Yuri Olesha
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Yuri Olesha (1899 – 1960) was a Russian novelist. He is considered to have been one of the greatest novelists of the 20th-century Soviet Union, one of the few to have succeeded in writing works of 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.
Life and work
Olesha wrote many short stories, but he is most famous for his 1927 novel Envy. The novel is about a pathetic young man named Kavalerov who refuses to accept Communist values and is consumed by loathing and envy for his benefactor Babichev, a model Soviet citizen who manages a successful sausage factory. With his former bourgeois friend Ivan, Kavalerov attempts to stage a comeback of all the old petty feelings that were crushed under communism. In the end, Ivan and Kavalerov are crushed by their own iniquity.
Envy received glowing reviews from throughout the Soviet literary establishment, including the premier literary magazine Pravda. Soviet reviewers took it as a condemnation of despicable bourgeois feelings. Yet Envy can equally be read as a searing indictment of the Soviet value system. There is something cold and inhuman about the novel's model Soviets, and something sympathetic about the bourgeois' earnest but doomed attempt to organize a "conspiracy of feelings". In a letter to Babichev, Kavalerov writes:
- I am fighting for tenderness, for pathos, for individuality; for names that touch me [...], for everything that you are determined to oppress and erase. (Envy, chap. 11, translation by Andrew R. MacAndrew)
Reading the novel in 1960, a reviewer for Time concluded that "Olesha once opposed Communism with such passion as to make Zhivago seem like a gentle reproof."
The true message of Envy likely lies somewhere in between these extremes. Olesha was aware of flaws in both capitalism and communism, and he was not wholly sympathetic to either. During the revolution, he was a strong supporter of communism, but he seems to have become gradually disillusioned after watching it in action. Nor can Envy be reduced entirely to a political statement; the book devotes much of its energy to exploring the psychology of its characters.
As Soviet literary policy became more and more rigid, this ambiguity 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.
External links
- Overview (http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/olesha.htm)
- Complete text of The Cherry Seed, followed by Biography (http://www.sovlit.com/rasskazy/cherryseed.html)