Leonid Leonov--prolific novelist, playwright, and essayist--has justifiably been called one of the most idiosyncratic talents of modern Russian literature, a philosophical writer who, despite his obvious and often cited indebtedness to Fyodor Dostoevsky, defies all categories and definitions applied to the culture of the Soviet period. Once a darling of literary historians and critics in both the U.S.S.R. and the West, Leonov has been likened to William Faulkner. Yet, he is rarely mentioned in critical discourse today and read even less. In tune with the fashionable, undifferentiated negation of the entire legacy of Soviet culture, some critics now dismiss him as a prosperous literary functionary whose voluminous novels lost any significance or appeal after the demise of the political system in which they were written. A closer, unbiased look at Leonov's work in its evolution, however, reveals a mastery of language unmatched by any living...