Word: olesha
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...even though, in the Writers' House on Moscow's Lavrushinsky Lane, they have apartments on the same floor. Boris Pasternak has been in serious trouble because of his Nobel Prize and the deep, Christian doubts he raised about Marxism in Doctor Zhivago (TIME, Dec. 15, 1958). Yurii Olesha's own run-in with the commissars goes back about three decades. The big difference between them is that Pasternak seems unrepentant, while Olesha's repentance has led him so far along the party trail that he can now turn out highly acceptable anti-U.S. propaganda...
...Olesha once opposed Communism with such explicit passion as to make Zhivago seem like a gentle reproof...
...wrote Envy, a short novel that may be one of the true originals of Soviet fiction. It was an immediate popular and critical hit; Pravda praised it as "masterful" and "infinitely subtle." What must have baffled Olesha, and what is still baffling today, is that the commissars read it as an attack on "little people, petty bourgeois washed out of their lairs by the Revolution." It was in fact the opposite: a memorable attack on a system that crushed both the flesh and spirit of humanity. After Olesha published several other works, the commissars took a second look...
Even in translation, Olesha's writing is crammed with unexpected turns of humor and fantasy, tenderness and sweet despair...