In Memory of a Prisoner and a Man
On 14 March 1977 Boris Fyodorovich LEONOV died in Omsk.
Boris Leonov was born in 1900. From 1918 he was a member of the Bolshevik Party and a commissar in the Red Army. From 1923 he was occupied with Party, trade union, and educational work.
In 1944 he was arrested under Article 58-10 (“Counter-Revolutionary Crimes”) of the 1924 RSFSR Criminal Code. Released into exile in 1953, he was re-arrested and re-convicted under the same article five years later. In 1965 he was released from the Mordovian camps after completing his sentence, and was legally rehabilitated of both convictions in the same year.
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Leonov was the author of many articles, essays, and stories, the majority of which remain unpublished.
In the camps of Kolyma, Taishet and Mordovia his faith in the greatness of the human spirit helped him to survive and endure a soulless and irrational reality. He continued to write and to think in the most difficult surroundings. Under the cruel conditions of a special-regime camp (Mordovia, penal institution ZhKh-385/10; 1962-1964), he wrote, although paralysed, articles on Thomas Mann, Jean Anouilh, Ivan Bunin and Boris Pasternak.
Leonov’s brilliant intellectual gifts, his tolerance for other people’s opinions, and his spiritual fortitude attracted other prisoners to him. An island of culture formed around him, which countered the general atmosphere of boorishness and violence.
All those who came into contact with him, both in the camps and afterwards, remember how his personality and thought patterns were shaped by his inheritance of the traditions of “sacred Russian literature” and profound German philosophy, and recall his intellectual honesty and his ironic attitude to servile literature and well-paid ideology.
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Until his death he remained remarkably open to all new trends in the social life of the country, and skilfully incorporated them into the rich spiritual tradition which has always been, and always will be, the lifeblood of the Russian intelligentsia.
If independent and uncorruptible thought lives on today, it is through people like Boris Fyodorovich Leonov.
Boris Vail & Mikhail Molostvov
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