SOURCE: Barratt, Andrew. “Yury Olesha's Three Ages of Man: A Close Reading of ‘Liompa’.” The Modern Language Review 75 (1980): 597-614.

In Yury Olesha's small corpus of literary works “Liompa” occupies a special place. Not only was it the first of the writer's mature stories to see publication, but it has also been acknowledged, by Western critics at least, as one of his finest achievements in the genre.¹ Existing studies of “Liompa” have tended to concentrate almost exclusively on thematic elements, indicating in particular the central importance to Olesha's overall world-view of the problem of perception as articulated in the story.² My purpose in this article is to attempt a more detailed and comprehensive reading of “Liompa”. By examining the formal and stylistic elements of what is possibly Olesha's most complex and elusive story I hope to throw some light on certain residual problems of interpretation.

“Liompa” is a story which yields its meaning only after considerable effort on the part of the reader. This point should be emphasized, as it is this very difficulty of comprehension that constitutes the first, and most lasting, impression upon the reader, and hence forms a vital element in the story's meaning.³ The prime importance of such an initial response to the text is stressed by L. M. O'Toole, who puts the case for attempting to state the theme of a story on the basis of a first reading: “There seems to be value in attempting to state the theme first, before analyzing the structure, partly because one's first reactions have a special validity in any art, and partly because one thereby gains a point of reference for the analysis which follows.”⁴ This argument is developed, in a different context, by Roger Fowler who insists on the importance of recent attempts by certain structuralist critics to reinstate the concept of the reader as a crucial element in the process of literary signification.⁵ Fowler himself begins a detailed and impressive analysis of a Shakespearian sonnet by recording his first impressions. By passing from the surface to the deeper structures of the text in this way the critic is able to establish a firm point of departure for the subsequent discussion.

What exactly does the reader gain from a first reading of “Liompa”? The broad outlines of the story are clear enough. The juxtaposition of three views of the world (represented by the dying Ponomaryov, the young boy Aleksandr, and the unnamed “rubber” boy) is foregrounded quite sharply, as is the story's central event—the crisis that afflicts Ponomaryov and the truth which is revealed to him on his deathbed. Yet, if this much is evident, there is a great deal more that is far from obvious, disturbingly puzzling even. What is the connexion between Ponomaryov's crisis and the behaviour of the two young boys? What is the significance of the lengthy description of the kitchen? How are we to account for the Isaac Newton passage which intrudes upon the narrative seemingly without motivation? And, perhaps most important of all, what are we to make of the highly dramatic moment when the old man utters the name “Liompa”? These general difficulties are compounded by numerous details at the level of the sentence, the clause, or even the phrase, which contribute further to the reader's sense of bewilderment at the seeming incoherence of Olesha's narrative. The magnitude of the problem is such that there would probably be few readers able, on the basis of a first reading, to formulate the story's theme in terms other than a résumé of Ponomaryov's last thoughts.

On the surface level “Liompa” seems puzzling to the extent that one suspects deliberate perversity on the part of the author. Indeed, there are certain signs that Olesha does set out to thwart our conventional notions of fictional coherence and unity. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the very title of the story. The function of titles in literary texts is a subject which has as yet attracted little, if any, systematic critical attention. The structural importance of the title is, of course, self-evident. As the first element in the text it is, inevitably, the first factor also in determining the nature of the reader's response to the narrative proper which is to follow. The title “Liompa” is an example of what might conveniently be termed an enigmatic title; that is, a title whose meaning, without further contextual clues, is at first uncertain. Commonly, the enigmatic title is a proper name, such as Gor'ky's “Chelkash”. Even to the native Russian reader this title poses a puzzle: is Chelkash the name of a person, or of a place, or is it perhaps not a proper noun at all, but simply a foreign word of unknown meaning?⁶

The title “Liompa”, initially at least, functions in precisely the same way.⁷ Just like the title of the Gor'ky story, Olesha's too is, to the Russian ear, an alien word whose semantic connotations are immediately unclear. Yet the very use of such a title leads to certain predictable expectations. By marking the title in this way the author draws attention to its importance, and we tacitly assume that the story itself will render the title and its thematic significance fully intelligible. Gor'ky satisfies our curiosity; in his story we learn quite quickly that Chelkash is a person, although the aura of mystery surrounding his personality continues to exercise the reader's imagination. Olesha, on the other hand, reneges on this implicit contract. Our expectation that the significance of the title will be revealed in the course of reading the story is undermined. Having aroused interest in the exotic word “Liompa”, Olesha builds up suspense by carefully avoiding any clue to its meaning until very late in his story, where its appearance is quite unexpected. The very unexpectedness of the context in which the word appears creates an oddly contradictory effect. On the one hand our curiosity is satisfied; we do at least understand how the story came to receive its unusual title. Yet this satisfaction is somehow deficient, as the meaning of the utterance and its context has still to be penetrated.

Olesha challenges our conventional expectations in other ways too. The choice of the springtime setting for a story about death offends against one of the most pervasive literary traditions. And the entire text, with its disjointed syntax and radical disruptions of “flow”—the constant shifts of viewpoint, the intrusion of seemingly irrelevant details—contributes to a sense of dislocation, confronting the reader with fresh and unexpected difficulties in almost every paragraph, and frustrating his initial attempts to discover any obvious pattern of coherence.

If I have taken what might seem excessive pains to emphasize the difficulties facing the reader of “Liompa”, it has been in order to indicate that these problems of intelligibility contribute not only to the story's aesthetic impact, but also to its central theme. By refusing to give his story an immediately apparent communicative focus, Olesha provides a surplus of potential meaning which forces the reader to examine the very process by which he assigns meaning to literary texts. That this bears directly upon the story's central theme, the problem of how man assigns meaning to the phenomena of the physical world, is a point which hardly needs to be laboured.

