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• 1 2020-08-26T12:50:27-04:00 Yury Olesha Bio 37 plain 2020-12-10T14:02:53-05:00 Tyler Hicks & Sara Laine

  Yuri Karlovich Olesha (March 3, 1899 - May 10, 1961) was born in Elisavetgrad, Ukraine to a family of Russian officials. In 1902, he and his family relocated to Odessa, Ukraine, where he attended the University of Novorossiya from 1916 to 1918. Over the course of Olesha’s career as an author, he published various poems, satirical prose, plays, short stories, children's works, and novels. The bulk of his most notable work was produced in the period from 1922 to the mid 1930s. During the Second World War, Olesha spent time working in radio in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan and translating local books to Russian. Throughout his life, Olesha valued freedom of expression and was at first praised for his social commentary through his literary contributions, but later in his life faced issues with government censorship and consequently slowed down on publishing his work.
   
  In looking at Olesha’s art, which was (for the most part) crafted from the lens of, at the time, a newly emerging Soviet Russia, one can understand much not only about Russia, but also about the role that an artist such as Olesha had, especially in reference to the ever-changing political state. To begin, Olesha, along with several other authors, formed a new artistic movement known as the Green Lamp (Зелёная лампа) literary group. This new literary group focused on commentary on Socialist ideologies of the recently birthed Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, otherwise known as the USSR. After finding his footing in the literary scene of Russia (primarily within Odessa), Olesha moved to Moscow in 1922, where he began working for The Whistle, a well-known railway worker’s periodical. Here, under the pseudonym “The Chisel” (Зубило in Russian), he published satirical poetry directly targeting the new life and culture in Soviet Russia. It is after this phase of Olesha’s life whereupon he writes the work that he is best known for, Envy (published in 1927). This novel depicts the strange and satirical relationship between a sausage maker (Andrei Babichev) and a pathetic young man (Nikolai Kavalerov), more precisely the relationship between the socialism associated with Soviet Russia and the individualism of pre-Soviet Russia, respectively assigned to both Babichev and Kavalerov.
   
  After these works, Olesha still released important works, such as Three Fat Men (written 1924, published 1928) and "The Cherry Pit" (1929), once again touching on the basis of the new cultural approach to life that the USSR presented to its people. Olesha was very well-known for his cunningly satirical writing, which is what made him popular at the time. However, as time passed and Olesha’s work became more read throughout the world, he was eventually even more well-respected by literary critics and scholars alike for his approach to writing literature from a central thematic point of view. Practically speaking, all of Olesha’s work is structured around one predominant topic, the idea of old versus new ideas of culture specifically in relation to Soviet and non-Soviet culture. Growing up in a world heavily structured around individualism and classical beliefs, Olesha was faced with rapidly changing cultural ideals as a result of the formation of the USSR. In order to cope with this shift, he wrote numerous texts from a satirical standpoint of an inability to fit into the new Soviet society. 
  
  Another way of looking at this style of writing, particularly looking at that of Envy, is that Olesha wrote in order to demonstrate the imperfect nature of humanity, and that neither the new means of living in the USSR nor the old means of living in classic Russia were perfect, just as neither Babichev nor Kavalerov are attractive figures within the novel. Within the context of Envy, there is also no shortage of symbols employed by Olesha. The most striking of which are his repeated allusions to flowers (such as lilies, roses), Kavalerov’s comparisons of Babichev’s body to different animals (female antelopes, elephants) and the reference to an inanimate object, Babichev’s machine, by a female name Ophelia. The effect of this was a greater dialogue between the future of the USSR at the time, between man and machine.
   
  It was here, after releasing several pieces of literature commenting on current USSR ideals, that Olesha’s work began drawing negative attention. Russian readers that originally enjoyed Envy and other pieces by Olesha were merely disillusioned by the ideas put forth by the author; as time passed, the Soviet public began to push back against Olesha and his writing. Witnessing the single largest change of Russian society and culture, Olesha was fascinated by the psychological aspect of the contrast between old Russian mentalities and new USSR-based ideals, which formed the primary basis for his work. Many Soviet officials began to take offense to his works, even going as far as to openly criticize the writer and encourage others to not read Olesha in the first place. Due to such intense criticism (one could even call this politically rooted criticism censorship), Olesha stopped publishing his work; however, he did continue to write memoirs and stage adaptations of his earlier works. After his death on May 10, 1960, Olesha’s work began popping up throughout global literary groups.
  
