SOURCE: "The Gathering Clouds: On the Eve of War" and "The War Years," in Twentieth-Century Russian Drama: From Gorky to the Present, Columbia University Press, 1979, pp. 295-304, 305-17.

An American educator and critic, Segel has written extensively on Russian literature. In the following excerpt, he discusses The Orchards of Polovchansk and The Invasion, two of Leonov's plays.

International events in the 1930s were followed with intense interest in the Soviet Union. The triumph of fascism in Italy and Germany and the Japanese invasion of China were viewed as ominous developments of profound potential danger to the Soviet state. The defeat of the Loyalist cause in Spain and the gradual clarification of German and Japanese political goals in Eastern Europe and Asia, respectively, made the threat of war no longer merely a possibility but a virtual certainty. The necessary preparations began to be undertaken in the late 'thirties; this...