The cause of much of the difficulty in reading “Liompa” is that Olesha, like many other modernist writers, has created a text in which the story element itself is not the primary source of coherence. Although the account of Ponomaryov's crisis is clearly central to the meaning of “Liompa”, this story alone cannot account for the presence of a large amount of material that is extraneous to it. We must look elsewhere, therefore, for the key to textual organization. On this subject the work of Lotman seems to be of help:

The ordered quality of any text can be realized along two lines. In linguistic terms it can be characterized as ordering in terms of paradigmatics and syntagmatics, in mathematical terms—of equivalency and order. The character and function of these two types of ordering are different. If in narrative genre the second type predominates, then texts with a strongly expressed modelling function (and it is precisely here that poetry, especially lyric poetry, belongs) are constructed with marked predominance of the first.⁸

The same basically valid distinction is made by Barthes, whose views are neatly summarized by O'Toole:

Within a literary text, Barthes claims, we may distinguish two types of function: (a) those properly labelled “function”, which relate units in sequence through the narrative (i.e. syntagmatically) and (b) those which he labels “indices” which relate a given unit to the more general, abstract purposes of the story (i.e. paradigmatically).⁹

The crucial notion in paradigmatic ordering, as Lotman explains, is that of binary opposition, by means of which patterns of parallel and contrast are established at all levels of the text. In the remainder of this essay I will attempt to demonstrate that “Liompa” is organized according to this principle, and displays a discernible tripartite structure. In the opening section (paragraphs 1 to 10) Olesha develops a series of polar oppositions which constitute the thematic “core” of the text, a fundamental revelation about the nature of human existence, the full implications of which are subsequently revealed to the reader in the second and third parts (paragraphs 11 to 17, and 18 to 30, respectively).

In the first ten paragraphs of “Liompa”, Olesha establishes a pattern of polar opposition which is realized at many levels of the text. Perhaps most immediately striking is the contrast of setting, between the kitchen and the bedroom. The details, although not fully explicit, make it evident enough that the characters inhabit a communal dwelling of the type that was only too common in the urban centres of Russia in the early years of Soviet rule. What is striking, however, is that Olesha transforms the mundane, even squalid conditions of the kitchen into a positive hymn to life.

The kitchen is the realm of bustling communal activity: the young Aleksandr works on his model plane, other occupants of the house prepare food, eat sunflower seeds, and sing songs. Even the rat in the rubbish bin seems somehow to participate in the joyous celebration of the beautiful spring evening. The season is itself symbolic; spring is the time of rebirth, and the details of the description convey a vitality that is almost physically tangible. The predominance of food (potatoes, eggs, crayfish, sunflower seeds) emphasizes the physiological process of human life, as do the references to sun and water, the life-giving elements. These are present not only in the natural world, but also in the man-made environment. Water, in particular, features prominently here, gurgling in the pipes, escaping from the taps, and boiling on the primus to cook the crayfish. Colours too are the colours of life: gold, yellow, and green. The one exception is the colour of the primus flame. Here, significantly, the colour blue is explicitly linked with the notion of death: “It died as a meek blue flame” (p. 191). The choice of vocabulary, with a strong emphasis on verbs of action, and the cluster “life, lodger, live crayfish” (zhizn', zhilets, zhivogo raka) also contributes strongly to the air of joyous vitality which pervades the kitchen scene.

Ponomaryov's bedroom, by contrast, is introduced at once as the scene of lonely death; food is replaced by medicine, the bright yellow light by a flickering candle, the movement and vigour by the motionless figure of the room's solitary occupant:

In the room adjoining the kitchen lay the seriously ill Ponomaryov. He lay in the room alone, a candle was burning, a bottle of medicine stood above his head, a label hung down from the bottle.

(p. 191)

Here not only the vocabulary but even the intonation conveys a feeling of inertia. The phrases of the second sentence conform to a rhythmic pattern of masculine endings, the tendency towards regularity culminating in the perfectly regular anapaestic metre of ŏt flăkónă tyănúlsyă rĕtsépt.

The kitchen is part of the wider universe; its doors stand symbolically open. Olesha's description leads us beyond the confines of the building into the yard; we are offered glimpses of the pavement and of the food store opposite. The bedroom, on the other hand, is remote from the world outside and represents the totality of Ponomaryov's drastically restricted and impoverished universe.

The juxtaposition of kitchen and bedroom is further emphasized by a radical shift in point of view, which brings into focus other important aspects of the polar opposition between the two symbolic realms. Although the entire narrative is conveyed in the third-person, omniscient mode, Olesha alternates, within this framework, between the poles of objectivity and subjectivity. These two terms are much abused: the precise sense in which they are intended here will become apparent in the course of the following discussion.

I will begin with the description of the kitchen and its occupants, and a statement by Alain Robbe-Grillet which seems apposite to our present concern. Writing on the role of description in the New Novel, Robbe-Grillet comments: “Many specialists still deprecate them; they find them pointless and chaotic. Pointless, because they have no real relation to the action, and chaotic, because they don't fulfil what is thought to be their fundamental purpose: to make the reader see.”¹⁰ These remarks (like so many in the French writer's theoretical articles) seem especially relevant to Olesha's work. The description of the kitchen in “Liompa” is precisely such a “pointless and chaotic” passage, and these features contribute in no small way to the story's difficulty.

Description in the pre-modernist novel and short story normally serves two basic functions. The first is to provide a readily recognizable picture of reality (“to make the reader see”, as Robbe-Grillet puts it). The second is to endow this fictional world with order and perspective, hence permitting the reader to discern the relevance of what is being described. To illustrate the point I cite the following passage from Chapter 11 of Ottsy i deti, in which the interior of Kukshina's house is described. Arkady and Bazarov are led into the drawing-room by Sitnikov:

The young people went in. The room in which they found themselves looked more like a study than a sitting-room. Papers, letters, thick issues of Russian magazines, mostly uncut, were spread about the dusty tables; scattered cigarette butts were everywhere to be seen.¹¹

Turgenev's description, like Olesha's, relies on impressionistic details rather than an exhaustive catalogue of furnishings. Yet it has none of the “pointlessness” or “chaos” of the Olesha passage. The details recorded are not random; they display a readily discernible “logic”. The general impression of the room, introduced in the second sentence, is supported and amplified by the specific details presented in the third. There is obvious purpose here too; objects are described not for their own sake, as the backcloth for the action, but rather as factors indicating the essential characteristics of the room's occupant. The dusty tables, the scattered cigarette-ends, and the untidy heap of journals reveal Kukshina's slovenly nature. The fact that she smokes cigarettes at all is a sign of her ostentatious “emancipation”, whilst the uncut journals invite a certain scepticism about her pretensions to culture. Turgenev's description, then, is unashamedly anthropocentric: the physical environment is of importance only inasmuch as it reflects the character or mood of the human protagonists.

