Iurii Olesha Research Articles

Metabolic Modernities: Digestion, Energy Transformations, and the Making and Unmaking of the World in Early Soviet Literature

AbstractEarly Soviet society featured clear nutrition guidelines and a robust plan for streamlined logistics in food processing, distribution, and consumption, all of which was aimed at building a stronger state through a virtuous transformation of calories into labor power. Such rhetoric appeared even in children’s illustrated books, such as Vladimir Maiakovskii and Nikolai Kupreianov’s Story of Petia, Fat Boy, and of Sima, Who is Skinny (1926). This paper shows how in the 1920s authors such as Viktor Shklovskii and Iurii Olesha turned that rhetoric on its head and pushed back against the early Soviet obsession with planning and mastering nature and the human body by employing metaphors of food, digestion, and agriculture. In Shklovskii’s memoirs A Sentimental Journey (1923) and Knight’s Move (1923) and Olesha’s novel Envy (1927), the October Revolution itself emerges as a metabolic process on a vast scale: prerevolutionary aesthetic threads, motifs, and concepts are broken down and processed, reassembled, and repurposed into a seemingly new society and worldview, in which the individual original components are still recognizable.

All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature by José Vergara

Reviewed by: All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature by José Vergara Anna Maslenova All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature. By José Vergara. (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies) Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2021. xiii+254 pp. $54.95. ISBN 978-1-5017-5990-1. José Vergara's monograph studies the reception of James Joyce in work by Russian authors Iurii Olesha, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Bitov, Sasha Sokolov, and Mikhail Shishkin as a pathway for analysis of themes of fatherhood, history, and literary heritage in Russian literature. Vergara explores how Russian writers assimilated the Shakespeare theory expressed by Joyce's character Stephen Dedalus in the 'Scylla and Charybdis' chapter of Ulysses, which argued that a writer can choose [End Page 275] his own father by reinventing his past through text. Although not all Vergara's examples of intertextual connections between Russian texts and Joyce's œuvre are equally convincing, they collectively provide valuable insight into the evolution of intertextuality in Russia over the course of the long twentieth century. The first chapter examines Olesha's contradictory reaction to Joyce in his novel Envy (1927). Feeling compelled to conceal his interest in modernist techniques (considered suspicious in Soviet Russia), Olesha was overtly negative about Joyce. Vergara, however, reveals numerous parallels between father-and-son characters in Envy and in Ulysses: namely, Buck Mulligan/Andrei Babichev, Leopold Bloom/Ivan Babichev, and Stephen/Kavalerov. Olesha's viewpoint, however, is more pessimistic than Joyce's: unlike Stephen, who has reinvented himself as his own father figure, Kavalerov fails to do so and thus remains an outsider within the Soviet system. Vergara's next case study examines Nabokov's many parallels with Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in his novels The Gift (1938) and Bend Sinister (1947). Vergara demonstrates that Nabokov, who famously despised biographies romancées, also disapproved of Stephen's creative approach to Shakespeare's life. In The Gift, Fyodor, like Stephen, wants to connect with a literary forefather (Pushkin), but instead of distancing himself from his biological father, he merges these two father figures in his unfinished biographical novel. Vergara suggests that Fyodor ultimately abandons this novel because he respects the inviolability of his fathers' life stories. Krug in Bend Sinister, on the other hand, does not hold back from manipulating Shakespeare's life story. For this crime he is punished by the death of his son, which triggers Krug's madness. Andrei Bitov's protagonist in Pushkin House (1978), Leva Odoevtsev, also attempts, less successfully than Nabokov's Fyodor, to establish relations with his forefathers. Written during the Khrushchev Thaw, Pushkin House addresses the issue of belatedness. Leva, estranged from his biological father, searches for other father figures but fails to fill the gap. The novel, described here as a 'disorientating amalgamation of sources' (p. 77), also attempts but fails to bridge the temporal chasm between Soviet Russia and the West. Its main emotion is anxiety about Russian literature's lack of innovation, a weakness causing its authors to lag behind those of the West. Sasha Sokolov's Student So and So in A School for Fools (1973) is unaffected by that sensation of belatedness. His unusual disease allows him to travel in time and simultaneously exist in the past, present, and future. A School for Fools contains fewer direct references to Joyce than Sokolov's later novel Palisandria (1985), but Vergara finds stylistic debts to the Irish writer in the stream-of-consciousness, structural play, and 'forking characters' that Sokolov employs. For Sokolov, language is a substitute reality where Student recognizes himself as both descendant and progenitor of his antecedents. Through language, he escapes from his own epoch, where his father tries to re-educate him with Soviet newspaper propaganda. Vergara's final case study looks afresh at Shishkin's novel Maidenhair (2005) with a reading of the same author's essay 'More than Joyce'. Here, Shishkin offers an unconventional interpretation of the Ouroboros symbol in Finnegans Wake, [End Page 276] arguing that while the past creates the present, the present can also (re)generate the past by reworking previous texts. Looking backwards, for Shishkin, allows...

