Yury Olesha (1899-1960)

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Yury (Karlovich) Olesha
(1899 - 1960) - also: Iurii Karlovich Olesha - born Feb. 19 (March 3, New Style), 1899 - died May 10, 1960


Writer, journalist, and playwright, whose best-known novel, ZAVIST´' (1927, Envy) painted a prophetic picture of the clashing values in the early years of the Soviet Russia. Writing in expressionistc style, Olesha's work differed radically from the school of the Socialist Realism. When the authorities realized that Olesha was more ambiguous than was permissible, he fell from favor. After Stalin's death, Olesha was rehabilitated.

-"How sweet is my life ... ta-rá! ta-rá ... my bowels are flexing ... rá-ta-tá-ta-ra-rí ... the juices are flowing just right, straight through ... ra-tí-ta-doo-da-tá ... squeeze, bowels, squeeze ... tram-ba-ba-boom!" (from Envy)

Yury Olesha was born in Elizavetgrad, Ukraine, into a middle-class family. His father was an excise officer, an impoverished member of the gentry. The family moved to Odessa in 1902. Olesha was educated at home, and Rishelevskii gymnasium, Odessa (1908-17). He studied law for two years at Novorossiikii University, Odessa, where he participated in literary discussion groups.

Rejecting his parents' monarchist sympathies, Olesha joined in 1919 the Red Army for a year. He served as a telephonist in a Black Sea naval artillery battery. He married Olga Gustavovna Suok and worked as a propagandist at the Bureau of Ukrainian Publications in Kharkov. In 1922 Olesha moved to Moscow and published his first story, 'Angel'. He became a staff member of the railway journal Gudok, which had such writers as Isaak Babel, and Ilf and Petrov.

In the 1920s Olesha published humorous verse and sharp, critical articles. He stressed the freedom of expression, saying "The invisible realm is the adobe of attention and imagination. In it the wayfarer is not alone; two sisters walk at his side, leading him by the hand; they are Attention and Imagination." Olesha's famous novel Envy appeared ten years after the Revolution and created an sensation. The ambiguous work was first printed in the literary magazine Red Virgin Soil in 1927. It tells the story of a Nikolai Kavalerov and two brothers, Andrei and Ivan Babichev. Andrei is a hero of the Revolution, the trade director of the Food Industry Trust, whom Kavalerov envies and who represents the rising generation. Kavalevov longs for personal fame. He allies with Ivan, opponent of the new age, against Andrei. Their plans fail, and Ivan withdraws from the scene. As the narrator in Dostoevskii's novel Notes from Underground, Kavalerov is pushed to the margins of society, that can find no place for a dreamer. The stage adaptation of Envy was entitled A Conspiracy of Feelings (1929). In Olesha's original ending Kavalevov lapses into a stupor and is denounced by Ivan as a worthless museum piece, "the man whose life was stolen away." In the staged version, Kavalevov murders Ivan, instead of Andrei.

Envy was followed by novella The Three Fat Men (1927), where the circus stars Tibul and Suok are leading the people to overthrow repressive authorities. It was made into a play (1930), a ballet (1935), and an opera (1956). After the early 1930s, Olesha published little. 'The Cherry Stone', which appeared in a collection of short stories in 1930, Olesha confessed his confusion: "Comrade driver, believe me, I am a mere amateur, and cannot tell you what turn to take." He wrote a few translations and film scenarios, and chose silence. In a speech to the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, Olesha defended the need for independent literature. Following this event Olesha's name vanished from Soviet literature. The dominating aesthetic doctrine known as Socialist Realism was formulated more or less by Maxim Gorky, who was chosen chairman of the Writers' Union. Envy was condemned for its "reactionary" stylistic tendencies and in 1937 Olesha was accused of "antihumanism".

During World War II Olesha was evacuated with the Odessa Film Studio to Ashkhabad in Turkmenistan. After the war he returned to Moscow. Olesha's only noteworthy theatre piece during his later years was an adaptation of Dostoevskii's The Idiot for the Vakhtangov Theatre. Olesha died on May 10, 1960.

"Exploring the principles of composition and the struggle of the writer to find a place in the new society, Olesha's work powerfully dramatized the dilemma of the literary intelligentsia in a society that increasingly regarded creative independence with suspicion. If his work represents the epitome of fellow-traveller poetics, then his critical reception in Russia also reveals the attitude of officialdom towards those writers." (Craig Brandist in 'Iurii Karlovich Olesha, 1899-1960', from Russian Literature, ed. by Neil Cornwell, 1998)

The publication of a selection of his stories, IZBRANNYE SOCHINENIIA, signaled Olesha's rehabilitation in 1956, three years after Joseph Stalin's death. In 1965 appeared posthumously Olesha's autobiographical No Day Without a Line, a collection of fragments in more or less thematic order, dealing with such subjects as 'family', school', 'the circus' and 'literary figures'. "There was something Beethovesque about Yuri Olesha, something mighty, even in his voice," said the writer Konstantin Paustovsky once. "His eyes spotted many marvellous things around him, and he wrote about them tersely, precisely, and well."

For further reading: The Invisible Land by Elisabeth Klosty Beaujour (1970); Masterstvo Iuriia Oleshi by M.O. Chudakova (1972); Sdacha; gibel' sovetskogo intelligenta. Iurii Olesha by Arkadii Belinkov (1976); The Invisible Land: A Study of the Artistic Imagination of Iurii Olesha by Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour (1979); Yurii Olesha's 'Envy' by Andrew Barrat (1981); The Artist and the Creative Act by Kazimiera Ingdahl (1984); The Poetics of Yury Olesha by Victor Peppard (1989); A Graveyard of Themes by Kazimiera Ingdahl (1995); Revolution Betrayed by Janet G. Tucker (1996)

Selected works:

* ZUBILO. STIKHI, 1924
* ZAVIST, 1927 - Envy (trans. by P. Ross ; trans. by Marian Schwartz) - Kateus (suom. Esa Adrian)
* TRI TOLSTIAKA, 1928 - The Three Fat Men (trans. by Fainna Glagoleva) - Kolme paksua
* ZAGOVOR CHUVSTV, 1929 - The Conspiracy of Feelings (stage adaptation of Envy)
* VISHNEVIA KOSTOCHKA, 1930
* ZAPISKI PISATELIA, 1931 - Hyvien tekojen luettelo
* SPISOK BLAGODEIANII, 1931 - A List of Assets (trans. by Andrew R. MacAndrew)
* O LISE, 1948
* IZBRANNYE SOCHINENIIA, 1956
* POVESTI I RASSKAZY, 1965
* NI DNIA BEZ STROCHKI: IZ ZAPISNYKH KNIZHEK, 1965 - No Day Without a Line (ed. by Judson Rosengrant)
* Envy and Other Works, 1967 (trans. by Andrew R. MacAndrew)
* P'ESY, 1968
* IZBRANNOE, 1974
* Complete Short Stories and Three Fat Men, 1979 (trans. by Aimée Anderson)
* The Complete Plays, 1983 (trans. and ed. by Michael Green and Jerome Katsell)

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