Before returning to the Olesha passage, I wish to mention one further aspect of description which is well illustrated by the famous passage from the beginning of Lermontov's “Bela”:

This valley is a wonderful place! Inaccessible mountains on all sides, reddish cliffs covered in green ivy and crowned with clumps of plane-trees, yellow precipices, furrowed with gullies, and high, high up there the golden fringe of snow, while below, the Aragva, embracing another nameless river, which bursts loudly from a dark ravine full of mist, stretches like a silver thread and sparkles, like the scales of a snake.¹²

Both the tone and the focus of this description are quite different, the effusive, poetic expression of this piece contrasting strikingly with the neutral, prosaic manner of the Turgenev passage. So infectious is the narrator's enthusiasm for the awesome beauty of the Caucasian scenery that the entire piece is dominated by his personality. Yet the description is not anthropocentric in quite the same way as the Turgenev passage. Despite the bold anthropomorphism of the metaphor “embracing”, which is reinforced by the humanizing metaphor “crowned”, the impressive contours of the Koyshaur valley are primarily of importance in their own right. Of particular interest to our present discussion, however, is the prominence in Lermontov's description of spatial perspective, which allows the reader both to identify, and to identify with, a human point of view which is both emotional and physical.

When viewed against this background the unconventionality of Olesha's kitchen description is readily apparent. The Olesha extract is neither anthropocentric in the manner of the Turgenev passage, nor “humanist” in the manner of the Lermontov.¹³ The details of the kitchen tell us nothing of those who use it, except that they eat. Similarly, the neutrality of the third-person narrative makes it impossible to draw any conclusion as to the personality of the narrator. What is more, there is very little in the passage to “help the reader to see”. The details we have are too fragmentary, and too unspecific, to create a precise visual impression of the setting.

The passage, then, seems deprived of any evident “logic”: it serves neither to characterize the actors, nor to establish a dramatized narrative consciousness, nor even to create that vivid visual impression of reality so important to narrative fiction. Equally, there is no obvious attempt to exploit the description for the purpose of social criticism; on the contrary, the squalid conditions of the communal kitchen combine to form a positive celebration of life. Yet this very absence of “logic”, although at first perplexing, is the key to the rationale of the passage. By depriving the description of any sign of ordered perception, Olesha rids it of a recognizably human viewpoint, intellectual, emotional, or physical. Both the nature of the items recorded and the order of their presentation create the impression of total randomness. Details are highly concrete,¹⁴ being composed almost entirely of visual and audible sense impressions, with a strong emphasis on the former. Together with the highly disjointed syntax,¹⁵ this has the impact almost of mechanical perception: it is as if a camera had been placed in the kitchen, its position and the focus of its zoom lens continually changed, and its shutter released at random intervals, whilst, independently, a tape-recorder had been switched on at various moments to capture sounds. In this way the description achieves a unique kind of objectivity, which seemingly excludes the mediating influence of the human mind, to present a more “pure” perception of the phenomenal world.

Given the general simplicity and concreteness of the extract, the cluster of anthropomorphic metaphors at the end of the second paragraph invites special comment:

The tap blew its nose quietly. Then, up above, the pipes would begin to talk in several voices.

The tap conversed.

(p. 191)

The notion of animation is also present in the sentence:

Suddenly, of their own accord (sami po sebe), two or three drops would fly out of the tap.

(p. 191)

The kitchen thereby emerges as a universe in which inanimate objects live their own lives, independent of man. The active role of human beings is correspondingly reduced. To this end Olesha employs a number of devices of depersonalization. Firstly, there are two cases, in consecutive sentences, where personal pronouns are omitted, shifting the emphasis away from the human agent:

In the kitchen finely-chopped potatoes were being fried (zharili melko narezannuyu kartoshku). A primus stove was being lit (Zazhigali primus).

(p. 191)

This process is taken a stage further in two other instances where the nominalization of verbs removes even the implicit reference to an agent:

Around the stove various kinds of stirring and crackling began (nachinalos' raznokharakternoye sheveleniye i potryoskivaniye).

Singing rang out (Razdavalos' peniye).

(p. 191)

The first example is particularly striking, as the form of expression disguises the fact that the noise around the cooker is caused by the people preparing their evening meal. It is only by extrapolation that we conclude the involvement of a human agent here at all. Finally, the use of the general “people” (lyudi), and of the highly impersonal, even official, phrase “one lodger” (odin zhilets), together with the almost total absence of proper names, serves further to reduce the status of human beings. In the kitchen description man is not the centre of the world but merely a part of it, and not, perhaps, the most significant part at that.

Point of view here is best defined not as impersonal, but rather as apersonal. By creating a vision of the world in which the “normal” human perspective is destroyed, Olesha establishes a unique sense of distance between the reader, who is allowed to share this privileged viewpoint, and the characters of the story, who are not.¹⁶ Different though these three characters are, each is seen ultimately as being in this important respect “human, all too human”.

Before we examine point of view as it functions in the bedroom passage, we should note one further aspect of the kitchen description, namely, the two sentences dealing with the primus stove:

The life of the primus began magnificently: like a flare up to the ceiling. It died as a meek blue flame.

(p. 191)

This extract is strongly marked stylistically by the concentration of abstract vocabulary, which, moreover, divides into semantically contrasting pairs: life/died (zhizn'/umiral), magnificent/meek (pyshno/krotkim). As the story progresses this passage takes on a symbolic significance; the primus stove becomes a metaphor for man himself, whose life passes from the “magnificent flare” of youth to the “meek blue flame” of old age.

The fourth paragraph marks a gradual transition from the apersonal, physical world of the kitchen to the anthropocentric, psychic world of Ponomaryov. Stylistically, this paragraph is of a piece with the preceding three: the syntax is still simple in the extreme, and the vocabulary concrete. But this stylistic unity masks a radical difference, for here the description is decidedly anthropomorphic in the manner of the Turgenev passage quoted earlier. No longer does the itemization of objects give the impression of randomness; each item is of interest for what it tells us of the room's sickly occupant; the physical environment is no more than an extension of the human personality and its condition.

