitka does not die, but leaves Moscow for the remote provinces where he becomes a lumberjack, thus breaking his ties with the criminal underworld. Zavarikhin's subsequent fate is indicated in passing in the early pages of the novel: by his large-scale trading in hemp, Nikolka will ultimately win glory for his peasant name not only at home, but also abroad. But we are told about this outside the framework of the story itself; at the end of the novel Zavarikhin is still a small-time owner of a stall in a dark corner of the market place.

The changes made by Leonov in the course of writing the novel as a result of critical attacks are obvious even to the naked eye. However, the reasons for his sense of failure with this work are much more complex, and expressions of dissatisfaction crop up in many places in the novel. What is the source of Leonov's feeling that the novel, on which he has "expended almost all of himself," is in some sense a failure? Some clues to this may be found in his comments on his alter ego, the writer Firsov: "Not loving the things he had to write about in those years, Firsov was afraid of touching Mitka, who appeared to him as a dark, subterranean force, a flame which, once it has broken through, subsides and flares again, momentarily changing form and color…. Firsov did not love Mitka enough to tell the truth about him, about the reasons why, in the end, he dropped out of the life he had won by dint of so much suffering and effort."

These lines help us to understand Leonov's sense of creative failure in connection with The Thief. Leonov the artist was unquestionably aware of the moods of disappointment with the results of the revolution which existed in Soviet society. During the years when he was writing the novel, disillusionment with the NEP caused many suicides among the young men who had fought in the Civil War and had been fired with the ideas of Wartime Communism. These suicides included the gifted trade-union leader Yury Lutovinov, the proletarian poets Kuznetsov and Khvastunov, and the brilliant peasant poet Sergey Yesenin.

Another conflict emerged and became widespread in the village: awakened by the revolution, the peasant youth was longing to spread its wings, but it felt hamstrung by the duality of the government's policy. Leonov himself was more in sympathy with Mitka than with Zavarikhin; but—like his alter ego Firsov—he did not love him enough to tell the whole truth and defend him from the attacks of his critics.

Among the failures of The Thief one must include the image of Mitka's youthful love, Masha Dolomanova, who later, through her husband, the thief Aggey, became the "gang queen," Manka Vyuga. In some of her traits she is kin to Dostoyevsky's Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoyevsky's influence may be traced in many pages of The Thief, particularly in the portrait of the former landowner Manyukin, who, from the writer's many oblique hints, appears to be Mitka's real father. It is felt also in the picture of Mitka's loyal friend Sanka Babkin, and especially of the latter's wife, Xenia.

Despite its flaws, however, The Thief is a novel of great scope, with a well-developed plot. Among the writer's most successful moment there is the meeting between Mitka and his sister Tanya, who left the parental roof before him and joined a circus where, thanks to the devotion of Pugel, her instructor, she became a celebrity as an aerialist. Her love affair with Nikolka Zavarikhin and her early death during a circus performance are particularly poignant.

The Thief had a most extraordinary history. At the end of 1959 the novel, which had not been reprinted since the middle of the 1930s, was issued in a new edition. From the preface to this edition the reader learns that The Thief has undergone a radical revision, which took Leonov two years to accomplish. In a brief note to the new edition, Leonov says the following:

The author has reread the book written more than thirty years ago, with pen in hand. To intervene in a work of such long standing is as difficult as stepping for a second time into the same creek. But it is always possible to follow the dried-up bed, listening to the crunching of the pebbles underfoot and looking without fear into the hollows that are no longer filled with water.

In this brief preface every word is a riddle. Why was it necessary to "intervene" in a work written more than thirty years ago? The very comparison of the novel to a "creek" is unconvincing (The Thief was not a creek, but a wide river). And how did the water vanish from this "creek"?

A comparison of the two versions reveals that, in revising the novel, the author sought to strip both leading characters of all the traits which had elicited the reader's sympathy—sometimes against the author's will. Leonov achieved this by whittling down the importance and attractiveness of the images of Mitka and Zavarikhin. The digression in which Leonov indirectly admits his failure "to love Mitka enough" is also deleted. In its place we find the harsh and disapproving lines: "Approximately by the middle of the book, we graphically see the futility of Firsov's attempts … to save the image of Vekshin, which until recently still held his sympathy—even if somewhat shaken—but which is now almost hateful to him" (italics mine—V.A.).

The devaluation of Zavarikhin is still more drastic. He is depicted as a coarse and cynical man, ready to trample down the lives of even those who are near to him for the sake of his interests, as he has done with his fiancée, Tanya Vekshina. The new edition has also been purged of the intimation that Zavarikhin would win renown both at home and abroad through successful trade: he now ends in a concentration camp. In the earlier version Zavarikhin fell in love at first sight with Manka Vyuga, who stole his trunk at the station when he first arrived in Moscow, but he never saw her again, and never looked for her. In the new version he sometimes thinks of her after "a grueling day in the camp." And he never learns that Manka Vyuga also "suffered, revenged herself, and fell, again and again, until at last she came to rot away her days quite near" the place of his own exile.