From Orientalism to Cultural Capital: The Myth of Russia in British Literature of the 1920s by Soboleva Olga (review)

SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 342 whilst also narrating details of Wells’s three visits to Russia and the Soviet Union. Nadel’s rather reverential attitude is offset by the edgier tone adopted by Galya Diment in her account of the relationship between Wells and his lover Odette Keun, whose first-hand experience of many of the horrors of life in the Soviet Union is juxtaposed with Wells’s more sympathetic stance. If the nine chapters making up the main part of this volume concentrate primarily on Wells’s works, then a welcome appendix of six translations of memoiristic and observational writing by V. D. Nabokov (father of the novelist), Aleksandr Amfiteatrov, Aleksandr Beliaev, Karl Radek and Solomon Lozovsky, Iurii Olesha and Iulii Kagarlitskii contains some evocative pen portraits of the author and his entourage. Reflecting Russian interest in the man, as much as the author, these set the artistic and political influence of Wells’s work into a very human context and remind us of the contingency of the personal passions and antipathies which shape cultural exchange. H. G. Wells and All Things Russian takes its place in the burgeoning field of recent scholarship on Anglo-Russian relations, a field to which its editor has already made so many significant contributions. Wadham College, University of Oxford P. R. Bullock Soboleva, Olga and Wrenn, Angus. From Orientalism to Cultural Capital: The Myth of Russia in British Literature of the 1920s. Peter Lang, Oxford, Bern, Vienna and New York, 2017. xiii + 337 pp. Illustrations. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. €61.95: £49.95: $75.95 (paperback). This book utilizes the theories of Edward Said and Pierre Bourdieu to examine the shift in British perceptions of Russia that occurred in the early twentieth century. The first chapter revisits familiar Russian tropes offered by British travellers to the country, summed up on page 31 as ‘barbarism, despotism, and extreme cold’. The argument is rooted in Said’s scholarship, but it was surprising to see only one reference to Larry Wolff, whose monograph Inventing Eastern Europe (Stanford, CA, 1994) has already done the work of applying Said’s concept to Western Europe’s geographically closer other, and defines it as ‘an intellectual project of demi-Orientalization’ (p. 7). As the first chapter proceeds to describe the turn-about of the British imagination, one is struck by how quickly Russophilia replaced Russophobia, especially when the authors remind us that the two countries waged wars against one another in Crimea in the 1850s and then again at the turn of the century in north-west India. The rebranding testifies to the great power of literary masterpieces, since it was the onslaught of Constance Garnett’s REVIEWS 343 translations that played the crucial role in turning recent military enemies into aesthetic lovers. No author can be credited more with this shift than John Galsworthy, whose contribution, as the authors state in the opening of chapter two, ‘is difficult to overrate’ (p. 65). He viewed Russian authors as more spiritual and more sincere than the English and, therefore, their works as more broadly encompassing of the human condition. Tolstoi occupied the first place among them, and the parallels between War and Peace and Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga are obvious, but it was Turgenev who influenced his aesthetic the most. H.G.WellstravelledtoRussiathreetimesand,asanenthusiasticsupporterof the Russian Revolution, made enemies at home among both English politicians and Russian émigrés. His view of Russia, though not explicitly identified so by the authors, had more to do with Orientalism than cultural capital. ‘Regarding the influence of Russian literature on Wells’ own writing, one can hardly make the case for any definitive impact’ (p. 111), while his visits to the country were ‘dominated by his mental schemes and preconceptions’ (p. 109), which allowed him to see what he wished to see and reinforce his own politics. For this reason, this third chapter of the book also begs for more engagement with Wolff, especially when it describes Wells ‘seeing Russia as a prospective social project’ (p. 130), which echoes Wolff’s assessment of Eastern Europe as ‘the laboratory of ideological exploration’ (p. 236) for French philosophers. J. M. Barrie was another author not...