The fourth paragraph, then, prepares us for the following six, in which we become immersed in the egocentric and idiosyncratic psychic world of Ponomaryov. Strictly speaking, we should talk here of Ponomaryov's psychic worlds, as we witness him first in a state of delirium, then in a condition of consciousness. In each case the objects of the real world recede from view as they are supplanted, first by the free associations of Ponomaryov's unconscious mind, and then by the abstractions created by his intellect. Olesha is careful to distinguish between these two states. This is done most obviously at the level of style: the short, simple sentences of paragraph 6 (delirium) contrast with the complex syntax of paragraphs 8 and 10 (consciousness).¹⁷ The time-scale is also quite different. If the time element does not enter at all into the delirious state, the conscious state is characterized by a dominant sequentiality, with events ordered in relation to a fixed moment, the moment that Ponomaryov realized that he was dying.

Leaving aside for the present the further implications of Ponomaryov's delirium, I will concentrate here on the account of his conscious state only. Just as the temporal element is highly egocentric, so also is the spatial perspective. Crucial here is the clause:

Then the decreasing began to draw ever nearer to the centre, to him, to the heart—into the yard, the house, the corridor, the room.

(p. 192)

Ponomaryov is the centre of this world. The passage is saturated with references to him,¹⁸ a significant number of which deal with spatial relations:

The sick man was surrounded by a few things … (Bol'nogo okruzhali …) … close thing (blizkaya veshch') … irrevocably distant (nevozvratimo dalyokoy).

… far from him … (daleko ot nego)

… alongside him … (vroven' s nim)

… to retreat from him … (udalyat'sya ot nego)

… close by, at his side … (ryadom, pod bokom)

… under his very eyes … (na glazakh u nego)

… on the way to him … (po doroge k nemu)

(p. 192)

The mobile, apersonal viewpoint employed in the kitchen description is here replaced by a point of view which is both highly personal and static.

The contrast is emphasized also at the level of lexis. Here, in marked distinction from the earlier passage, vocabulary is predominantly abstract. The word “thing” (veshch') and its derivatives or substitutes, for example, appears no less than fifteen times,¹⁹ which is in fact exactly the same figure as for concrete nouns. What is more, the references to specific physical objects or actions occur almost invariably as illustrations to an abstract generalization. This is a dominant motif:

With each day the quantity of things decreased. Such a close thing as a railway ticket had already become irrevocably distant to him.

… the real pain came when it became clear that even those things which had moved alongside him, were also beginning to retreat from him. Thus, in one day, he had been abandoned by the street, his job, the mail, horses.

And now such disappearances had begun swiftly close by, at his side: the corridor had already slipped from his power, and in his room itself, under his very eyes, his coat, the door-bolt and his shoes had lost their meaning.

Of all their vast and unnecessary (prazdnogo) quantity, death had left him only a few, and these were things that, had it been in his power, he would never have admitted into his domain. He had things foisted upon him. He received terrifying visits and looks from his acquaintances.

(p. 192)

This structural feature contrasts strangely with the semantic level of the passage: whilst Ponomaryov has come to accept that the physical world is beyond his control, his language reflects a perverse tenacity in subordinating concrete objects to the abstract constructs of his intellect. This contradiction is essential to an understanding of Ponomaryov's character, as we shall see.

The key concept throughout the passage under discussion is power, which is reflected in a recurrent semantic motif:

… how few of them remained in his power.
     (v yego vlasti)
… slipped from his power …
     (iz vlasti yego)
… had it been in his power …
     (v yego vlasti)
He realised that he was unable …
     (ne v silakh)
… he would never have admitted into his domain …
     (v svoyo khozyaystvo)

(p. 192)

In Ponomaryov's world things exist in order to be controlled by man, to be transformed into language, the emblem of man's evolutionary superiority. It is precisely the loss of this power that causes Ponomaryov such anguish. Significantly, his mortal illness is seen by him ultimately as a threat to the power of language:

… his coat, the door-bolt, and his shoes had lost their meaning. (prekratilos' znacheniye pal'to, dvernoy zadvizhki, bashmakov)

(p. 192)

Death is feared not because it signals the end of physical existence, but because its approach suddenly challenges Ponomaryov's entire view of the world, which is based on his faith in man's supremacy.

The opening of “Liompa”, then, establishes a network of polar oppositions which may be summarized under the headings: kitchen/bedroom, physical world/psychic world, world of objects/world of language, apersonal viewpoint/personal viewpoint. All of these may be subsumed under the more fundamental opposition of life and death.

It might be tempting to add to our list one further antithetical pair, at the level of character: Aleksandr/Ponomaryov. Certainly, Aleksandr's youth and vigour contrast sharply with the debility of the dying Ponomaryov. The opposition is also suggested by the structural prominence given to each of the characters at the beginning of the two sections:

The boy Aleksandr was planing wood in the kitchen.

In the room adjoining the kitchen lay the seriously ill Ponomaryov.

(p. 191)

The two stand, as it were, at the threshold of their separate, symbolic realms. Olesha suggests an almost physical bond between Aleksandr and his environment by means of an interesting detail of language. The “golden, edible crusts” (zolotistyye, s''yedobnyye korki) which form on the cuts on the boy's hands are echoed in the last sentence of the kitchen passage, where we encounter the “yellow light” (zholtyy svet) and the “food store” (s''yestnaya lavka). The connexion in the latter case is especially marked in Russian, being lexical as well as semantic.

The opposition of Aleksandr and Ponomaryov, although evident, is only superficial. Moreover, the beginning of the second section of the story (paragraphs 11 and 12) causes us to view the two characters in a radically different way, as it is the similarities between them which now come to the fore. The parallels are both formal and thematic. Perhaps most obvious is the stylistic unity of paragraph 12, where Aleksandr's thoughts are revealed, and those earlier paragraphs dealing with Ponomaryov's intellectual world. Here, too, sentences tend to be comparatively long,²⁰ the syntax complex, and the vocabulary predominantly abstract. As in the preceding passage also, there is an obviously human logic at work; the entire piece is a syllogism which cogently argues the boy's claim to be considered an adult.

Most important at the thematic level is the seriousness with which both characters view their ability to control their environment. For Ponomaryov, as we have seen, the prospect of imminent death is disturbing because it has caused him to doubt his supremacy over the physical world. In Aleksandr's case it is his capacity to shape objects in accordance with his will that is the very essence of his claim to adulthood. It should be noted that this capacity is explicitly linked with the boy's command of the laws of science, a point to which I shall return later. Adulthood, therefore, takes on a limited and rather specialized connotation in this context, being measured not so much in terms of years lived, but rather in terms of the individual's ability to rationalize the flux of his experience, and to use this ability to control the physical world.

