Some Reflections on the Urban Theme in L. M. Leonov’s Dramaturgy

Abstract

This paper presents an artistic and philosophical interpretation of the city and its inhabitants, which is based on two plays (“Untilovsk”, “A Golden Coach”) by the Russian Soviet writer Leonid Leonov. “City” is understood here as a structure of thinking and as a cultural and geographical unit.

A basis for the reasoning is the thesis put forward by Soviet historiography according to which the dramaturgy of the classics is essentially anti-philistine. The conceptual and ideological grounds for this thesis (for example, the method of socialist realism, as part of which such a provision was formulated) are revealed and a clarifying criticism of special historiography is carried out (the author of the paper has a pessimistic interpretation of the works of Leonov).

The urban theme in the plays is highlighted in the form of a linear scheme—as entry and exit points in Leonov’s dramaturgy. It is shown how the playwright highlights the initial stage of philistinism’s transformation in the early years of Soviet power (“Untilovsk”) and what conclusions he comes to in the late 1940s (“A Golden Coach”), hinting at an answer to the question of what a “new Soviet man” is, deduced during the intervening thirty years of intensive modernization of social relations.