Leopold Leonidovich Averbakh was a Soviet literary critic, who was the head of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) in the 1920s and the most prominent member of a group of communist literary critics who argued that the Bolshevik Revolution, carried out in 1917 in the name of Russia's industrial working class, should be followed by a cultural revolution, in which 'bourgeois' literature would be supplanted by literature written by and for the proletariat. Averbakh was a powerful figure in Russian cultural circles until Joseph Stalin ordered RAPP to cease its activities, in 1932.
Leopold Infeld was a Polish physicist who worked mainly in Poland and Canada (1938–1950). He was a Rockefeller fellow at Cambridge University (1933–1934) and a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
Leopold Henryk Staff was a Polish poet; an artist of European modernism twice granted the Degree of Doctor honoris causa by universities in Warsaw and in Kraków. He was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by Polish PEN Club. Representative of classicism and symbolism in the poetry of Young Poland, he was an author of many philosophical poems influenced by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, the ideas of Franciscan order as well as paradoxes of Christianity.
Leopold Antonovich Sulerzhitsky was a Russian Empire theatre director, painter and pedagogue of Polish descent. He is associated with the Moscow Art Theatre and the household of Leo Tolstoy. Among his many students were Yevgeny Vakhtangov and Michael Chekhov.
