Abstract
Iurii Olesha's minor masterpiece Zavisf is a confusing and difficult novel because of its often fantastic atmosphere. The action takes place on a variety of levels of reality, ranging from the ordinary objective world through stages of fantasy to outright dreams. Because Olesha's transitions between these levels are abrupt and unannounced, it is often easy to miss them. Most criticism of the work simply accepts this confusion at face value: Zavisf is a fantastic novel, in which impossible events and incongruous or illogical connections do not require a logical explanation.1 In this paper I shall suggest an alternative, essentially positivist approach: not only is it possible to distinguish between what is real and what is imagined by the characters, but moreover such an understanding goes far to clarify the thematic content of the work.
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