OLESHA, YURY KARLOVICH

born March 3 [Feb. 19, Old Style], 1899, Elizavetgrad, Ukraine, Russian Empire died May 10, 1960, Moscow Russian writer who dealt with the conflict between the old mentality and the new in the early years of the Soviet Union. Olesha was brought up in Odessa, served in the Red Army, and afterward became a journalist. He published some humorous verse and several sharp, critical articles in the early 1920s. In 1927 he produced the novel for which he is remembered, Zavist (Envy, 1936). It is concerned with a set of six characters, three of whom accept the mechanized, conformist nature of Soviet society and three of whom rebel against that society and question its accepted values. Olesha contrasts the romantic and futilely asserted individualism of the latter against the smug and comfortable conformity of the former. Zavist was highly praised by Soviet critics as a vivid indictment of those out of sympathy with the regime, and the book made Olesha's reputation as a writer. But his incisive questioning as to whether personal ethics and individual expression had been denied their rightful place in the planned, totalitarian Soviet society lent a subtle ambiguity and irony to this otherwise ideologically acceptable work. Olesha's later works included the short stories Lyubov (Love) and Liompa (both 1929), the fairy-tale novel Tri tolstyaka (1928; Three Fat Men), and the play Spisok blagodeyaniy (1931; A List of Benefits). They all deal with variations of the theme presented in Zavist. When in the early 1930s a demand arose for a literature of Socialist Realism (positive portrayal of Communist heroes in real life), Olesha found that he could not write, in his words, in accordance with the times. He spoke openly of his doubts and misgivings at a meeting of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934. Following this admission, Olesha's name vanished from Soviet literature, giving rise to rumours in the West that he had been arrested and sent to a labour camp. Little is known of his activities in the postwar years, and only after Stalin's death did his name reenter Soviet literature. The publication in 1956 of a selection of his stories signalized his full rehabilitation; since then several volumes of his works, including many never previously published, have appeared.