H. G. Wells and All Things Russian by Diment Galya (review)

REVIEWS 341 Diment, Galya (ed.). H. G. Wells and All Things Russian. Anthem Press, London and New York,2019. xv + 238 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography. Indexes. £80.00: $125.00. Russian writers’ interest in the work of H. G. Wells, as well as Wells’s own interest in Russia itself, seem so logical, obvious and ubiquitous that it comes as some surprise that, as Galya Diment claims, ‘this book is the first one to devote itself entirely to this theme’ (p. 1). Building, nonetheless, on a substantial bibliography of existing scholarship, H. G. Wells and All Things Russian is subdivided into three sections, exploring first his reception in Russia before World War Two, then his post-war afterlife, and finally traces of Russia in Wells’s own oeuvre. Throughout, there is a refreshing variety of heterogeneous models of influence and intertextuality. Thus, Maxim Shadurski revisits the largely familiar topic of Wells and Evgenii Zamiatin in order to interrogate each author’s attitude to utopia and social progress. The utopian theme is picked up by Muireann Maguire in a comparison of the satirical fictions of Mikhail Bulgakov and Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii, in which a number of Wellsian echoes are identified. Zoran Kuzmanovich offers an elegant, playful, even sceptical reading of Vladimir Nabokov, a writer who claimed to ‘loathe science fiction’ (p. 54). Kuzmanovich’s essay also offers welcome reflections on how we might define and interpret literary influence. Richard Boyechko’s chapter maps the field of Soviet science fiction writing, focusing in particular on the work of Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii, and exposing the ways in which ‘Soviet authors freely interpreted Wells’s many barbs directed toward the uneducated and uncultured masses as referencing the meshchanstvo, their own “un-intelligentsia”’ (p. 93). Patrick Parrinder’s pithy contribution usefully widens the parameters of the volume; taking Iulii Kagarlitskii’s 1963 study of Wells as its central text, it exposes ambiguities both in Wells’s attitude to Marxism, and in Marxist understandings of Wells’s world-view. This theme is picked up by Olga Sobolev and Angus Wrenn in their examination of a number of theatrical and cinematic representations of Wells. Here, Wells appears as the archetypical ‘fellow traveller’, often depicted in conversation with Lenin, who invites him to ‘come and visit us in ten years’ time!’ in order to admire the Soviet Union’s future social, economic and scientific achievements. If these six chapters chart a variegated chronology of Wells’s Russian reception, the next three focus more specifically on Wells’s own interest in Russia. David Rampton offers a compendious reading of Babes in the Darkling Wood, a 1940 novel of ideas, analysing it as a heuristic commentary on Wells’s own ambivalent attempt to come to terms with what the Soviet experiment had become under Stalin. Ira Nadel traces the personal, aesthetic and ideological affinities characterizing the friendship between Wells and Maksim Gor´kii, SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 342 whilst also narrating details of Wells’s three visits to Russia and the Soviet Union. Nadel’s rather reverential attitude is offset by the edgier tone adopted by Galya Diment in her account of the relationship between Wells and his lover Odette Keun, whose first-hand experience of many of the horrors of life in the Soviet Union is juxtaposed with Wells’s more sympathetic stance. If the nine chapters making up the main part of this volume concentrate primarily on Wells’s works, then a welcome appendix of six translations of memoiristic and observational writing by V. D. Nabokov (father of the novelist), Aleksandr Amfiteatrov, Aleksandr Beliaev, Karl Radek and Solomon Lozovsky, Iurii Olesha and Iulii Kagarlitskii contains some evocative pen portraits of the author and his entourage. Reflecting Russian interest in the man, as much as the author, these set the artistic and political influence of Wells’s work into a very human context and remind us of the contingency of the personal passions and antipathies which shape cultural exchange. H. G. Wells and All Things Russian takes its place in the burgeoning field of recent scholarship on Anglo-Russian relations, a field to which its editor has already made so many significant contributions. Wadham College, University of...