The Literary Gazette (February 7, 1960) published some interesting comment on the new version of The Thief:

Once upon a time, the twenty-three-year-old Leonov, back from the southern front in the Civil War, was struck by the contrasts of NEP-time Moscow. He thought about many problems that seemed insoluble to him at the time—problems connected with the future of his generation, with the search for a place in life….

But the present version of the novel, according to the Literary Gazette, "is a condensation of certain thoughts which have stirred Leonov over three decades; it is a debate of the firmly convinced and experienced writer with his own younger and wavering self."

To the present-day Leonov, the entire 1927 version is a gross political error, and he spares neither effort nor his heroes in order to "correct" his novel. And so, the large river of his earlier narrative has, in fact, dwindled in the later edition to a "dried-up creek."

Having failed, in the latter 1920s, to create a "hero of the epoch" in the images of Mitka Vekshin and Nikolka Zavarikhin, Leonov did not abandon hope that he would still succeed in finding him. He shifted his attention to another milieu, whose active elements devoted themselves to work in the first Five-Year Plan for the industrialization of the country.

Sot (1929) was the first major literary dealing with the industrialization theme. The idea of building a cellulosepaper combine in the North originates with the chairman of the Province Executive Committee, Potyomkin, who spent his youth, until his army days, as a lumber floater, and who was later a worker in a paper-manufacturing plant. The abundance of forests and available men, and the paper shortage in the country lead Potyomkin to the idea of building a paper factory. As he dreams of it, he becomes more and more enthusiastic and, together with some "knowledgeable people" in the region, he develops a plan for a mighty combine. In his mind's eye Potyomkin already sees an island of industry in the midst of a vast peasant ocean. Thanks to his persistence, Potyomkin succeeds in obtaining approval for his project from the center.

Of course, the novel's interest does not lie in the history of this construction project, but in the men depicted in it. For the first time, the reader of the late 1920s was offered a work reflecting, not the lives and feelings of individuals, but the epoch in the totality of its components. The center of the narrative is held by Uvadyev, one of the leaders of the project and an ex-foreman of a paper factory. After the end of the Civil War his life was spent in responsible but uninteresting work. Uvadyev's credo is simple and direct: "In our age it is necessary to think big: in terms of dozens of factories, thousands of hectares, millions of people…." The workers on the new project, "Sot-Stroy," to which Uvadyev is now assigned, dislike their new chief. One of them says to him: "You have no understanding of a workingman, you are a hard master!"

The young engineer Favorov is closest to Uvadyev in his outlook. He sees the current period as a parallel to the days of Peter the Great, who also used "the whip, and drove in endless piles to drain the wide expanses of the Russian swamp." In brief, the novel presents a generation of men who are "economic workers, co-operators, men of the American type." At the other pole, rarely looked at, are the workers and peasants and, even further, the monks who are living out their days in the woods.

There is little communication among most of Leonov's characters in Sot. Uvadyev finds it difficult to speak a common language even with his own mother. A worker's widow and a worker herself, Varvara Uvadyeva sharply criticizes the way of life enjoyed by her son and the other "commissars." Accustomed to poverty, she is angered "at even the slightest evidence of comfortable living." She leaves her son, goes to live somewhere in a cellar, and finds a job as a switch operator on a streetcar line. "I refuse to be a flunkey. I may be a fool, but I'll be my own fool!" To escape loneliness, Varvara marries an elderly man who earns his livelihood by selling portraits of "the leaders" in the market place.

In Sot, as in The Thief, Leonov paints a graphic picture of the life and moods of the Moscow back streets, where Varvara goes to live with her husband. The motley population of the district consists of workers, erstwhile ladies who are now selling sweets in the market, and petty "NEP-men." All these people are united in their hatred of the powers that be.

Leonov does not succeed in presenting Uvadyev as the "hero of the epoch." Against his wish, the artist in him shows his central character as a stony hulk in whose vicinity no living thing can grow: his wife Natalya leaves him; his affair with a young girl, the daughter of an engineer employed on the project, ends in failure. Uvadyev escapes from his personal disasters into work, leaving Moscow for the construction site.

The novel also offers a striking picture of life in the remote northern province and the small town of Makarikha, around which the new construction is developed. The reader is astonished by the persistence of the old social forms. A locomobile sent from the center makes its appearance in the town square. A group of peasants examines the machine with curiosity, and a conversation ensues which is reminiscent of the opening pages of Gogol's Dead Souls. "'Look at all those tubes!' one of the peasants exclaimed, yawning solely from excess of feeling. The peasant eye was teased and tempted by the lubricating tubes which fairly seemed to beg for transfer to the home-brew apparatus. 'Come a second revolution, and we'll have to take it all apart again; you can get ruptured on the job!' added another, not without enthusiasm."

