Yevgeny Leonov

Yevgeny Leonov: The Voice a Country Grew Up Inside

In 1972 a single Soviet comedy sold 65.02 million cinema tickets and led the year's distribution outright. In it, Yevgeny Leonov played two men: a gentle kindergarten principal and war veteran, and the ruthless crime boss he is recruited to impersonate. Soviet audiences could not have told you what school of acting he belonged to. They could all do his voice.

A Factory, Then a Stage

Yevgeny Pavlovich Leonov was born in Moscow on 2 September 1926, the son of Pavel Vasilyevich Leonov, who worked at an aircraft factory, and Anna Ilyinichna Leonova. The war interrupted everything: Leonov and his family spent it working in a weapons and aviation plant. It is a detail worth holding on to, because the ordinary Soviet working man he would spend forty years portraying was not a research project for him. Afterwards he studied at the Moscow Art Theatre School under Mikhail Yanshin, and went to work. By the end he had played more than two hundred roles.

The Face of the Ordinary Man

Soviet cinema had an abundance of heroes and a shortage of people who looked like the audience. Leonov filled the gap and then made it the most valuable real estate in the industry. His breakthrough came with *Striped Trip* in 1961, and from there he became a fixture — most durably as a collaborator of the director Georgiy Daneliya, whose particular register of melancholy comedy suited him exactly. *Belorussian Station* (1971), *Mimino* (1977), *Autumn Marathon* (1979) and *Kin-dza-dza!* (1986) trace an arc from post-war memory to late-Soviet absurdism, and Leonov is credible in every stop along it.

Two Men in One Film

*Gentlemen of Fortune* is the one everybody quotes. Directed by Aleksandr Sery from a script by Daneliya and Viktoriya Tokareva, shot at Mosfilm and running eighty-seven minutes, it sends the mild principal Yevgeny Troshkin into a prison disguised as his double, the criminal Aleksandr "Docent" Beliy, to recover a stolen golden helmet of Alexander the Great. Sery had himself recently been released from prison, and he built the film out of real criminal slang — *fenya* — with enough conviction that words invented for the picture entered the Russian language and stayed there. "Radish," the film's term for a bad man, was still current enough decades later to be used in a joke by Vladimir Putin.

The performance is the reason it works. Leonov's two characters are physically identical and morally opposite, and he separates them without a single prosthetic — the timing changes, the eyes change, the warmth is withdrawn. In 2001 Moscow put up a monument to the role. In 2015 someone stole it. In 2016 the city put it back.

Vinni Pukh

Between 1969 and 1972 the animator Fyodor Khitruk made three short films from Boris Zakhoder's Russian version of A. A. Milne, and asked Leonov to voice the bear. The Soviet Winnie-the-Pooh looks nothing like the Disney one — deliberately simplified, set against flat backgrounds resembling a child's pencil drawings, and, in the animator Eduard Nazarov's phrase about an early design, something like "a mad dandelion." What gives him a soul is the sound. Khitruk was unambiguous about the debt: "The success of Vinni Pukh, for example, to a large extent depended on Leonov." Two or three generations of Russian-speaking children learned what a bear thinks like from an actor they would not recognise on the street.

The Quiet Devastations

Daneliya's *Autumn Marathon* (1979) is the counterweight to the comedies. Oleg Basilashvili carries the film as Andrey Buzykin, a Leningrad translator paralysed between his wife and his lover and incapable of refusing anyone anything. Leonov plays Vasily Ignatyevich Kharitonov, the neighbour — a supporting part in a chamber piece. The film took prizes at Venice in 1979, at San Sebastián and at Berlin in 1980, in directing and acting categories, and it was the Soviet submission for the foreign-language Oscar. Leonov's Venice acting honour for so small a role is the most precise measure of what he could do: he did not require screen time.

Coming Back From the Dead

While on tour in Germany toward the end of the 1980s, Leonov suffered a massive heart attack. He needed surgery and a long hospitalisation. He went back to the Lenkom Theatre and kept performing. On 29 January 1994, on his way to the theatre to appear that evening, he died. He was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery. More than half a million people came out for the funeral procession.

Why Yevgeny Is Called a Genius

The claim is not intellectual and nobody has ever pretended it was. Leonov wrote no theory, directed nothing and founded no school. What he possessed was an instrument — a face and a voice of unusual, unforced warmth — and, more importantly, the discipline to use it against the grain. Almost any actor with that equipment becomes a specialist in lovable men. Leonov used it as a baseline he could violate: because the audience arrived trusting him, his cruelty in *Gentlemen of Fortune* landed harder than a conventionally sinister actor's would, and his sadness landed harder still. That is a real technique, and a rare one. The most credible external testimony comes from Fyodor Khitruk, an artist of the first rank, who said flatly that the success of *Vinni Pukh* depended to a large extent on Leonov — an unusual thing for a director to concede about a voice performance.

The counter-case is honest and short. His work is almost entirely bounded by one language and one vanished country; the films are genre comedies rather than formal experiments, and his reputation abroad is negligible. Half a million mourners measure love rather than greatness, and love for a comic actor is not the same as artistic authority. The fair verdict is that "genius" here stands in for something more specific and harder to fake: irreplaceability. Nobody else could have done what he did, and Soviet cinema kept proving it by not trying.

Legacy

His monument stands in Moscow, once stolen and once restored, which is a fittingly ridiculous fate for a man who spent his career playing people that ridiculous things happen to. The Pooh films still run. The slang still circulates. Across the former Soviet Union, a certain register of tenderness — rumpled, apologetic, funny in spite of itself — remains recognisably his, and is still, thirty years on, borrowed by actors who were not born when he died.

Achievements

• Order of Lenin — 1986
• Order of the Badge of Honour — 1967
• Worked as actor, film actor and voice actor