The Easter Outing
Leonid Leonov’s novel THE THIEF, which appeared in 1927, is a panoramic story of the Moscow underworld in the early twenties. The central figure is Mitya Vekshin,a former aristocrat, then a Bolshevik, and finally, cut of his disillusionment with the Revolution, the leader of a gang of thieves. Opposed to him is Nikolai Zavarikhin,a shrewd, inexperienced peasant who has come to Moscow to make his fortune, legally or otherwise, and who falls in love with Mitya’s sister, Tanya. Tanya, a high-wire artist in the circus whose stage name is Hela, lives with her trainer, Pagel.