Leonov does not minimize the antagonism between the government and the working people. Once, when a dam bursts on the project and the workers toil on its repair without sparing themselves, Uvadyev wants to praise one of them, who plunged into the work with particular disregard of himself. He says to the worker: "But you are really one of ours!" In reply he hears the sullen and intractable: "I'm nobody's, I am my own. You think you rule me? You like the voiceless ones; they lick your boots, but keep a rope for you in a dark corner."

Acute need fills the peasants' hearts with bitterness. Observing the endless cases of iron and nails arriving at the construction site, a peasant says to his fellow villagers: "They'll build for you! I carted cases from the station the other day…. Iron and iron, pure-blooded iron, peasants! And we must plead like beggars for a nail or a horseshoe." Suffering from shortages of the barest essentials, the peasants do not conceal their disapproval of the "squandering waste" attending the construction project.

For all his loyalty to the regime, Leonov did not want to conceal that, under the conditions which developed by the late 1920s, "socialist construction" did not further the consolidation of the country, but, on the contrary, hastened the process of class differentiation in the new society.

In his tireless search for a dynamic and positive hero epitomizing the period of construction, Leonov stumbled upon a large theme which for many years became his central preoccupation. It was the theme of fathers and sons. Though not, of course, new in Russian literature, the theme was highly interesting in its new interpretation: for the first time in Russian literature, the writer—himself a young man at the time—gave his sympathy, not to youth, but to the "old men." This was particularly apparent in the novel Skutarevsky (1932) and in The Road to the Ocean (1935).

Along with novels and shorter works Leonov has written a number of plays: The Orchards of Polovchansk (1936–38), The Wolf (1938), An Ordinary Man (1940–43), and others. I shall forego analysis of these plays, since Leonov is at his weakest as a dramatist. His plays remind one of icebergs, nine-tenths of which are submerged under water. Many of the decisive events in the lives of most of the characters seem to have taken place before the opening of the play and quite outside its framework. The only exception is The Invasion, written in 1942.

Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union in June of 1941 and the defeats sustained by the Red Army for almost two years were a great shock to Russia, and most of all to the upper strata of Soviet society; the latter turned out to be the least prepared for these defeats. A detailed characterization of these moods will be found in Chapter 16, devoted to literary developments during and after the Second World War. No writer in the Soviet Union failed to reflect this bitter period in his work. Like others, Leonov was deeply shaken, and responded with his play The Invasion.

The action of the play unfolds in a small provincial town on the eve of its surrender to the Germans. The center of action is the family of Doctor Talanov. The old doctor has decided not to leave his native town, feeling that its people will have even more need of his help during the occupation than in peacetime. Just before the arrival of the Germans, the doctor's errant son, Fyodor, returns home after imprisonment. Fyodor has had a stormy youth: he killed the woman he loved, was sent to prison, then to a concentration camp. Since he has never written them from the camp, the doctor and the rest of the family fear Fyodor. During his years in the concentration camp he may have grown hardhearted. He might even go over to the Germans.

While the doctor is talking with his son, the chairman of the Executive Committee, Andrey Kolesnikov (the fiancé of Talanov's daughter Olga), calls on him and tries to convince him to evacuate. As Andrey enters, Fyodor manages to slip behind a screen. Kolesnikov confides to the doctor that he will also remain in the city for underground work. Fyodor inadvertently turns over a chair and comes out of his hiding place. He offers to help Kolesnikov, but the latter refuses, distrusting him. There is an exchange of caustic words. Kolesnikov gives the impression of a man who has lost his bearings. After he leaves, Fyodor says to his father: "I am not an artilleryman, Father, but this gun isn't working any more" (italics mine—V.A.).

On the day when the Germans arrive, Fyodor disappears, intensifying still further the apprehensions of his family. In the occupied city the Germans live as if they were sitting atop a volcano: every day some German soldiers and officers are killed. The assassinations are attributed to Andrey Kolesnikov, but the Germans fail to capture him. All the greater is the astonishment of the Talanov family when the mysterious partisan, captured by the Germans and brought to their home, turns out to be Fyodor and not Kolesnikov. Afterward Fyodor is taken to the prison cellar, where he meets other Soviet partisans. Threatened with death before a firing squad, he is asked by the other prisoners why he posed as Kolesnikov and showed such heroism. Sullen and sparing of words, he replies: "I prolonged your lives … and I ask for no receipt." Fyodor is shot, and several hours later the city is retaken by Soviet troops.