Olesha also stresses the similarity between Aleksandr and Ponomaryov in his use of point of view. In both cases the presentation is non-dramatic (with the brief exception of Ponomaryov's delirium). The omniscient narrator is obtrusive, telling rather than showing, and emphasizing the general condition rather than the specific state. It is as if the narrator has taken on the role of spokesman for Aleksandr and Ponomaryov whilst the characters themselves remain in mute passivity. The unity of the narrative voice serves both to emphasize the similarities between the two characters, and also to play down their differences. Had a more dramatic mode of characterization been employed, the obvious signs of Aleksandr's youth (his lack of linguistic and intellectual sophistication, for example) would certainly have been more conspicuous. As it is, Aleksandr emerges not so much as a child, but rather as a young adult, ready to follow in Ponomaryov's footsteps, the difference in their age being ultimately less important than their similarity in outlook.

The proximity of Ponomaryov and Aleksandr is foregrounded again later by a parallel in their behaviour towards the “rubber” boy. On separate occasions the “rubber” boy approaches both Aleksandr and Ponomaryov, unwittingly antagonizes them both, and prompts an aggressive response. The fact that the “rubber” boy is repulsed by both characters in this way suggests a new pattern of opposition: Aleksandr-Ponomaryov/“rubber” boy. Such an interpretation is not without foundation; the inner world of the “rubber” boy differs quite markedly from those of the other two characters. His is a world comprised almost entirely of specific sense impressions. The child's mind simply records without comprehension his visual sensations of the parquet tiles, of the dust under the skirting-board, and of the cracks in the plaster—a far cry, indeed, from the intellectual world of Ponomaryov and the engineer's mentality of Aleksandr. The charm of the passage is guaranteed not only by the naivety of the “rubber” boy's perception, but also by the dramatic immediacy of the description.

We should not, however, press this argument too far. Different though the inner world of the “rubber” boy is, the distance is not so great as it might first seem. Highly significant in this respect is the presence of the ubiquitous omniscient narrator who intrudes on a number of occasions with explanatory comments:

(The bicycle had been leant against the wall by a pedal. The pedal had made a scratch in the wallpaper. The bicycle seemed to be supported against the wall by the scratch.)

Suddenly there was a trick of lighting; the boy hurried towards it, but hardly had he taken a step when the change of position destroyed the trick, and the boy looked behind him, up and down, looked behind the stove, searched, and finally threw up his hands in confusion at not finding it.

(p. 193)

By explaining in this way the aberrations and insufficiencies of the “rubber” boy's view of the world the narrator consistently undermines the magic of the passage. We are not allowed to escape entirely the rational, scientific explanation of phenomena. What is more, the perception of the “rubber” boy is not itself completely free of a rational element. The narrator explains:

The boy had only entered into the cognition of things (tol'ko vstupil v poznavaniye veshchey). He was not yet able to distinguish temporal differences in their existence.

(p. 193)

The use of the perfective aspect vstupil makes it clear that the “rubber” boy's initiation into rational thinking has already taken place, and the adverbial phrase “not yet” insists that the development of these intellectual faculties is inevitable. In the course of the passage we even witness the child's tentative efforts to order his perceptions in a rational manner, to encompass them within a framework of causality:

The spider flew away simply at the boy's thought of touching the spider with his hand.

(p. 193)

Although the causal relationship indicated here is clearly unsatisfactory from the scientific viewpoint, its very presence is a sign of the “rubber” boy's endeavour to organize his experiences rationally.

The revelation of character in the central, second section of “Liompa” displays, therefore, a discernible pattern, whereby an initial opposition (Aleksandr/Ponomaryov, Aleksandr-Ponomaryov/“rubber” boy) masks a more profound level of similarity, indicating that the differences between the three characters are of degree, rather than kind. If the “rubber” boy and Ponomaryov stand at opposite poles of experience, they are, nevertheless, part of a continuum in which Aleksandr occupies a middle position. Together they represent three ages in the life of man, the development from childhood to old age being presented as a gradual and inevitable process of alienation from the phenomena of the real world, and a corresponding retreat into the abstractions constructed by the human intellect. The reverse order of character presentation achieves an ironic effect. Because we are taken first into the mind of the dying Ponomaryov, who has suddenly come to learn the transience and fragility of his power to control the world, Aleksandr's natural pride in his engineering prowess seems tragically misplaced, whilst the “corruption” of the “rubber” boy invests the entire process of human life with a sense of inescapable circularity.

Aleksandr and the “rubber” boy are little more than ciphers, whose “character” extends no further than their function in Olesha's schematic life of man. Ponomaryov, however, has a more important role. Unlike the two boys, he is individualized in a number of ways, and it is his crisis of consciousness which provides “Liompa” with the high dramatic climax of the third part.

Before examining in detail the story's climax, we should consider what we learn of Ponomaryov's character prior to this event. Explicit information about him is very sketchy indeed: we know nothing, for example, of his age, his occupation, or of the nature of his fatal illness. The sum of our factual knowledge derives from the single sentence:

Countries disappeared, America, the possibility of being handsome or rich, of having a family (he was a bachelor).

(p. 192)

Insufficient though these details are, they shed considerable light upon Ponomaryov's character, as they enable the reader to interpret the associations cast up by his unconscious mind during his delirium:

Towards evening he became delirious. The medicine bottle looked at him. The label stuck out like the train of a gown. The bottle was a duchess getting married. The bottle was called “Name-day” (tezoimenitstvo).

(p. 192)

The process of association comprises two main strands. Firstly, there are the sexual connotations of the item of female clothing, which are reinforced by the concept of marriage and the overt sensuality of the scent-bottle association.²¹ Secondly, each image also alludes to nobility, wealth, and prestige. These implications also become progressively more explicit: the train of the dress suggests merely a lady of wealth and glamour; in the second association she is transformed into a person of specifically noble extraction (a duchess); the word tezoimenitstvo has similar overtones, being a term reserved for the saint's day of those of noble birth, including the Tsar and his immediate family. These images of wealth, status, and sexuality, which rise unsolicited from Ponomaryov's unconscious, would seem, therefore, to indicate the presence of unfulfilled desires which have been suppressed by his conscious mind.