  Yury Olesha lived a life that can only be described as chaotic and full of conflict. He was an influential man within the broader Russian literary picture, which is exemplified even more by the time in which he was actively writing, particularly at a pivotal time for Russia.
  
  Bibliography
  
  Kisel, Maria. “Literacy and Literary Mastery in Early Soviet Russia: The Case of Yuri Olesha's 
  ‘Envy.’” Ulbandus Review, vol. 11, 2008, pp. 23–45. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25748181. Accessed 22 Sept. 2020. 
  
  Magill, Frank Northen. "Yury Olesha - Biography" Great Authors of World Literature, Critical Edition, eNotes.com, Inc., http://www.enotes.com/topics/yury-olesha#biography-biography-1.1997. Accessed 5 Oct, 2020.
  
  "Yury Karlovich Olesha." Encyclopaedia Britannica, 6 May 2020, 
  www.britannica.com/biography/Yury-Karlovich-Olesha. Accessed 21 Sept. 2020.
  
  “Yury Olesha.” Yury Olesha - New World Encyclopedia, 
  www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Yury_Olesha.

• 1 2020-11-30T12:32:04-05:00 Emotion's Great Defender: the Pitiful and the Beautiful in Yury Olesha's Envy 18 Rose plain 2020-12-14T18:13:54-05:00 The question of individualism is ubiquitous in twentieth-century Russian literature. The Soviet Union and collectivism put the idea of personal identity into an autoclave, pressurizing and sterilizing it until it reached Socialist Realism, the officially sanctioned literary genre of the Stalin age and beyond. When Yuri Olesha’s Envy was published, literature was gearing up to be seen as a tool that could be used to instruct the new Soviet man—the ideal, selfless, collectivist Soviet citizen—and so was already experiencing a considerable amount of this pressure. Envy initially managed to avoid censorship without advocating strongly for Sovietism, though years later its publication was halted. Its uncertain reception was, perhaps, a product of the ambivalence in Olesha’s writing. Olesha wrote Envy with staunch ambivalence, using a combination of ironic and beautiful language. However, he assigned his most beautiful language to his more anti-Soviet characters, perhaps making the case for emotion.
  
  Olesha is carefully ambivalent in his writing toward the question of individualism. He nearly outright states his ambivalence several times throughout the novel. One such moment is the soccer match, which is set up as a battle between Russia and Germany, the teams being led by Volodya and Goetske, respectively. Volodya is a soccer player for the Soviet Union and is a team player, representing collectivism. Goetske, who plays for Germany and plays for personal glory, represents individualism. Olesha does not make it clear who wins the soccer match, though he does say that the crowd was “swinging Volodya Makarov.” The lack of clarity in the outcome of the match conveys his ambivalence between individualism and collectivism (141). Another moment Olesha expresses his ambivalence is the very end of the novel, when Ivan Babichev, a romantic character who creates a machine to kill all machines and a one-time ally of the main character, Kavalerov, says “indifference is the best of all conditions of the human mind” (52). Though ambivalence and indifference are not quite the same, they both exist in the space between choosing one side or the other. 
  
  Olesha also conveys ambivalence through his characterization. Each of his characters is pitiful, ridiculous, or both. Two of the main characters, who are in opposition throughout the novel, can be used as an example with which to see this: Kavalerov and Andrei Babichev. The character Kavalerov, an individualistic, envious drunk, narrates the first section as he stays in the house of Andrei Babichev, a man who has a large role in the new Soviet state. Kavalerov constantly describes Andrei with satire. He takes these descriptions quite far, saying once that “last night [Andrei] came back hungry and decided to have a bite to eat” and “he kept taking his pince-nez off and putting them back on, he smacked his lips, he snorted, his ears wiggled” (9). The narrator uses zoomorphism—giving a human the traits of an animal—by giving Andrei pig-like qualities, thereby degrading him, making fun of him. However, Andrei is not the only one who receives this satirizing treatment. Kavalerov himself is pitiful. He constantly talks about his desire for “fame of [his] own,” and his desire for “a lot of attention,” but when encountered with any sort of attention he reacts bitterly and stupidly (26). Andrei takes him in because was thrown out of a bar and lying in the street. He is certainly no hero. He is, rather, a “clot of envy in the dying era’s bloodstream,” as one character describes him. This is not a particularly sympathetic description of Kavalerov; he is a clot, something that causes sickness and pain, something that no one wants (101). This depiction of Kavalerov may have, in fact, allowed Envy to be the success in the Soviet Union that it was; Pravda, the official Communist newspaper, said that it demonstrated “the envy of small despicable people, the petty bourgeois flushed from their lairs by the revolution; those who are trying to initiate a ‘conspiracy of feelings’ against the majestic reorganization of our national economy and our daily life” (xi). From this viewpoint, the character of Kavalerov is a pitiful mimicry of people at the time who were worried that the revolution would strip Soviet citizens of their individual selves. And it’s true; if Kavalerov is our great defender of emotion, he’s a pathetic one. 
  
