“THE SNOWSTORM” BY L. LEONOV AND “VOLCANO” BY VS. IVANOV:
A COMPARATIVE REVIEW

The article is devoted to the comparison of two works by Vsevolod Ivanov and Leonid
Leonov, belonging to different kinds of literature. The subject of the Association of steel novel by
Vsevolod Ivanov “Volcano” and the play by Leonid Leonov “The Snowstorm”. Both writers belong
to the generation that entered the literature in the early 1920s. The works that became the
subject of comparative analysis belong to the turn of the 1930s and 1940, to the time before the
Second World war. Both works reflected the characteristic for this time feeling of “life before a
storm”. Both works show events of global scale and importance on the examples taken from the
private life of people. The characters of the main characters, the peculiarities of the plot organization
and the motive structure are considered in detail. In both cases, writers turn to metaphors
from the natural world to depict political, social, and psychological conflicts. These metaphors are
connected with the world of elements. The analyzed works are considered in the context of literature
and cinematography of the time that gave rise to them. It is shown how they reflected the
tragic “spirit of the time”, opposing the atmosphere of unrestrained fun widespread in the aesthetics
of the era.
The article recreated an art history essay Ivanova and Alexey Leonov. The novel was published
in the magazine “Siberian lights” after the death of the writer, in 1966, and Leonov’s play
was published and was in theaters in the country, but was banned. The interaction of writers' creative
intent and the influence of power, politics and ideology on their texts is considered. The features
of similarities and differences in the creative behavior of two major Russian writers of the
Soviet period are shown. Different versions of Vsevolod Ivanov's novel are also compared. It is
noted that both plans are associated with the creation of an image of a person belonging to the
world of art. In both works, the personal drama of their creators, who participated in the life of a
society living under totalitarian laws, is encrypted in complex images. The characteristic features
of the conflict and the composition of the two works are considered in detail. It is also shown how
the model of the image of the world and man created by Ivanov and Leonov on the eve of the war
continued to work in the works of writers of the late Soviet time (Boris Vasiliev, Vadim Shefner)
and in the novel “June” by the modern writer Dmitry Bykov.