Ponomaryov's poverty may be understood both literally and metaphorically. Deprived of life's blessings, he has retreated into a world of intellectual activity, which offers a surrogate of the power and fulfilment denied him in real life. Intellectual endeavour has become the sum of Ponomaryov's life; hence, it is hardly surprising that his death-bed thoughts on the limitations of his intellect should lead to a profound crisis. The cynical remark he makes to his visitors is transparently an act of mock bravado. Equally comprehensible is his resentment of the “rubber” boy, who stands at the threshold of life, and has at least the prospect of true fulfilment. Ponomaryov's attempt to frighten the young boy is preceded by the following passage:

Ponomaryov watched the child with melancholy (s toskoy). The child walked about. Things rushed to meet him. He smiled at them, not knowing a single name. He went out and a magnificent train of things fought its way after him.

(p. 193)

The metaphor “magnificent train” (pyshnyy shleyf) is richly suggestive. Both parts of the phrase have occurred separately earlier in the story. The train of the dress was, of course, one of the images cast up by Ponomaryov's unconscious in delirium. The adjective “magnificent” (pyshnyy) appeared as an adverb in the description of the primus stove:

The life of the primus began magnificently (pyshno): like a flare up to the ceiling.

(p. 191)

The collocation “magnificent train of things” (pyshnyy shleyf veshchey) therefore, draws together the notions of life, sexuality, and the physical world, all of which are now beyond the old man's reach.

The entire section of “Liompa” dealing with Ponomaryov's final crisis (paragraphs 19 to 26) is highly dramatic. The ominiscient narrator almost ceases to function as commentator, and direct speech and inner monologue feature prominently for the only time in the story. Summary is absent: we are confronted by a chain of specific events. The dramatic immediacy is created also by the syntax. Consider, in particular, the climax of the passage:

He realized that at all costs he must stop and not think about what the rat's name might be,—nevertheless he continued, knowing that at the precise moment when this one nonsensical and terrible name came to him, he would die.

“Liompa” he shouted suddenly in a fearful voice.

(p. 194)

The long sentence, with its staccato syntax, conveys vividly Ponomaryov's breathless tension, which is finally released in the act of naming. The sense of release is all the greater as this is the moment too when the reader's curiosity about the name “Liompa” is at last satisfied.

If the dramatic impact of this scene is apparent, even on a first reading, its function is not so immediately obvious. Here, it seems, two questions should be posed. First, what is the nature of Ponomaryov's crisis? Second, how are we to understand his behaviour?

The first question may be answered quite simply by quoting directly from Ponomaryov's thoughts:

“I thought that the external world did not exist”, he reflected, “I thought that things were governed by my eye and hearing; I thought that the world would cease to exist when I ceased to exist. But now … I see everything turning its back on me though I am still alive. But I do still exist! So why don't things exist? I thought it was my brain that gave them shape, weight, and colour; but now they have left me and only their names—useless names which have lost their masters—swarm in my brain. And what use are these names to me?”

(p. 193)

This is the moment of supreme revelation. Ponomaryov has become totally conscious of the fact that his intellectual mode of existence has led to bankruptcy, to a ridiculously extreme solipsism. His reliance on intellect has caused him to reverse the natural order, seeing the world as a product of man, and the phenomena of physical reality as the product of language.

In order to answer the second question we should, perhaps, take account of the Russian literary tradition, and, in particular, the precedent of Tolstoy's “Smert' Ivana Il'icha”. Ponomaryov's predicament is, in essence, very similar to that of Tolstoy's character. The resolution, however, is quite different. In the Tolstoy story, the moment of revelation is followed by repentance and then redemption: at the very last moment, Ivan Il'ich accedes to a new state of grace. Olesha resists the Tolstoyan example. In “Liompa” the moment of revelation gives way to no feeling of repentance on the part of Ponomaryov; instead, it breeds a crude resentment which he directs against the innocent “rubber” boy. Natural though this reaction is, it is quite paradoxical, for Ponomaryov now tries to frighten the “rubber” boy with the very same solipsistic notions he had just come to reject. This irony is the source of pathos rather than antipathy to Ponomaryov, the pathos being guaranteed by the fact that the old man's words are powerless to harm the child, who has already left the room.

Ponomaryov's tragic duality, his inability to abandon his discredited philosophy, reaches its climax in the “Liompa” scene. The problem of language, as we have seen, is central to Ponomaryov's moment of revelation, which ends with his awareness of the “useless names” which “swarm in his brain”. Yet the process of naming is deeply rooted in Ponomaryov's mentality; it is an automatic reflex, the first stage in bringing the data of the real world under the control of the intellect. The entire “Liompa” scene is a grotesque parody of the process of naming. The very absurdity of giving a rat a proper name is patent enough, yet this absurdity is compounded by the fact that the rat has not been directly observed by Ponomaryov. The old man, in fact, merely assumes the presence of the rat in the kitchen on the basis of his past experience; most of the sounds that he hears are usually caused by rats. Thus he is naming not a rat, which is absurd enough, but an intellectual abstraction. This is not all. The ultimate irony is that Ponomaryov is distinctly aware, despite, or perhaps even because of his delirium, of the utter absurdity of his futile act. Yet the force of habit is too strong: Ponomaryov's awareness of the truth is unable to prevent him from perpetuating his conceit.

The naming of the rat is an unconscious attempt by Ponomaryov to reassert a mastery whose illusiveness he fully understands. As before, the notion of power is firmly embedded in the language:

Ponomaryov listened: the rat was doing the chores (khozyaynichayet), it rattled the plates, turned on the tap, rustled in the bucket.

(p. 194)

The verb khozyaynichayet is quite untranslatable into English, as its literal meaning “engaged in household chores” is complicated by its overtone of resentment, which is perhaps best conveyed by the idiom “to throw one's weight around”.²² Apparent here, as in Ponomaryov's subsequent thought, “Aha, it's doing the dishes” (Ege, ona sudomoyka), is a grudging respect for the supposed power of the rat. This fixation with power is evident a little earlier too, where the same lexical motif appears in the old man's thoughts of “useless names which have lost their masters” (bespoleznyye imena, poteryavshiye khozyayev). Try as he may, Ponomaryov is unable to accept the idea of a world in which he does not wield absolute power; this is the barrier to his salvation.

