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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 |
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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, Yury 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. He sings in the mornings in the lavatory. You can imagine what a happy, healthy man he must be. The urge to sing comes naturally to him, like a reflect. These songs of his, which have neither tunes nor words, just a series of "ta-ra-ras", and which he shouts out in various keys, may be interpreted as follows: "How glad I am to be alive ... ta-ra! ta-ra!.. My bowels are elastic ... ra-ta-ta-do-ta-ta... The juices are flowing correctly inside me ... ra-ta-ta-do-ta-ta... Contact, bowels, contact ... tram-ba-ba-boom!" (from Envy by Yuri Olesha, translated by J. C. Butler, Raduga Publishers, 1988, p. 16) Yury Olesha was born in Elizavetgrad, Ukraine, into a middle-class
Polish Catholic family. His father, Karl Antonovich, was an excise officer, an
impoverished member of the gentry. In 1902 the family moved to the
cosmopolitan port of Odessa, where Karl Antonovich was employed as as
a tax inspector in a vodka distillery. According to Olesha,
he should have avoided drinking himself: "And truly I do remember an episode
when he put me on a windowsill and aimed a revolver at me. He was
drunk, and Mama fell down on her knees, pleading with him to "stop
that."" (No Day without a Line
by Yury Olesha, edited, translated from the Russian, and with an
introduction by Judson Rosengrant, Northwestern University Press, 1998,
p. 8) His early education Olesha received at home, where his Polish grandmother taught him Russian and mathematics. Olesha's contemporaries have recalled that he always spoke Russian with an imperceptile Lithuanian accent. In 1908 Olesha entered Rishelevskii gymnasium, graduating in 1917 with a gold medal in language and literature. He then studied law for two years at Novorossiikii University, Odessa. At
the age of eighteen, Olesha saw his first Charlie Chaplin movie. They
were very popular in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1921 he wrote two short film scenarios, Zolotoe iabloko (The Golden Apple) and Svoeiu sobstvennoi rukoi
(By His Own Hand) for the Khar'kov provincial political educational
committee; the scripts were not published. Under the influence of Alexander Blok and Igor Severyanin, Olesha began to write verse. 'Clarimonda', a ballad, appeared in the newspaper The Southern Herald. Moreover, in Odessa he participated in the activities of the Green Lamp, a literary discussion group, and the politically engaged literary circle, the Poets Collective, whose members also included Ilya Ilf. With Valentin Kataev he was inseparable. Kataev portrayed later his bohemian friend in My Diamond Wreath (1978). Olesha's sister Wanda died of typhoid in 1919, at the height of
civil strife in Ukraine. Rejecting his parents' monarchist sympathies,
Olesha joined the Red Army for a year, serving as a telephonist in
a Black Sea naval artillery battery. While working as a
propagandist at the Bureau of Ukrainian Publications in Kharkov, he
published his first story in the Kharkov newspaper Proletarian.
Olesha already had doubts about the revolution and how art and poetry
would preserve in the new society. On the other hand, he believed that
soccer has a bright future. Olesha himself had been a talented school
player for a time. In 1922 Olesha went to Moscow, where he was employed by the railway journal Gudok, which had such writers as Isaak Babel, and Ilf and Petrov. His first job in the information deparment consisted of stuffing envelopes with letters written by the section head to the various addresses of the worker correspondents. Olesha wrote the addresses. He soon became a leading member of the editorial staff. His satirical pieces, which he published under the pseudonym of Zubilo (the Chisel), gained popularity among the readership. However, finding it difficult to adjust himself to boring routines, Olesha spent more time writing in restaurants than in his office. One of his favorite places was a Georgian restaurant on Tverskoi Bulevard, opposite the Telegraph Building. Envy, Olesha's most famous novel, appeared ten years after the Revolution and created an sensation. This 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, who represents the rising generation, is an industrial director, who creates a perfect sausage. Kavalevov, a drunkard and nihilist, who longs for personal fame, envies his success. He challenges Andrei: "We'll wage war! We'll fight it out! . . . Just a couple more achievements in the sausage-making business, a couple more cheap canteens and your career will be over." (Ibid., p. 68) Kavalevov allies with Ivan, a romantic dreamer and opponent of the new age. Ivan is killed by his mysterious machine, a machine of machines, which can do everything. He has named it Ophelia. Kovalev shouts: "Save him! Are you really going to let a machine kill a man!" (Ibid., p. 172) And as the narrator in Dostoevskii's novel Notes from Underground, Kavalerov is pushed to the margins of exitence. He takes a refuge in a boarding house run by a fat widow, Anna. A smaller version of Ivan says: "If you ask me, indifference is the best state for a person's mind to be in." (Ibid., p. 175) The stage adaptation of Envy was entitled A Conspiracy of Feelings
(1929). It took still some time, before
critics and party
officials began to suspect, that the perfect sausage was a metaphor for
Communist ideals, especially because the was a shortage of sausages. Envy was followed by Tri tolstiaka (1927, The Three Fat Men), where the circus stars Tibul and Suok are leading the people to over throw repressive authorities. This widely popular novella was made into a play (1930), produced by Konstantin Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theater, a ballet (1935), an opera (1956), a radio drama, and it has been filmed several times. Olesha's only original play, Spisok blagodeianii (1931, A List of Assets) was staged by Vsevolod Meyerhold at his Moscow theatre. A dawdler
by nature and working in general very slowly, Olesha published little
after the early 1930s, but his early prose was twice reprinted (in 1935
and again in 1936). One of his best stories, 'The Cherry Stone', was
collected in a volume with the same title, published in 1931. The
