The art of compromise : the life and work of Leonid Leonov / Boris Thomson.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Leoniv's beliefs and values were incompatible with the Soviet version of Marxism but he tried to affirm them indirectly in his work through structure, imagery, and allusion, while outwardly conforming to official demands.

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CHOICE Review

Author of two earlier volumes on Soviet literature (The Premature Revolution, London, 1972; Lot's Wife and the Venus of Milo, CH, Nov'78), Thomson (Univ. of Toronto) here examines a novelist and playwright who was both a disciple of Dostoyevsky and a Stalin Prize laureate. A writer of great merit and moral complexity, Leonov (1899-1994) survived the Stalin years only at some cost to his integrity. His early books, The Badgers (1925) and The Thief (1928), are classics of Russian literature, but with the exception of Evgenia Ivanova (written in 1938; published first in 1964), the novels of the 1930s showed increased conformity. His important Russian Forest (1954) launched the ecological theme in Soviet literature. Thomson describes a Leonov who lived in dread of arrest, notwithstanding an embarrassing stream of journalistic toadyism and chronic revision of his published work--practices that badly undermined his literary reputation in the post-Stalin period. Providing the only extensive English treatment of Leonov's impressive oeuvre, Thomson sympathetically weighs the writer's painful compromises with the regime. This meticulously annotated volume draws on information recently made available and includes an excellent bibliography. Thomson goes far toward rehabilitating Leonov's tarnished literary reputation. All collections supporting Russian literature. D. B. Johnson emeritus, University of California, Santa Barbara