Already during his lifetime, Leonid Leonov was considered a classic - his works were so fundamental and profound. He described a socialist society from the time of the October Revolution to the post-war period; at the same time, the writer tried to understand the movements of the human soul and the thoughts of the people who were building socialism.
Biography
Leonid Maksimovich Leonov was born in Moscow in 1899. His father was a famous poet of his time and wrote under the pseudonym "Wretched". He was originally from the Kaluga region, but when he moved to the capital, he managed to create his own publishing house, and then a bookstore. He was a fairly wealthy entrepreneur, but he saw all the injustice of society and wrote on this topic. For this he was arrested many times, and then exiled to Arkhangelsk.
He was forced to leave, but the family remained in Moscow. Therefore, Leonid was raised by his grandfather Leon Leonidovich. He loved spiritual and ancient Russian literature, and he and his grandson spent long hours reading books.
Leonid received his education at the third Moscow gymnasium. As a student, he began to write his first poems and stories. When on vacation he went to his father in Arkhangelsk, he often disappeared at his work, in the editorial office of the newspaper "Northern Morning". Later, his father helped him publish his essays and other writing experiences in this newspaper. Even the first works of Leonid were very strong, and Leonov Sr. could be proud that such things were written by his son.
First pen attempts
Within the walls of the gymnasium, Leonid tried himself in different genres: he wrote poetry, fairy tales, stories. And after graduation, he went to his father in Arkhangelsk. There he worked for his newspaper and the newspaper "Severny Day". At this time, he met the wonderful northern writer Boris Shergin and other people of culture. They helped him to understand even deeper Russian culture and northern traditions.
In the North, Leonov realized that he needed to study further, and entered Moscow University. However, he did not finish his studies - in 1920 he volunteered to fight against whites. He was both an artilleryman and a military commander, in the end he was accepted into the editorial office of the "Red Warrior". At this time he wrote his essays under the pseudonym "Lapot". In 1921, he left military service to return to the capital and start writing serious works.
The first writing experiences were highly appreciated by the famous Maxim Gorky. He said that the future of a famous writer awaits Leonov. Critics compared the first works of the young writer with the style of Dostoevsky, which was also very flattering. However, the general atmosphere of Leonid Maksimovich's works was still not as gloomy as that of the great classic.
Writing career
In particular, his novel Badgers (1924) was highly appreciated, although in those years Leonov was considered an aspiring writer. In the novel, the author described the rebellion of peasants who did not agree with the Soviet regime that took place in the early twenties of the twentieth century. He examined in detail both the actions of the authorities against this class of the population, and the hostility of the peasants themselves to the city dwellers. Fueled by certain elements hostile to the Soviet regime, people became infected with envy, hatred, and an unbridled mass raised a riot. At the same time, Leonov did not blame the rebels: he understood that, due to their illiteracy, they did not understand the global historical process that was taking place in the country, therefore they were rebelling.
In 1927, Lenov wrote the novel "The Thief", in which he showed himself as a subtle connoisseur of the human psyche. The hero of the novel is a former red commissar who slipped to the status of a criminal and lost his former ideology and bright goals. In this, the author saw the tragedy of people who could not survive the test of power.
Among the works of Leonid Maksimovich there are novels that glorify the labor heroism of the Soviet people: these are the novels "Sot" (1930), "The Road to the Ocean" (1931).
In the thirties, Leonov became known as a playwright. His plays "Polovchanskie Sady" (1938), "Skutarevsky" (1934) and others are performed with great success.
During the Great Patriotic War, Leonov, along with other writers, was evacuated from Moscow, but he often traveled to the battlefields to describe what was happening there. The newspapers Izvestia and Pravda became his place of work.
He wrote a lot about this terrible war, but his most poignant works on a military theme are the novels "Invasion" and "Lenushka". In them, he reflected all the heroism of the Russian people in a battle with enemies who dared to enter their holy homeland. The personal tragedy of each person was also reflected here - after all, the war then entered every home, pulled people out of peaceful life and forced them to kill their own kind.
I must say that Leonov wrote very boldly, without embellishing reality. But he was never arrested, and there was not a single denunciation against him.
When he received the prize for his novel Invasion, he donated it in its entirety to the Defense Fund. And for this he received Stalin's personal gratitude.
True, there is in his legacy the play "Snowstorm", which stands apart in his work, because it touches on facts from the writer's personal life. Here he showed the atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust that existed in the country in the thirties of the last century, at the time of repression. The heroes of the play are an emigrant and director of a Soviet enterprise. Moreover, the first was described positively, and the second - negatively. The play was criticized, then banned as "slanderous and distorting Soviet reality," but no measures were taken against Leonov.
The main work of Leonov is considered the novel "The Pyramid", which he wrote for forty-five years. Here fiction coexists with reality, the possible with the impossible. And the writer himself, with this novel, seemed to have summed up his life. He probably understood what contribution he made to Russian literature.
The writer died in 1994 at the age of ninety-five and was buried in Moscow.