Vaingurt, Julia Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde: Technology and the Arts in Russia of the 1920s (review)

REVIEWS 333 Polonist and anti-Catholic motivation (p. 192), and secures Ippolit Kirillovich’s ‘Roman preference for civilization’ (p. 193). Reading The Brothers Karamazov in the light of Blake’s study offers a completely new adventure in interpreting Dostoevskii’s work. Slawisches Institut H.-J. Gerigk Heidelberg University Vaingurt, Julia. Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde: Technology and the Arts in Russia of the 1920s. StudiesinRussianLiteratureandTheory.Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2013. xii + 308 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00. Ever since Boris Groys’s The Total Art of Stalinism first appeared in 1988, the Soviet avant-garde has been implicated in the Stalinization of Russian society. Totalitarianism, according to Groys, was a logical, almost inevitable consequence of the utopian change demanded by radical artists. Now while the Red Queen has her Stalinist side, no-one has ever contended that Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland was a formula for aesthetic dictatorship. Carroll’s final lines suggest that the role of creative invention is self-perpetuation, not social change; Alice’s imaginative gifts will in turn inspire her children ‘with the dream of Wonderland’. Julia Vaingurt’s innovative and exhaustively researched monograph effectively sets out to reclaim Wonderland on behalf of the Russian avant-garde. It enriches current scholarly investigation (by Anindita Banerjee and Katarina Clark, among others) of the unexpected diversity and internationalism of early Soviet culture. Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde contends, countering Groys, that Soviet avant-garde aesthetic production of the 1920s was concerned with inspiring wonder for its own sake, or in Vaingurt’s words, with ‘contemplative rather than constructive aims’ (p. 13). Vaingurt uses the Aristotelian concept of techne (craftsmanship as self-sufficient good) to disassociate technology from instrumentality, inventiveness from use-value. Without denying that many artists (for example, most Constructivists) enthusiastically supported cultural engineering, she stresses the mysterious lack of pragmatism or utility in many major 1920s ideas, whether celebrated or obscure, from Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International to the floating apartment buildings designed by a Vkhutemas student in 1928. These draft projects were not blueprints for the socialist future: they were, Vaingurt argues, challenges aimed at the transitional present. Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde is organized in three sections, each exploring a different aspect of technology. ‘Homo Faber, Home Ludens’ examines physical technology — self-engineering — in the biomechanical SEER, 94, 2, APRIL 2016 334 philosophies of the proletarian poet Aleksei Gastev and the director Vsevolod Meierkhol´d. Although the work of both Gastev and Meierkhol´d appeared to uphold Soviet hierarchies of mechanization and rationality, Vaingurt shows how both men blundered into cognitive quandaries of the kind constructed by other, less conformist artists. Gastev propounded psychological ‘selfcolonization ’, where individuals exchanged personal and national identity for a state of trans-national super-being. But this state of being, Vaingurt points out, was by definition too international to remain truly Soviet, making Gastev’s brand of utopia ultimately unacceptable in Stalin’s Russia. A similar paradox problematized Meierkhol´d’s 1922 production of The Magnanimous Cuckold; here, the play’s form contravened its content. Biomechanics required conscious control over physical action and emotion, yet the titular cuckold’s attempt to dominate his wife’s body backfires ludicrously. Meierkhol´d’s staging of the play, Vaingurt argues, thus became a case study in the futility of power, querying both the philosophy behind biomechanics, and utopian Soviet hopes to rationalize physiology and psychology. The book’s central, and most convincing, section on ‘Alternative Technologies’ introduces flawed, unreal and dangerous machines. Here, Vaingurt re-interprets the critiques of utopian politics in Evgenii Zamiatin’s We and Iurii Olesha’s Envy; she examines the subtle privileging of unrealizable structures in the architectural fantasies of Tatlin and Velimir Khlebnikov, and their gradual rejection of machine technology (Tatlin’s glider Letatlin, for instance, evokes the organic shape of a bird’s wings). The final section, ‘The Homeland of Technology’ returns to an earlier theme of American culture as the focus of Russian desire. In two intriguing and informative chapters, Vaingurt analyses American travelogues by Soviet writers from Gor´kii and Maiakovskii to Il´f and Petrov, followed by a fresh look at popular fiction and cinema with...

Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin , and: Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams (review)

Reviewed by: Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin, and: Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams Thomas Seifrid Jochen Hellbeck , Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin. 448 pp. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. ISBN-13 978-0674032316. $19.95. Irina Paperno , Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams. 304 pp. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. ISBN-13 978-0801448393, $55.00 (cloth); 978-0801475900, $22.95 (paper). Jochen Hellbeck's Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin and Irina Paperno's Stories of the Soviet Experience lay to rest two closely related commonplaces about the historiography of the Stalin era in Russia (some of the first blows, at least for readers in the West, having been dealt by the translated anthology of Stalin-era diaries, Intimacy and Terror).1 The first is that the Stalinist regime—whose own rhetorical campaigns so aggressively dominated contemporary media, public space, and archives—ensured that very few documents of private life were preserved for subsequent generations. The second is that there were few such documents to begin with, because the invasive and repressive manner in which the regime thrust itself on its citizenry meant that personal thoughts and experiences were discussed only in the most private realms and not, as a rule, committed to paper—which, like the rubles Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoi hides in the ventilation flue of his bathroom in Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, had an uncanny way of ending up as hard currency in the hands of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). As both these studies amply demonstrate, the Stalin era in fact witnessed something of a boom in diary writing in spite of the state's insistence on collective, public life and party ideology—and even, in some ways, because of it. Both Hellbeck and Paperno survey of a range of diaries (and, in some cases, autobiographical memoirs) in an effort to identify recurring patterns in them: [End Page 911] of self-identity and development; of self-defined relation to the Party, state, or workplace; and patterns across diaries and memoirs of reaction to cardinal events such as the purges of the late 1930s or World War II. Hellbeck covers a somewhat wider range of materials than does Paperno, examining the diaries of well-known writers such as Dmitrii Furmanov, Iurii Olesha, and Aleksandr Afinogenov as well as those kept by members of the former intelligentsia, who resisted and then struggled to adapt to the new order, and, most symptomatic of all, those of several vydvizhentsy, men who ascended from obscure provincial or rural origins to acquire an education (typically technological) and some sort of public role (e.g., as brigade leader at work, as agitator, etc.). Hellbeck's primary interest lies in using the diaries to probe the nature of Stalin-era subjectivity. He warns against the facile application of a "public-private binary" to these records of personal experience because it assumes that Soviet citizens strove "like liberal subjects" (86) for individual autonomy, whereas most of them, he suggests, were committed Marxists who actively participated in the initiatives of the state. This suspension of Western prejudice is certainly necessary to a scholarly consideration of the material, but in some ways it intensifies rather than allays concerns about how we, at our historical and geographical remove, understand the diaries. One such concern is hermeneutic and applies to the reader: how can we tell what the diarist's ultimate intentions and self-understanding were? It might be reasonable to assume that, if a diarist like Nina Lugovskaia, one of Hellbeck's examples, states that she keeps her diary to expose the "lies" of communist propaganda (60), then she is telling the truth, because it is improbable that any one would fictionalize such a posture. But what of the many vydvizhentsy who in their notebooks express nothing but enthusiasm for the Soviet remaking of their world? In the absence of other evidence, are we safe in assuming they are sincere? Or is it also possible, as other forms of evidence from the Stalinist era might suggest, that some of these Soviet subjects were in fact clever...

