SOURCE: An obituary in The Times, London, August 11, 1994, p. 17.

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...