At the end of the story Ponomaryov is reduced to the pathetic condition of endlessly repeating his futile gesture of self-assertion. The sense of anticlimax is almost palpable. Once again Olesha delights in thwarting our expectations. Ponomaryov's certainty that he will die once the word “Liompa” is pronounced proves unfounded; he lives on for several hours after this event. After the excitement of the passage culminating in the desperate cry the following extract seems undramatic in the extreme:

The house was asleep. It was early morning, just after five. The boy Aleksandr was awake. The door from the kitchen to the yard was open. The sun was still somewhere below. The dying man walked through the kitchen, bending at the waist and stretching out his arms with the hands hanging down limply. The boy Aleksandr ran through the yard. The model plane flew ahead of him. This was the last thing that Ponomaryov saw.

(p. 194)

The utter impersonality of the narrative, which verges on the callous in the use of the depersonalizing “the dying man” (umirayushchiy), contrasts strikingly with the highly dramatic “Liompa” scene. We observe Ponomaryov's final sad attempt to bring things under his control with a detachment which is akin to cynicism. The anticlimax points up the very superfluity of his actions, and makes the actual moment of his death seem quite immaterial; for us he is already dead, trapped in the strait-jacket of his own intellectuality. Hence, the final words of the “rubber” boy (who understands neither the significance of the word “coffin”, nor the function of its objective referent) inject a note both of wry humour and of condemnation; it is as if life itself were passing final judgement on the follies of the old man.

“Liompa” is an extreme and unambiguous statement of Olesha's critique of pure reason and of the conventional modes of thinking which derive from the modern scientific tradition extending back to Newton. The connexion is made explicitly in the following passage, which, significantly, immediately precedes Ponomaryov's moment of enlightenment:

In the world there was an apple. It shone amidst the leaves, revolved gently, grasped and took with it as it turned chunks of daylight, the blueness of the garden, the window frame. The law of gravity lay in wait for it beneath the tree, on the black earth, on the ant-hills. Tiny ants were running amongst the hills. Newton was sitting in the garden. Within the apple was concealed a multitude of causes, able to produce a still greater multitude of effects.

(p. 193)

This extract is marked off from the rest of the narrative by virtue of its uncertain motivation (are these Ponomaryov's thoughts, or is this a digression by the narrator?), and constitutes a self-sufficient parable that encapsulates Olesha's argument against scientific thought.

The presence of fruit in Olesha's works, as E. K. Beaujour has pointed out, is normally associated with a state of “blessedness”, often in the form of consummated love (for example, the pears in “Lyubov'”, or the cherries in “Vishnyovaya kostochka”)²³ Of the present passage the same author writes: “The apple in “Liompa” symbolically holds all the richness of the world.”²⁴ The apple is both the food which sustains life, and the beauty and mystery which give it meaning. Its glossy, rounded surface captures the light and transforms the surrounding world into strange, distorted reflections. The “law of gravity” which “lies in wait” beneath the tree injects a sinister note into the description. The verb podzhidat' has connotations of stealth and predation, whilst, in a metaphorical sense, the law of gravity is a predator which threatens to rob the apple of everything but its potential to illustrate this basic principle of physics.

Somewhat unexpected here, perhaps, is the detail of the “minute ants” which swarm amongst the tussocks under the tree. This is the third in a series of references to invertebrates in “Liompa”. The first is to the insects which walk over the stone whilst Aleksandr builds his model (paragraph 13), and the second, of course, is to the spider that so captivates the attention of the “rubber” boy. These are all part of the minute texture of life that normally escapes detection. In addition, the ants in this passage suggest one of the multitude of possible alternative consequences of the apple falling from the tree. As the apple lies on the ground it would be devoured by the ants and other small creatures, hence becoming part of the complex chain of life. This is precisely what Newton's formula disregards.

The apple is also popularly regarded as a biblical symbol, being generally held to have been the fruit which was both the source of man's knowledge, and the cause of his fall from grace. That Newton's apple, transformed here into the symbol of modern scientific thought, has had consequences equally disastrous for the history of mankind is a conclusion which seems central to an understanding of “Liompa”.

This critique of science is a recurrent theme in Olesha's work, and a number of specific details from “Liompa” may be discerned in others of his stories. The figure of Newton, for example, appears also in “Lyubov'”. The theme of gravity also recurs elsewhere. In “Zrelishcha” Olesha explains the fascination of “wall-of-death” motorcycling in the following terms:

The secret is that in the spectacle of a man moving in the vertical plane there is an element of the most intense fantasy that is accessible to our consciousness. This is the fantasy that is created in those cases when before our earthly perception some event occurs which has as its cause the failure to obey the laws of gravity. These events constitute the limit of fantasy. They are the more unusual for our earthly perception because, when they occur, a picture of some non-existent world with physical laws contrary to our own appears before us for a second.

(p. 276)

Here Olesha's delight in the spectacle derives directly from the power of the act to destroy, or at least to suspend, the influence of our scientific knowledge upon our manner of perception.

Despite these and other similarities “Liompa” differs in one most significant respect from Olesha's other works. In “Zrelishcha” and “V tsirke” there is the possibility of escaping the thraldom of scientific rationalism in the circus, which is the realm of unfettered fantasy. In “Lyubov'” the young Marxist, Shuvalov, is delivered from his narrow materialism by the experience of love, which allows him even to defy the laws of gravity (in the famous scene where he “flies on the wings of love”). In “Vishnyovaya kostochka” the dry logic of the planner, Avel', contrasts with the rich imagination and acute powers of observation cultivated by the narrator.

Leaving aside the important questions of how this conflict is presented and resolved in these and other works, we should note that they share a common feature. In each case a new manner of perception is, however temporarily, attainable by man, whether by the force of circumstance (the experience of love, for example), or by positive volition. In “Vishnyovaya kostochka”, the narrator even affects to teach the reader himself how to rediscover his lost powers of perception:

The land of attentiveness begins by the bedhead, on the chair which you moved close to the bed when you were getting undressed before retiring. You wake up early in the morning, the house is still asleep, the room is filled with sun. Silence. Don't move, so as not to destroy the immobility of the lighting. Socks lie on the chair. They are brown. But—in the immobility and brightness of the lighting—you suddenly notice in the brown material individual multi-coloured threads curling in the air: crimson, blue, orange …

(p. 219)

In “Liompa” this possibility is denied to man. The magic and freshness of perception described above belong only to the very young child, and even here this state of innocence is displayed in all its fragile impermanence. The very process of human development and education renders the loss of this innocence inevitable, and, once lost, like all innocence, it is unrecoverable.