A Third Wave Writer and the Prose Tradition of the Soviet 1920s: The Similarities between Zinovii Zinik’s “Cricket” and Iurii Olesha’s Envy

Unlike previous scholarly works on Zinovii Zinik, which have underscored his debts to Gogol’ and Nabokov, this article seeks to examine his connection with the prose tradition of Soviet literature of the 1920s, specifically by analyzing the similarities between his story “Cricket” and Iurii Olesha’s novel Envy. The discussion focuses on four aspects of the works: the role of the narrator as outsider; the centrality of a sporting event to the narrative; questions of homosexuality, and the objectification of women; and, finally, the way that each author plays with language to add verbal texture to his writing.

Light in Captivity: Spectacular Glass and Soviet Power in the 1920s and 1930s

Exploiting what Jean Starobinski has called the “solar myth” of the revolution, the Soviet regime used the visual power of light within glass to create an exalted vision of Russia's transformation. This article explores the symbolism and the spectacular use of the light bulb (as a material and a discursive entity) in the early Soviet period. Julia Bekman Chadaga traces how the light bulb became an ideological icon and then investigates its treatment in Soviet popular culture and in literary works by Mikhail Zoshchenko, Andrei Platonov, and Iurii Olesha. The Kremlin stars are examined as a monumental manifestation of the Soviet light bulb and a case study illustrating the state's appropriation of religious imagery. While official discourse around the Kremlin stars and “Lenin's little lamps” invokes the conquest of unruly nature and the attainment of divine power via technology produced by the triumphant socialist state, the literary works examined here destabilize the fixed symbolic meaning of captive light.

Gluttony and Power in Iurii Olesha's Envy

Given the highly carnivalized view of the world that informs the narrative structure of Envy (Zavist'. 1927), one should not be terribly surprised to find that Iurii Olesha's controversial novella contains gastronomic and alimentary motifs that function in a highly Rabelaisian way, with food imagery being called upon to celebrate what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the material bodily principle (images of the human itself, food, drink, defecation, and sexual life) and thus to express a joyful sense of satiety, abundance, and excess.! Indeed, Olesha's story fairly reverberates with images of gluttonous overeating, heavy drinking, and physical corpulence, all of which Bakhtin identifies with the grotesque body portrayed in works of carnivalized literature.2 From the tubby aristocratic torso of Andrei Babichev, the Soviet salami king, to the flaccid figure of Anechka Prokopovich, the cook for the barbers' artel (who goes about entangled in the entrails of animals), Envy quite deliberately foregrounds the essential corporeality of the human and emphasizes many of its basic physiological functions: among them, mastication, ingestion, digestion, and elimination. The novella opens, appropriately enough, within the very bowels (nedra) of Andrei Babichev's apartment, his bathroom, where the effervescent food commissar can be

