The Art of Compromise: The Life and Work of Leonid Leonov by Boris Thomson (review)

humanities 519 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Allan Fotheringham as a teenager in the NFB film Breakdown filmed in Chilliwack, British Columbia, in 1951. From Borradaile=s account of the past, there are lessons to be learned in the twenty-first century: a recommendation for the proper training and comportment of war cinematographers, for instance; or a blueprint for the ideal Canadian film style, based on the model of the Australian film The Overlanders (1946). But, ultimately, the reader will find more memorable the images of the persevering cameraman transporting cumbersome equipment through inclement weather and unwelcoming terrain to capture the stunning background footage that made him the landmark figure that he is. (C.D.E. TOLTON) Boris Thomson. The Art of Compromise: The Life and Work of Leonid Leonov University of Toronto Press. xiv, 408. $75.00 This book is an eminently solid, well-grounded study, written for Slavic scholars as well as for readers who are seriously interested in Russian spiritual life of the Soviet era B a period of history coextensive with and outlived by Leonid Leonov=s work (he lived and was active up to nearly a hundred years of age). This account of >life and work= is not a biography as most of us know it: the facts of Leonov=s private life are limited to a minimum, and regrettably there are no photographs. The majority of the book is devoted to Leonov=s literary output, his spiritual and philosophical concerns, and their evolution over such an uncommonly long span of time. Special chapters are devoted to each of his major novels: The Badgers (1924), The Thief (1927), The Sot= (1930), Skutarevsky (1932), The Road to Ocean (1935), The Russian Forest (1953), and The Pyramid (1994), as well as to his shorter stories and plays. In a series of penetrating, well-documented chapters, Boris Thomson succeeds in revealing a complex web of invariant themes and motifs of Leonov=s work that recur with various complications over the decades and ensure the continuity of his creative career. The bibliography is, to all appearance, exhaustive; it is especially valuable in cataloguing the less-known material, such as Leonov=s numerous speeches, interviews, and articles over almost eighty years. Extensive quotations throughout the book enable readers to follow and verify the critic=s argumentation and prevent them from getting entangled in abstractions, although Thomson=s analysis is sufficiently lively and intellectually stimulating in itself to keep us interested and satisfied that we are receiving new information. (It is regrettable that Russian-reading readers do not receive these excerpts in the original, as it would substantiate Thomson=s just evaluation of Leonov as one of the major masters of the Russian word; but the book would then prohibitively grow in size.) Leonid Leonov is undoubtedly a genuine Russian classic of the twentieth 520 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 century, arguably of no less stature than Mikhail Sholokhov. A continuer of Dostoevsky in the directions of his intellectual quest, Leonov, like the majority of honest Russian writers, gauges the price of revolutionary experience in terms of the survival and moral health of Russia and her people. His conclusions are neither simple and unequivocal nor trivial, and they were too skilfully woven into the artistic texture to constitute an easy target for the powerful ideological inquisition of his time. Thomson convincingly shows that many of Leonov=s findings would have been inadmissible had he expressed his ideas in a less intricate, more straightforward manner. One chapter of Thomson=s book is especially timely and relevant to Soviet studies B the one devoted to Leonov=s later revisions of his work. It is a well-known fact that virtually all successful Soviet writers of the 1920s and 1930s had to rework their texts for almost each new publication over the subsequent decades. Gradual changes in aesthetic modes and political orientation necessitated revisions that were often tantamount to falsification and mimicry. This process involved most major writers, such as Sholokhov, Vsevolod Ivanov, Sel=vinskii, and Gladkov. Leonov seems to be unique in that his motives for reworking...