“Liompa” draws on ideas which were common currency in the Russia of Olesha's day. N. A. Nilsson has indicated the connexion between Olesha's thinking and the philosophy of Henri Bergson on the one hand and the ideology of the Russian Futurist movement on the other.²⁵ Like these contemporaries, Olesha directed his critique of science not against the physical products of new technology (indeed, his delight in the inventions of science, especially the aeroplane, is well known), but rather against the effects of scientific endeavour upon the human mind. The pressure of rational thinking always threatens to reduce the potential richness of human experience to standard formulas, and to stifle imagination and inventiveness. It is the role of the artist, Olesha insisted, to counteract this harmful tendency, and to destroy the barriers imposed by conventional modes of thinking. For Olesha this entailed a totally new vision of man and his importance in the world. In “Liompa” he reveals the precariousness, and the ultimate absurdity, of man's imagined grasp of his physical environment, and raises it to the level of tragedy. Here again, the words of Robbe-Grillet seem uncannily appropriate:

Tragedy may here be defined as an attempt to reclaim the distance that exists between man and things, and give it a new kind of value, so that in effect it becomes an ordeal where victory consists in being vanquished.²⁶

Notes

1. In the Soviet Union “Liompa” has tended to escape detailed critical attention. For Olesha's contemporaries the story was overshadowed by the controversy surrounding Zavist'. Quite recently, however, V. Pertsov has expressed the opinion that “Liompa” is the “most perfect and tragic of Yury Olesha's stories”. V. Pertsov, My zhivyom vpervyye. O tvorchestve Yuriya Oleshi (Moscow, 1976), p. 181.

2. E. K. Beaujour, The Invisible Land: A Study of the Artistic Imagination of Iurii Olesha (Columbia, 1970), pp. 24-30; William E. Harkins, “The Philosophical Tales of Jurij Oleša”, Orbis Scriptus. Dmitrij Tschiževskij zum 70. Geburtstag, edited by Dietrich Gerhardt and others (Munich, 1966), pp. 349-54.

3. Here “meaning” is understood in the broadest sense, as the aggregate of intellectual, moral, emotional, and aesthetic responses to the text.

4. L. M. O'Toole, “Structure and Style in the Short Story: Dostoevskij's A Gentle Spirit”, Tijdschrift voor Slavische Taal—en Letterkunde, I (1972), 84-85.

5. Roger Fowler, “Language and the Reader: Shakespeare's Sonnet 73”, Style and Structure in Literature. Essays in the New Stylistics, edited by Roger Fowler (Oxford, 1975), pp. 79-122.

6. Jonathan Culler cites the example of Middlemarch, which would come under this same heading, in Structuralist Poetics. Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (London, 1975), p. 211.

7. The first variant of the story bore the subtitle “Veshchi”, which was subsequently removed in later revisions. Yury Olesha, Izbrannoye (Moscow, 1974), p. 563. All page references in the text are to this edition.

8. Yury Lotman, Analysis of the Poetic Text, edited and translated by D. Barton Johnson (Ann Arbor, 1976), p. 37. Ann Shukman makes the same point somewhat more intelligibly when she writes: “In the case of a narrative text which tells us about a sequence of events, it is the plot, the ordering of the narrative events, which is the main unifying factor.” Ann Shukman, “Ten Russian Short Stories: Theory, Analysis, Interpretation”, Essays in Poetics, II, 2 (1977), 74.

9. O'Toole, p. 83.

10. Alain Robbe-Grillet, “Time and Description in Modern Narrative”, Snapshots & Towards a New Novel, translated by Barbara Wright (London, 1965), p. 143.

11. I. S. Turgenev, Sobraniye sochineniy v 12-i tomakh, III (Moscow, 1954), 229.

12. M. Yu. Lermontov, Sobraniye sochineniy v 4-kh tomakh (Moscow, 1958), IV, 9.

13. I use the term “humanist” in the sense implied by Robbe-Grillet in his article “Nature, Humanism, and Tragedy” (Robbe-Grillet, pp. 75-95). The article is a militant restatement of the “pathetic fallacy”, in which the author passionately defends his own practice of ridding description of anthropomorphic elements.

14. The concreteness of the passage is reflected in the high density of nouns. Of the fifty-six nouns in the first three paragraphs no less than fifty refer to concrete objects or to people. There are only three adverbs. Adjectives, too, are little in evidence, and are mostly concrete. Of the fifteen adjectives, two may be discounted, as they appear in fixed combination with nouns (sornyy yashchik, s''yestnaya lavka), four relate to colour, and five only are conceptual (posledniy, s''yedobnyy, raznokharakternyy, krotkiy, prekrasnyy). Significantly, only the last two are evaluative.

15. The twenty-two sentences comprising the first three paragraphs have an average length of 6.5 words. None is complex: the longest (sentence 3) is, in fact, a chain of simple clauses. Subordination is totally absent, and conjunction rare, with no cases of hypertaxis, and only two of parataxis.

16. The privileged nature of the apersonal point of view is especially apparent in the following short piece of description, where the narrator is blessed with a vision which allows him to contemplate the universe and the microscopic world of insects in successive moments: “Round the boy were spread out rubber bands, wire, pieces of wood, silk, light pale yellow silk fabric and the smell of glue. The sky shone. Insects crawled about on a stone. In the stone was a fossilized cockleshell” (p. 193).

17. Average sentence lengths are as follows—paragraph 6: 3.9 words; paragraph 8: 14.2 words; paragraph 10: 17.3 words.

18. Altogether in this passage there are twenty-six specific references to Ponomaryov, either by name by the word bol'noy, by the personal pronoun, by the possessive, or by the reflexive svoy. There are, in addition, three cases of ellipsis, where the person of Ponomaryov is implied.

19. This figure includes the personal pronoun oni, and the possessive ikh, where these refer to veshchi.

20. The seven sentences have an average length of 13.7 words.

21. The association of the final image with scent is suggested by Richard Newnham: “It may be conjectured that among the images conjured up in the delirious Ponomaryov's mind is that of a bottle of scent so named.” Soviet Short Stories, edited by Richard Newnham (London, 1963), p. 220.

22. Soviet Short Stories, p. 71.

23. Beaujour, p. 18.

24. Beaujour, p. 65.

25. Nils Ake Nilsson, “Through the Wrong End of Binoculars: An Introduction to Jurij Olesha”, Major Soviet Writers, edited by E. J. Brown (New York, 1973), pp. 269-71.

26. Robbe-Grillet, p. 83.