The twentieth-century Russian novel: an introduction

Eight of Russia's most popular and significant novels are presented in this important new guide for students. Works include: We by Evgenii Zamiatin Red Cavalry by Isaak Babel Envy by Iurii Olesha How the Steel Was Tempered by Nikolai Ostrovskii Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak Cancer Ward by Alexander Solzhenitsyn Pushkin House by Andrei Bitov In each chapter, David Gillespie examines one novel in detail and explores the career of the author and the critical reception of the work. Throughout, considerable reference is made to recently published scholarship and archival materials to provide students and scholars of Russian and Comparative Literature with a guide to these important Russian authors and their place in the world of literature. The book also includes an extensive bibliography of secondary literature and contains textual references in both the original Russian and in English translation.

A Graveyard of Themes: The Genesis of Three Key Works by Iurii Olesha

A Graveyard of Themes: The Genesis of Three Key Works by Iurii Olesha

Iurii Olesha’sZavist’: Fantasy, Reality, and Split Personality

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.

Proust-Envy: Fiction and Autobiography in the Works of Iurii Olesha

Iurii Olesha's works present us with a series of episodes for a fictional autobiography: the self-portrait of the artist as failure. Already early in his career, Olesha was committed to the achievement of success through the creation and manipulation of images of failure. These images are also dominant in his last work No Day Without a Line, which this article analyzes. Olesha declares in No Day that he wishes to "go backwards through life the way Marcel Proust succeeded in doing in his time." There are interesting similarities between the two writers, particularly the fact that A la Recherche du temps perdu is also in a sense based in the imagination of failure. But Olesha misunderstands Proust's procedure, and in so doing reveals much about the nature of his own talent and his inability to come to terms with time.

Gulliver in the Land of the Giants

Iurii Olesha entered literature full of a new vision of the world. He did not know what literary quests were. He confidently wrote down the impressions he had accumulated in the twenty-five years of his life.

Gulliver in The Land of The Giants (On the Seventy-fifth Birthday of Iurii Olesha)

Iurii Olesha entered literature full of a new vision of the world. He did not know what "literary quests" were. He confidently wrote down the impressions he had accumulated in the twenty-five years of his life.

A Dialogue About The Novella

The stenographic record of a conversation about the novella between Konstantin Paustovskii and Iurii Olesha is kept in the Central State Archive of Literature and Art.

The Invisible Land. A Study of the Artistic Imagination of Iurii Olesha

The Invisible Land. A Study of the Artistic Imagination of Iurii Olesha

The Theme of Sterility in Olesha's Envy

Iurii Olesha's Short Novel Envy (Zavist', 1927) has been greatly admired and even has some claim to be considered the “great Soviet novel.“Yet comparatively little has been written about Envy since the first flood of reviews and articles, many uncritical, appeared in the Soviet press between 1927 and 1933.Envy is a complex novel, sometimes described as expressionistic, written in a variety of styles and with many planes of meaning. Elements of realist, romanticist, and symbolist styles are present. Dreams, fantasies, and lies are introduced, often as reality. It is a work in which the author's ideological intentions are far from clear or unambiguous, a work deeply hedged with irony. And it is a work that can yield much to discerning analysis.

The Dead Hand of the Future: the Predicament of Vladimir Mayakovsky

In a recent memoir Iurii Olesha, one of the most sophisticated Soviet prose writers, recalls a conversation he once had with V. E. Meyerhold regarding a film version of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons which the famous avant-garde director was then contemplating. “I asked him whom he had in mind for the part of Bazarov. He answered, ‘Mayakovsky'.“The resemblance between one of modern Russia's foremost poets and Turgenev's harshly antipoetic hero may not be immediately obvious. Yet a close look at Mayakovsky's poetry, especially at his earlier, Futurist lyrics, reveals the presence of what might be called the Bazarov syndrome. The tenor of these Surrealist urban still-lives (“Night,“ “Morning,” “The Street,” etc.), these impassioned lyrical manifestoes (“I,” “Man,” “A Cloud in Trousers“), is total negation of the status quo.