Yuri Olesha: A Talent to Be Envied

Yuri Karlovich Olesha was born 100 years ago in Elizavetgrad (Kirovograd), then in Russia, now part of Ukraine, to a middle-class Polish family. When he was four years old, his family moved to Odessa. He went to university (in law) at Novorossisk and joined the Red Army in 1919. AFter leaving the army he began his working life in Moscow as a journalist, for the popular magazine Gudok (The Whistle). There he worked alongside other famous humor writers like Ilya Ilf, Evgeny Kataev and Isaac Babel, all from Odessa.

Olesha’s rose to fame on the 1927 publication of his slapstick novel Envy. It was a ruthlessly satirical attack on the Soviet state and New Soviet Man (but very proi-NEP) and is still considered one of the greatest works of Russian fiction this century. One year later, his fairy-tale of revolution and despotism, Three Fat Men, was published. Even more strident in its veiled attacks on the regime, it too was an instant hit and continued, amazingly, to be published (and performed on stage and screen) throughout the Soviet era.

Olesha also produced a number of wonderfully-crafted plays and stories. We reproduce here two of his stories in step with this issue’s theme of love (from an out-of-print collection published by Ardis Publishers), superbly translated by Aimee Anderson. At present, no collection of Olesha’s stories is in print, although Ardis Publishers does keep Envy in print (800-877-7133, $12.95).

It was inevitable that Olesha’s literary boldness would run him afoul of Stalin’s regime. At first he stopped writing in the 1930s, then was relegated to journalistic posts in provincial newspapers and lived on the edge of poverty for many years. In 1938, he wrote in his diary: “Some people claim that I don’t write. In fact, I write a lot. I just can’t write fast and easily.” And later, in 1940: “I will no longer be a writer. Most likely an artist lived in my body, an artist I can’t subordinate to the inner strength of my life. This is my tragedy, which, as a matter of fact, forced me to live a terrible life.” Amazingly, however, he was never arrested in the purges. After Stalin’s death, he returned to live in Moscow until his own death in 1960. He was reportedly working on an article about Hemingway at the time.