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...