Yury Olesha

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Yury Olesha
Three Fat Men
Signature

Yury Karlovich Olesha (

Odessa School of Writers.[1]

Biography

Yuri Olesha was born on March 3 [

Odessa, where Yuri would eventually meet many of his fellow writers such as Isaac Babel, Ilya Ilf, and Valentin Kataev, and ultimately maintain a lifelong friendship with the latter. As a student, Yuri demonstrated a knack for science but favored literature above his other subjects and began writing during the year before his graduation cum laude from high school.[4] In 1917 Olesha entered law school but postponed his studies two years later to volunteer for the Red Army during the Civil War
; during this time, Olesha began producing propaganda for the revolution.

Olesha's writing career began while he was involved with the literary group of young writers in Odessa called "The Green Lamp," which included not only

Odessa and then in Kharkov, where he relocated in 1921. In 1922, Olesha published his first short story, "Angel," and moved to Moscow the same year to work at a popular railway worker's periodical called The Whistle. Here Olesha began writing featured satirical poetry under the pseudonym "Зубило" ("The Chisel
"), eventually publishing two collections of poems in 1924 and 1927 before turning to prose writing and drama.

Olesha's literary debut would also become one of his most popular works: the novel

Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot
later in life.

"The Right to Despair"

In the 1930s and 1940s Olesha found it increasingly difficult to publish his work as a result of stringent Stalinist censorship. Speaking to the First Congress of Soviet Writers, he said that he could not write about workers and industrial production, as required of soviet writers, because "it is difficult for me to understand the type of worker, the type of revolutionary hero. I can't be them."[5]

Early in 1936, after Stalin had instigated a public attack on Dmitri Shostakovich, a report filed at the headquarters of the NKVD quoted Olesha as saying that the composer was "a brilliant, and a blow against Shostakovich is a calamity for art." He had written the script of a film A Severe Young Man, directed by Abram Room, which dealt with inequalities in Soviet society, but according to the same police report, he feared it would be banned because it was "many times more left-art than Shostakovich"[6] The film was suppressed until the 1970s. In August 1936, he allowed himself to be pressured into signing a declaration calling for death sentences for the defendants at the first of the Moscow show trials, but when the praesidium of the writers' union discussed Boris Pasternak's refusal to sign a similar denunciation, Olesha defended him as "a perfectly soviet person".[7]

When Isaac Babel was under arrest, in 1940, he told his interrogators that Olesha was practising "the right to despair"—by getting into a series of loud arguments in taverns.[8] Despite continuing to write and edit, Olesha's career was stunted by his political environment, and on 10 May 1960 the author died of heart failure.

See also

References

  1. ISBN 9781134260706
    , 1012 p.
  2. ^ "Yuri (Karlovich) Olesha." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2001. Literature Resource Center. Web. 27 Apr. 2011.
  3. ^ Jackson, William Thomas Hobdell. European Writers: Walter Benjamin to Yuri Olesha. Vol. 11. Charles Scribner's Sons/Reference, 1983.
  4. ^ Olesha, IUriĭ Karlovich, and Judson Rosengrant, ed. & tr. No day without a line: from notebooks. Northwestern Univ. Press, 1998. Biography Index. Web. 27 Apr. 2011.
  5. ^ "Юрий Олеша". culture.ru. Retrieved 15 June 2022.
  6. ISBN 978-0-300-10646-6
    .
  7. ISBN 978-1-59558-056-6
    .
  8. ISBN 1-86046-072-0
    .
  • Harkins, William E. "Yuri (Karlovich) Olesha." European Writers: The Twentieth Century. Ed. George Stade. Vol. 11. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1990. Word Count: 1390. From Scribner Writers Series.
  • Ingdahl, Kazmiera. "' In Studies in 20th Century Russian Prose." Studies in 20th Century Russian Prose. Ed. Nils Åke Nilsson. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1982. 156–185. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Joseph Palmisano. Vol. 69. Detroit: Gale, 2004. Literature Resource Center. Web. 27 Apr. 2011.
  • Kalfus, Ken. "Soviet Sad Sack." The New York Review of Books 51.10 (2004): 30–1. Biography Index. Web. 27 Apr. 2011.
  • King, Francis. "Past, Present, and Future Odds: Envy by Yuri Olesha." Spectator. V296 i9197. 58. Nov. 13, 2004. Web. 29 Apr. 2011.
  • "Olesha, Yury Karlovich." Merriam Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1995. Literature Resource Center. Web. 27 Apr. 2011.
  • Peppard, Victor. "Iurii Karlovich Olesha" Russian prose writers between the world wars.. Gale Group, 2003. Biography Index. Web. 27 Apr. 2011.
  • Wolfson, Boris. "Escape from Literature: Constructing the Soviet Self in Yuri Olesha's Diary of the 1930s." The Russian Review 63.4 (2004): 609–20. Biography Index. Web. 27 Apr. 2011.

External links

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