  Yet, Kavalerov is emotion’s great defender, and Olesha reserves his most beautiful language for him, creating sympathy in the reader towards Kavalerov’s case. Kavalerov at one time describes people as “surrounded by tiny inscriptions […] on forks, spoons, saucers, [Andrei’s] pince-nez frames, his buttons, and his pencils […] no one notices them. They’re waging a battle for survival […] they rise up, class against class: the letters on the street plaques do battle with the letters on the posters” (9). Kavalerov creates, in this short section, a mirror-world of our own from the trademarks and advertisements of everyday life, and then sets them to battle with one another to mirror the discord in the Soviet Union at the time. This technique, in which the author takes a thing known to the reader and makes it unknown in order to give it meaning again, is called defamiliarization; that Kavalerov gives something that is as inane as advertisements on glasses meaning makes the reader have some degree of admiration for him. Kavalerov also describes old airplanes as “looking like birds,” instead of the current ones, which he bemoans “look like heavy fish” (43). He uses defamiliarization again, here—who would look at a plane and think of a heavy fish?—to revitalize the reader’s world. His ability to make the world more beautiful makes the reader wish they could see like Kavalerov. And here is the crux of the issue of ambivalence, the decision. In spite of ourselves, we are drawn towards the battle of inscriptions instead of the battle between nations, we dream of bird-like planes instead of reveling in the take-off of the new Soviet machine. In short, we are just as pitiful as Kavalerov. As so, as Ken Kalfus says in the introduction, he is “the mad, miserable, true hero of Envy” (xii). The desire for meaning and beauty in the world wins out. 
  
  Kavalerov’s uncertain ending complicates this win. Throughout the novel, he sees one woman, Valya, who is also the niece of Andrei Babichev, as his goal. However, he fails at this goal. At the end of the novel, he is pictured with his widowed neighbor, Anichka, whom he makes fun of in the beginning of the novel. He describes her with hatred, even going so far as to call her “the symbol of [his] male degradation” who tells him to “give up [his] dreams of extraordinary love” (29). And he does give up this dream. Kavalerov’s failure to achieve his goal of Valya could be seen as uncomplicated, a death sentence for emotion, except for a long description in chapter 3 of part two, which is not clearly attached to any one character. The narrator describes a dead lightbulb which, upon being shook, “flashes again and [burns] a little longer. Inside the bulb it’s a disaster,” and so the light has “a brief, unnatural, undeniably doomed life—a fever, a too-bright incandescence, a flash,” which soon turns to eternal darkness, but “the brief flash is magnificent” (95). Kavalerov’s life can be compared to this dead, destroyed lightbulb. Inside him, it’s a disaster—that much is obvious from his twisted hatred and envy, his incapability to achieve satisfaction or joy. And perhaps he is doomed, now, to stay with Anichka forever, but there is a brief, tender moment where he sees Valya near the end of the soccer match. A spark of light. And perhaps this is success, for Kavalerov. The metaphor of the lightbulb allows that emotional success does not need to be linear. The ending is going to be bad; but the moment in the middle, of beauty, of emotion, justifies the rest. Again, Olesha’s ambivalence and uncertainty give way to the side of emotion. 
  
  Though Olesha seems to align himself with the side of emotion, the question of individualism remains largely unanswered by this text. Through satirizing everything and making us both love and hate characters with equal measure, Olesha seems to be saying that neither option is perfect—both, in fact, are ridiculous, pitiful, unnoteworthy—and, at the same time, contain beauty. Envy, written only ten years after the Bolshevik revolution—before Stalin, before the reign of Socialist Realism, before World War II—allows us to see an author who is hesitant, uncertain of the world to come. 
  
  Bibliography
  Olesha, Yuri Karlovich. Envy. Green Integer, 2012.