Escape from Literature: Constructing the Soviet Self in Yuri Olesha's Diary of the 1930s

Abstract

On 5 May 1930, instead of beginning a novel, Yuri Olesha started a diary. The entry for that day opens with a reflection on diary-writing as an antidote to the decay of belles lettres, as a remedy for the blisters left upon the metaphorical body of the reader by the scalding achievements of recent Soviet novels: despise [belles lettres]. ... Belles lettres are rotting away (Gniet belletristika)! Novels just burn me! Reading them has become disgusting!' By this point in his literary career, the thirty-year-old Olesha had published several hundred poems and had authored two plays staged by Moscow's most prestigious theaters. But his reputation as a writer rested primarily upon the success of his short novel Envy (Zavist', 1927), a work that provoked an animated discussion in the press with its ambivalent portrayal of the conflict between the old (prerevolutionary) worldview and the Soviet reality. The vigorous rhetorical attack on the occupation of novel-writing which Olesha now mounted in his diary signaled the young author's commitment to reinventing himself as a Soviet writer. This essay focuses on Olesha's attempts to overcome the literary form on the pages of his 1930s diary. I examine this remarkable experiment from the perspective of concomitant attempts to articulate, and so reshape, his identity as a man of letters and as a new Soviet man. Olesha's diary was conceived as a literary means of resolving an experiential crisis: the writer's apparent inability to produce works of fiction. An instrument of creative regeneration, it was planned as a work of literature-a kind of literature-that would demonstrate to Olesha's colleagues and critics that he was an active, valuable member of the writerly profession, as redefined in the Soviet context. Yet from its inception Olesha's diary also served, like many a diary, as a record of a tortuous conversation with himself in the process of self-education, a record that was abandoned and then restarted time after time. The diary entries vary in length, form, and style; many, though far from all, are undated. Fragmentary and unpolished, the diary was kept in order to eventually become a public document, for the benefit of Olesha himself, his contemporaries (both sympathetic and hostile), and the future generations of his Soviet readers. At stake in Olesha's intensely personal yet self-consciously literary project was the very possibility of developing a mode of writing that could give meaning to the intimate experience of a writer working and living in the Soviet Russia of the 1930s.