Leonid Leonov (born 1899) belongs to the generation of Soviet writers who began their literary career during the revolution and the civil war and identified themselves with the new life which the revolution inaugurated. Leonov's first novel Badgers (1924) won unanimous appreciation among his contemporaries as a mature work of artistic merit. He became a writer of outstanding reputation in Soviet literature. Author of such popular novels as The Thief, Sot, Skutarevsky, and The Road to the Ocean, the short novel The Capture of Velikoshumsk and the plays An Ordinary Man, Invasion, and The Golden Carriage, Leonov was the first Soviet wrier to be awarded a Lenin Prize for his novel The Russian Forest, written in 1953. The Russian Forest embodies all the most characteristic features of its author's style and manner. In this novel, which reads like a kaleidoscope of the twentieth-century Russian scene, the author emerges with consummate versatility as artist, philosopher, and citizen.