the peasantry of the Revolution and symbolically pits brother against brother in the struggle." His dark novel The Thief (1927), set in the criminal underworld of the Russian capital, was warmly welcomed by critics in Russia and abroad, but Brown considers it "spoiled in execution by the self-conscious literary poses of the author and his transparent derivation of himself from the irrationalist Dostoyevsky. Leonov nonetheless performs a shrewd psychological dissection upon his main character, a disillusioned commissar who has become a member of a gang of thieves. He produced a thoroughly reworked version of this novel in 1959." He married Tatayana Mikhailovna Sabashnikova in 1926; the couple had two daughters. He visited Maxim Gorky in Sorrento in 1927. The Moscow Art Theatre under the direction of Constantin Stanislavski staged Leonov's play Untilovsk, which was set in a remote Siberian community. The production opened on 17 February 1928, having given a preview to the theatre's management committee three days earlier. Both the committee and the wider press disapproved of the play's ideological stance; Anatoly Lunacharsky, writing in the Leningrad journal Krasnaia, described it as a step backwards for the theatre. Soviet River (1930) describes the construction of a paper mill on the banks of a river in the middle of the Siberian forest; Skutarevsky (1932), "probably one of his best works in style and intellectual power, explores the psychological problems of an eminent scientist working in a socialist state and, in what is undoubtedly an autobiographical statement, traces his development from a skeptical critic of the new order into an enthusiastic supporter." In 1934, Leonov helped Maxim Gorky to found the Union of Soviet Writers. The following year, he published a fantasy about the Soviet future, Road to the Ocean, in which the hero, "another embodiment of Leonov, meditates on the suffering he has caused and endured and tries to answer the question whether it was worth while in the total economy of history." Immediately after the start of World War II, Leonov penned several patriotic plays, which were quickly made into movies and won him the USSR State Prize (1943). His novel The Russian Forest (1953) was acclaimed by the authorities as a model Soviet book on World War II and received the Lenin Prize, but its implication that the Soviet regime had cut down "the symbol of Old Russian culture" caused some nervousness, and Nikita Khrushchev reminded the author