For a full appreciation of Leonov's play, we must return to Mitka Vekshin, whom Leonov did not "love enough" to tell the whole truth about him. The emotions which Leonov experienced during the bitter war years helped him, more than fifteen years later, to give just due to Mitka and the other young people who had been critical of the Soviet regime, and whose true worth Leonov had failed to see.

The boldness and unexpectedness of Leonov's reorientation is brought into sharp relief by the fact that Soviet critics and the theater directors who produced the play refused for a long time to reconcile themselves to the idea that the hero of the play was not the Communist Andrey, but an erstwhile concentration-camp prisoner.

The short novel The Taking of Velikoshumsk is so fragmented that it can scarcely be called a novel. This is somewhat—but not altogether—camouflaged by the fact that three of its protagonists bear the same name, Litovchenko: the tank-corps general who arrives to inspect the front; the young driver of the famous "203" tank, who plays an important role in the story; and the elderly peasant woman into whose house the general comes to warm himself.

The background of the story is formed by the roads of the Soviet advance, described with remarkable vividness. Like "splinters in the river of war," the returning people and cattle flowed along these roads: "lean cows with sorrowful Biblical eyes pulled ramshackle carts, and old men walked alongside, helping the beasts to reach home. Small flocks of peasant children, often four of them under a single piece of sacking, looked with uncomplaining smiles at their mothers who trudged along with tightly drawn lips, with nothing to rely on in the world except their own hands, now hanging limply down their sides…." And all around the caravans returning to their own ruins lapped "the bitter sea of peasant trouble."

The rather weakly delineated plot of the novel is balanced by the history of the famed "203" tank, whose crew is proud of its military biography. This crew consists of the tank commander Sobolkov, whose wife and children are left behind in distant Altay, and who has won the respect and love of his men by his comradely warmth and courage; the tank's gunner, the merry, hard-drinking Obryadin, about whom the radioman Dybok says: "You're a friend to the whole honest world, Obryadin, but you'd be a king among loafers!" The tank driver, after the death of his predecessor, is the young Vasya Litovchenko. All of them are linked by the bonds of love for one another and for their tank. After the last and most violent encounter with the enemy, only Vasya and Dybok remain alive, and Dybok swears eternal devotion to his friend.

The underlying meanings of the conversation between General Litovchenko and his old schoolteacher Mitrofan Platonovich Kulkov are highly significant. Like Leonov, Litovchenko did not find his teacher among the living, but saw him in a dream. The teacher and the general sat silently in this dream, and "there was a profound question in the old man's silence: how will history repay for the irredeemable human suffering caused by the war?"

Litovchenko is deeply stirred by Kulkov's question. He feels as if he were "at a lesson, thirty years ago." And he begins to tell the old man about the coming material blessings to be brought by the still incompletely realized program, and about the "sage from Gori" (i.e., Stalin). But the humanist teacher, unreceptive to high-flown rhetoric, is not to be placated by future perspectives. To all of Litovchenko's arguments about a shining future, Kulkov replies: "To seek friends in the future is the fate of loneliness."

The Soviet general's dispute with his own conscience ends as abruptly as it began, but it throws a new light on the question that arises in the minds of Soviet people along the roads of the advance: what "price" will the Soviet government set on the country's unprecedented feats of self-sacrifice, how will it reward the people of our time, dressed "in the tattered army coats of death"?

After the publication of The Taking of Velikoshumsk, Leonov was silent for almost ten years. It was not until the end of 1953 that he came forward with a new novel, The Russian Forest, and, a year later, with the play Golden Carriage. These works (especially the play) contribute little that is new to the writer's extensive literary "economy," and the new novel is artistically weaker than many of Leonov's previous works.

The literary portrait of Leonov cannot be completed without at least a passing glance at the question of Dostoyevsky's influence upon his work. This influence was mentioned in the discussion of The Thief. It is especially evident in Leonov's treatment of his heroines, including Nastya (The Badgers), Masha Dolomanova, and Xenia, Sanka's wife (The Thief), Liza Pokhvistneva (The Road to the Ocean), and others. It may be felt, further, in Leonov's language, although his style is richer and more vivid. Like Dostoyevsky, Leonov makes wide use of the wealth of suffixes and prefixes in the Russian language to lend the desired shading to what, for one reason or another, he does not want to say directly and openly.

Nevertheless, I would question the view of some Russian critics abroad that, were Leonov free in his creative work, he would have become a "Soviet Dostoyevsky." Dostoyevsky's central concern was with ethical and religious problems, which determined the entire character of his work. Leonov is alien to moral, religious, and philosophical preoccupations. He is an accomplished artist, who perceives the world through images. But his spiritual and emotional world is devoid of that intensity with which Dostoyevsky's works were so profoundly charged.