central theme dealt with the conflict
between artistic imagination, the world of metaphors, and everyday
reality. Through the voice of the narrator, a young man, Olesha acknowledges thar he has lost the right direction of the way:
"Comrade driver, believe me—I'm just a dilettante after all, I don't really know which way should turn your machine. . . . " (Envy, and Other Works, translated, with an introduction, by Andrew R. MacAndrew, W. W. Norton, 1981, p. 150) Like many other authors, who were cast aside at that time,
Olesha worked in other fields than fiction. He did journalism,
translated Turkmen and Ukrainian authors,
and wrote film scenarios for such films as Bolotnye soldaty (1938, Swamp Soldiers), dealing with Nazi prison camps, Oshibka inzhenera Kochina (1939, Engineer Kochin's Mistake), directed by Aleksandr Macheret, and Malen'kii leitenant (1942, The Little Lieutenant). Abram Room's screen adaptation of Olesha's Strogii iunosha
(1934) was banned by the Kiev Ukrainfil'm studio in 1936. Room's film,
which was one of the most costly Soviet productions of the 1930s, was
not shown until the 1960s. Reviewing Mikhail Romm's film Lenin v Oktiabre
(1937), he praised its portrayal of Lenin, Stalin and Felix
Dzerzhinskii, the founder of the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police. Eventually Olesha
withdrew from the public eye, though he defended the need for an
independent literature and artistic autonomy before the First
Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. Olesha revealed the feelings
he underwent as he found himself incapable of writing until he had
"established a common ground" with the new Soviet man. Responding to
accusations that the three most talented Soviet writers of the period,
Babel, Olesha, and Pasternak, had been slow in producing new books,
Ilya Ehrenburg said that a writer's output should not be judged by the
standards applicable to construction work. Following his speech Olesha's name gradually vanished from the pantheon of 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. It did not help Olesha to denounce Joyce's Ulysses
as "Formalist" at the 1936 General Meeting of the Moscow Union of
Soviet Writers: "In order to understand what is Formalism and what is
Naturalism, and why these phenomena are hostile to us, I give you an
example from Joyce. This writer said: Cheese is the corpse of milk."
Look, comrades, how terrible. The writer of the West saw death of milk.
He said that milk can be dead. Is it well said? It is well said. It is
said correctly, but we don't want such correctness." (All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature by José Vergara, Northern Illinois University Press, 2021, p. 15) At the
peak of Stalin's purges in 1937 Olesha was accused of "antihumanism".
Pasternak and Olesha were mentioned among those intellectuals who were
allegedly plotting a political diversion. During World War II Olesha was evacuated with the Odessa Film Studio to Ashkhabad in Turkmenistan. There he worked as a propagandist and contributed to radio broadcasts. After the war he returned to Moscow. With his wife, he constantly moved from one small apartment to another. In 1954 they were given an apartment in the writer's building on Lavrushinsky Lane. Olesha's only noteworthy theatre piece during his later years was an adaptation of Dostoevskii's The Idiot for the Vakhtangov Theatre. Other works included a stage adaptation of Chekhov's 'Tsvety Zapozdalye' (1959), which was made into a movie in 1970, and a screenplay for a children's cartoon, entitled A Girl in the Circus. Olesha died of a heart attack on May 10, 1960. He was married to Olga Gustavovna Suok. Their stepson Igor, committed suicide by jumping out of a window in front of both Olesha and Olga. "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." ('Iurii Karlovich Olesha: 1899-1960: Prose writer, poet, and dramatist' by Craig Brandist, Reference Guide to Russian Literature, edited by Neil Cornwell, Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998, p. 600) Olesha stressed the power of thought and imagination, saying: "Reading Verne, we never forget that everything is invented, but reading, say, The War of the Worlds, we fall under the spell of a strange idea: it suddenly begins to seem to us that there really was a time when the Martians attempted to conquer Earth." (No Day without a Line, p. 165) The publication of a selection of his stories, Izbrannye sochineniia, signaled Olesha's rehabilitation in 1956, three years after Joseph Stalin's death. Posthumously came out the
autobiographical Ni dnia bez strochki: Iz zapisnykh knizhek
(1965, No Day Without a Line), a collection of fragments in more or
less thematic order, dealing with such subjects as "the family,"
"Richelieu Gymnasium," "the circus," "Odessa," and "literary figures,"
and so on. "There was something stormy, and powerful, like
Beethoven, in Olesha," said the writer Konstantin
Paustovsky. "Even is his voice. His sharp eyes saw many splendid and
comforting things around him. He wrote about the succinctly and
precisely, well knowing the law that two words can be incredibly strong
and that four words are four time weaker." (Pages from Tarusa: New Voices in Russian Writing, edited and with an introduction by Andrew Field, Little, Brown and Company, 1964, p. 349) 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); No List of Political Assets: the Collaboration of Iurii Olesha and Abram Room on "Strogii iunosha" [A Strict Youth (1936)] by Jerry T. Heil (1989); A Graveyard of Themes by Kazimiera Ingdahl (1995); Revolution Betrayed by Janet G. Tucker (1996); 'Introduction' by Judson Rosengrant, in No Day Without a Line: From Notebooks by Yury Olesha (1998); Olesha's Envy: A Critical Companion, edited by Rimgaila Salys (1999); Iurii Olesha, Abram Room and Strogii Iunosha - Artistic Form and Political Context by Milena Lily Michalski (1999); 'Valentin Kataev and Yury Olesha,' in Isaac Babel and the Self-invention of Odessan Modernism by Rebecca Jane Stanton (2012); Ėsse o IUrii Oleshe i ego sovremennikakh: statʹi, publikatsii, pisʹma = Yury Olesha and His Contemporaries: Articles, Essays, Letters by Irina Panchenko (2018); 'Yury Olesha: An Envy for World Culture', in All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature by José Vergara (2021) Selected works:
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