Yury Olesha
From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
Yuri K. OleshaYuri K. Olesha (Russian:
Юрий Карлович Олеша, March 3 [O.S.
February 19] 1899 – May 10, 1960) was a
Russian and Soviet novelist. He is
considered to have been one of the
greatest Russian novelists of the
20th-century, one of the few to have
succeeded in writing works of lasting
artistic value despite the stifling
censorship of the era. His works are
delicate balancing-acts that
superficially send pro-Communist
messages but reveal far greater subtlety
and richness upon a deeper reading.
Sometimes, he is grouped with his
friends Ilf and Petrov, Isaac Babel, and
Sigismund Krzhizhanovsky into the Odessa
School of Writers.
Olesha was born in Elizavetgrad (now
Kirovohrad, Ukraine). He was raised in
Odessa where he moved with his family in
1902, and he studied in the University
of Novorossiya in 1916-1918. Three
authors that influenced him most were H.
G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, and
Leo Tolstoy. In Russia, Olesha's name is
familiar for the fairy tale Three Fat
Men (1924), which Olesha turned into a
play in 1930 and Aleksey Batalov made
into a movie in 1967. In
English-speaking countries, he has been
known for two books of short-stories
that have appeared in English, Love and
Other Stories and The Cherrystone - both
concerned with dreams of adolescence.
But his artistic reputation rests
primarily upon his 1927 novel Envy,
which he turned into the play Zagovor
chuvstv (Conspiracy of feelings) in
1929.
As Soviet literary policy became more
and more rigid, the
ambiguity[clarification needed] in
Olesha's work became unacceptable. Less
than a decade after the publication of
Envy, he was condemned by the literary
establishment, and fearing arrest he
ceased writing anything of literary
value. Olesha died in 1960, too early to
benefit from the later loosening of
censorship. His remarkable diaries were
published posthumously under the title
No Day without a Line.
