Leonid Leonov
Leonid Maximovich Leonov (Russian: Леонид Максимович Леонов) (1899-1994) was one of the most notable Soviet novelists, styled the 20th-century Dostoyevsky for the deep psychologism of his prose. During the Russian Civil War, he worked as a reporter. His dark novel The Thief (1927), set in the criminal underworld of the Russian capital, was warmly welcomed by critics in Russia and abroad. In 1934, he helped Maxim Gorky to found the Union of Soviet Writers. Immediately after the start of the WWII, Leonov penned several patriotic plays, which were quickly made into movies and won him the USSR State Prize (1943). His novel The Russian Forest (1953) was acclaimed by the authorities as a model Soviet book on the WWII and received the Lenin Prize. In 1967, Leonov was named a Hero of Socialist Labour. He was admitted to the Soviet Academy of Sciences five years later. During the last decades of his life, he worked upon the psychological epic The Pyramid (1994).
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