Leonid Leonov's The Thief
Early Soviet metafiction and the reader's gaze.
Manka the Snowstorm is one of the masks worn by the strongest character in Leonid Leonov’s The Thief, first published in 1927, as she morphs between carefully contrived personas, manipulating the cast of thieves, writers, story tellers, circus performers and freaks that inhabit the Blagusha district of mid-1920s Moscow. One minute she is Masha, the childhood sweetheart of Mitka, who is now the leader of a gang of thieves, his rapidly deteriorating mental health a consequence of the unravelling of his own self-mythologising. Then she is Manka Stolyarova, the wife of Agey, a villain from Mitka’s village. Sometimes she is the snowstorm, ‘a whirling wheel, a cyclone, a witch!’, the lover of Curly Donka, a thief but also a poet. Other times she becomes Marya Dolomanova the muse of the writer, Fyodor Firsov, a metafictional projection of Leonov who is writing a book about Mitka.
Firsov offers a competing narrative to Leonov’s. We only ever learn what he is writing based on what the omniscient narrator tells us, except for an extract from the grimy notebook in which he constantly scribbles his observations and the facts revealed by those who confide in him. Transforming his prototypes into characters with impunity, Firsov vivifies them in literature whilst mortifying them in real life. What we are told is that Firsov’s novel is a loose approximation of reality and of the people who want to be characters in his book, a book he is writing in such a way he hopes will avoid criticism, using literary tricks and devices that are echoed in Leonov’s novel. This sense of ambiguity and uncertainty reflects the betrayals and double crossings of Mitka’s gang of thieves. Following a successful robbery they are raided by the police, who have been tipped off, Agey is killed and Mitka is shot and wounded.
A further perspective is Sergey Manyukin’s, once a wealthy landowner from Mitka’s village. He now makes a living inventing and telling stories for a few kopeks, and his diary, addressed to an imaginary son, is a text that tells another part of the Leonov’s story. It becomes apparent that rather than leaving the village to fight for the Bolsheviks because Masha spurned him, Mitka abandoned her to be raped by Agey, and that a cowardly act of retribution against a white officer saw him demoted, disillusioned, drunken and ultimately become a thief. The reappearance of his sister, Tanya, initially as another of his victims, causes him to reconsider his past. She has become a successful acrobat but dies in a tragic accident, plunging Mitka further into despair as he lives life on the run trying to work out who is betraying him.
A final robbery is planned but that is cover for a thieves’ court in which Donka might be unmasked as the informer, or might kill Mitka, driven by jealousy of his one-time comrade bordering on hatred that is encouraged by Manka. The evidence of Donka’s guilt had been planted by Manka, but ultimately one of the other gang members confesses. Mitka realises that although Manka may still love him, she holds him responsible for her rape; he wants to atone but she is intent on revenge. Mitka collapses, finally succumbing to both physical and mental exhaustion, and falls seriously ill. Once nursed back to health he abandons Masha for a second time, leaves Moscow and embarks on a new life intent on becoming a model Soviet citizen.
Most critics read The Thief as commentary on politics, the New Economic Policy and the period of rapid industrialisation that would be heralded by the first Five-Year Plan, and the way in which different characters embody the substrata of Soviet life. A hydro-electric power station is being constructed on the river that was the scene of Mitka and Masha’s romantic encounters and where Masha was raped. I was more interested in the commentary on literary politics; Leonov’s own battles with what was then expected of a Soviet writer before becoming normalised under socialist realism and the way in which The Thief is a sustained polemic with competing schools and theories. The writers Donka and Firsov sustain a literary duel for the attention of Masha, reflecting the antinomy between poet and novelist that was felt by many of the avant garde as they struggled to develop literary forms appropriate to the new era. Leonov’s self-conscious parodying of Firsov’s literary tricks, and awareness of the doctrinaire critical appraisal of Firsov’s novel, reflects his own antipathy to the demands for a new revolutionary culture that was singularly proletarian in orientation.
My own reading of a battered paperback edition of Leonov’s novel was mediated by a previous reader’s marginalia and underlinings, an ironic reflection of the metafictional layers of the novel itself and the contested literary space between the writers Firsov and Leonov. I wasn’t sure if I was readings Leonov’s novel or was being distracted by a version of the novel as interpreted by my predecessor. The markings varied in intensity. Occasionally there was tightly written commentary but mainly it was to highlight prose that perhaps was important to the plot or was just deemed noteworthy. I couldn’t tell. At times I thought I had escaped the earlier reader’s gaze as I leafed through pages devoid of marks only to have them suddenly re-assert their presence – much as Manka the Snowstorm does in the novel. The markings were sometimes in pencil, other times in blue or red ink, and I considered the possibility they were the work of different readers or the same reader, revisiting the text, re-reading their original reading. By contrast, my own highlighting was via small post-it notes, in varying hues of blue, that reflected my current preoccupation with Russian metafiction.
The Thief is a complex, dense book with an ostensibly simple plot confounded by multiple narratives and competing perspectives. Many reviewers felt a compelling story and psychological portrait, redolent of Dostoevsky, was marred by the insertion of Firsov, a self-referential literary device, into the narrative. As Leonov became part of the Soviet literary establishment he rewrote The Thief… multiple times, but this translation, based on the first published version of the novel, is one of the best books from a unique period of Soviet literature.