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

MLR, 97.4, 2002 1049 papers is something of a mixed bag, not helped by some uncompleted editing, in which the sluggish indeed threatens to dominate; happily, though, it is not without its more vibrant ingredients. Julian Connolly surveys the treatment of the supernatural in the early stories, finding The Return of Chorb a model for its evocation 'that will emerge as the standard in Nabokov's mature work' (p. 31). There are welcome critical outings for such stories as Music (read by Nassim W. Balestrini against Tolstoi's The Kreutzer Sonata), The Assistant Producer (discussed by Christian Moraru), and A Forgotten Poet (Brian Walter). Linda Wagner-Martin presents an effective feminist reading, from the 1990s, of The Vane Sisters. Victor Strandberg, discussing 'That in Aleppo Once . . .', ventures the possible paradox that, rather than having to know all of Nabokov's work to know any of itwell (as T. S. Eliot had remarked of Shakespeare), 'knowing any of it well may go a long way toward all of it' (p. 189). In the case of his chosen story,at least, Strandberg may be on rather safer ground than some of the other contributors could have been, had they proffered any such suggestion. By far the strongest contribution, however, is the valuable 46-page essay by J. E. Rivers, convincingly reclaiming the original French-language version of Mademoiselle O, in which, he proposes, 'The "O" could [ultimately] stand forthe paradox, the circularity' of the relationship between 'fact' and fiction (p. 118). This piece alone would have made this volume at the least a worthwhile library acquisition. Much the same might have been said for Maxim Shrayer's almost equally lengthy examination of the 'Vasiliy Shishkov' phenomenon (Nabokovian?or Sirinian?poems, story, hoax), but for the fact of its prior appearance in Shrayer's The World of Nabokov's Stories (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999; reviewed MLR, 96 (2001), 1170-1), one of the three previous books devoted to Nabokov's short prose acknowledged in the editors' Foreword (p. 1). The editors of this volume can be wholeheartedly supported in one contention at least: that Nabokov's short fiction deserves (yet) more attention. University of Bristol Neil Cornwell The Art of Compromise: The Life and Work of Leonid Leonov. By Boris Thomson. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press. 2001. xiii + 40opp. ?55. Leonid Leonov is the grand old man of Soviet literature. He died in 1994 at the age of 95, productive to the end; yet his reputation has been partially eclipsed, both at home and in the West, by more fashionable younger writers and the literature of open dissent. Nevertheless, as Boris Thomson points out: 'Leonov, at least in his better works, can be seen as one of those for whom taboos and dangers have served as creative stimuli' (p. 104). Leonov was initially protected by Gorkii, who recommended him to Stalin. It is said that Stalin went through the novel The Thief with a red pencil, and later advised the author to transfer the footnotes of The Road to Ocean to the main text. He was not pleased when Leonov declined. Leonov himself claimed that six warrants forhis arrest had been issued at various times, which Stalin refused to sign. As president of the Union of Soviet Writers (1929), Pravda correspondent at the Nuremberg trials, recipient of Stalin and Lenin prizes, and author ofhack journalism, including eulogies of Stalin, he could be seen as part of the Soviet literary establishment, but given the circumstances of Stalinist Russia, one can be too hasty to judge. In 1968 he refused to sign a letter in support of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and although honoured on his ninetieth birthday by a personal visit from Gorbachev, he did not feel flattered. Leonov had a guilty secret: during the British 1918-20 intervention in Archangel, he had been forced to become an officercadet in the White Army, but had later been 1050 Reviews protected by a young woman commissar. These facts he concealed to the last, only telling his daughters two or three years before his death. Thomson sees the 'guilty secret' as conditioning Leonov's art: 'he is trying not to...

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