Leonid Leonov (1899-1994) - the white guard officer and the ordinary red army soldier; the merchant's son and the fashionable writer whom Maxim Gorky named the successor; the playwright whose plays are removed from repertoire by Stalin's calls, and the master whom Mikhail Gorbachev congratulates on the ninetieth anniversary ... it is Improbable that all this could fit in life of one person. The fame of his first novels - "badgers", "Thief" - envied Bulgakov and Nabokov, the play "Untilovsk" put in the Moscow art Theater under Stanislavsky, and the publication of the last novel - "Pyramid" - was late for several years to become a bestseller of the era of perestroika on a par with"Children of Arbat". "Prilepin-biographer is very thorough. Precisely because the fabric of the book — with Chevron on sleeve ensign Leonov and the prices of horse meat in Arkhangelsk 1919, with the executions in Odessa in 1921 and poems Leonov in the Odessa newspaper "Red warrior", with the letters M. V. Sabashnikova wife from custody, with the widely prescribed background of fate and a clear understanding of shapes, relations, meanings — rekonstruiruet remember them "incredible diversity of God's world". And each glare, each semantic smear complicates the portrait of the main character" (Elena Dyakova, "Novaya Gazeta"). "Prilepin's love, interest in the character and joyous willingness to solve the riddles proposed by him, even without the hope of ultimate success, are evident in every line, in every masterfully chosen quote. It is difficult to tear oneself away from his book, and at the exit there is an urgent desire to re-read Leonov himself — "the Russian forest", "the Thief","the Road to the Ocean". And this, perhaps, the best, that in principle can be said about any writer's biography" (Galina Yuzefovich).