The early stories of Jurij Oleša, such as “Liompa” (1928), “The Cherry Stone” (“Višnevaja kostočka,” 1929), “Love” (“Ljubov,” 1929), “Aldebaran” (1931) and others, form a cycle of philosophical tales concerned with questions of epistemology and metaphysics. These stories are constructed on a number of antitheses: idealism vs. materialism, vitalism vs. mechanism, romanticism vs. realism, traditionalism vs. futurism. To a considerable degree these antitheses are treated by Oleša as one and the same, but each may also appear separately in the context of a single story or passage. We shall approach these antitheses in terms of narrative situations or images which express them; indeed, it is images, along with their structure and mode of presentation, which often embody Oleša's ideas most clearly.

Oleša's images fall into a number of distinct areas which have their own characteristic symbolic meanings. Of particular importance as sources of imagery are the worlds of nature, technology and sport.

Oleša perceives nature sharply, concretely, almost linearly. At the same time his nature imagery has a freshness which suggests the uncluttered and unpreoccupied perception of a child (in “Liompa” it is actually a child who perceives). One wonders if Oleša's descriptions were not influenced by Viktor Šklovskij's theory of ostranenie, “making strange”, developed a few years before. Nature in Oleša's tales appears distorted and fantastic, violating natural law miraculously and seemingly at random. Heroes fly through space; they perceive scenes which will occur only five years later. Yet Oleša's nature images are organized around a metaphorical principle of comparison, sometimes even from the point of view of a given scientific discipline, such as geometry or botany, which serves to organize seemingly random perceptions, as well as to deform them. In terms of such imagery Oleša builds one of his most important antitheses: the practical, conforming and formal (symbolized here by the scientific discipline) against the individualistic, romantic and impractical (the world of nature or experience unorganized). Thus, in the story “Love” we read:

… he saw blades of grass, articulated like bamboo; he was struck by the particolored quality of what is called grass cover, and the particolored soil seemed quite unexpected to him.

“I won't become a naturalist!” he implored. “I have no use for all these random observations.”

But Lola didn't come. He had already completed some statistical observations, and carried out a kind of classification. He could show that in the park there was a preponderance of trees with broad trunks and of leaves having a trifoliate form. He was learning to identify the buzzing of insects. His attention, in spite of itself, was filling up with a content quite uninteresting to him.

The hero's “scientific” perception proceeds from the boredom of enforced inactivity and of waiting; here science is set off by implication against life, which remains unlived by him so long as his mistress, Lola, does not arrive.

Similarly, the discipline of architecture serves to organize the perceptions of the same hero as he continues to wait:

He came out onto a clearing and sat down on a stump. Insects flew about. The stalks trembled. The architecture of flying birds, flies and beetles was an illusive one, but still he could make out some dots, the lines of arches, bridges, towers and terraces—a city which quickly changed and at every second was again deformed.

Another source of distorted images is the world of color-blind perception. The introduction of a color-blind observer permits the systematic deformation of images according to a self-consistent system of optics, one in a sense even “scientific”. Indeed, the story “Love” contrasts the perceptions of the hero, Šuvalov, who sees the world as disorganized and distorted because he has fallen in love, with the vision of a color-blind man, whose perceptions are cold, systematized and rational, quite undistorted except that they lack the single attribute of color. The color-blind man perceives forms correctly, but without that which gives things their real tone, their intangible nature. He is in fact a materialist, and he warns the young Marxist Šuvalov of the dangers of the latter's new idealistic vision of life, colored and deformed by the experience of love:

“I'm living in paradise”, said the young Marxist Šuvalov in an excited tone.

“Are you a Marxist?” the question sounded from quite close at hand.

“Yes, I'm a Marxist”, said Šuvalov.

“Then you may not live in paradise.”

The story “Love” is built on this contrast of perceived worlds: materialistic or fantastic. True, the contrast is something of a playful conceit, a metaphorical joke carried to almost hyperbolic proportions. Šuvalov flies through the air, propelled by the transports of love; the extravagant metaphor is pushed to its full effect by the introduction of the physicist, Isaac Newton, who turns up in order to defend the law of gravitation which Šuvalov has violated.

Although in this instance the opposition of science and fantasy forms a metaphorical conceit, Oleša's more general practice of imposing a scientific point of view on nature suggests the broad philosophic antithesis of idealism (the transports of love, symbolized by flying) and materialism (Newtonian physics). The very arbitrariness and apparent inappropriateness of the point of view (geometric, architectural, botanical, etc.) seems to suggest that nature actually evades the categories of materialist science, just as Šuvalov's love seems to defy the law of gravity.

Similarly, in “The Cherry Stone”, Fedja's unrequited love for Nataša springs paradoxically into life in the symbolic germination of the cherry stone which Nataša has given him. Such a paradox, even if partly a playful one, strikes us as anti-materialistic: a good Marxist could hardly subscribe to the idea of unrequited love as a generative force, nor could Marxist social morality encourage its romantic idealization.

Where Oleša's imagery is drawn from the world of technology, there is again an element of paradox. Technology for Oleša is inescapably linked with certain childhood memories: a boy's first bicycle (“In the Circus”—“V cirke,” 1928; “The Chain”—“Cep,” 1929); the first men to fly (“I Look Back”—“Ja smotrju v prošloe,” 1929; Envy—Zavist', 1927), and hence appears already tinged with a romantic and idealistic coloring. Another paradox is that the world of technology often appears as animated: thus the sharp boundary between technology and nature is wiped out. In “I Look Back” a flying machine is compared to a bird. The fantastic machine Ophelia in Envy will sing songs and destroy other machines; thus it is itself alive. Or, in a later sketch, “We Are in the Center of Town” (“My v centre goroda,” 1937), Oleša sees the world of technology as no less miraculous and fantastic than the fauna of the zoological garden through which he has just conducted his readers.

Love for Oleša is the highest manifestation of life seen as vitalist and organic, as above material existence; love is the irrational antithesis of geometry and technology. Yet here again there is a reconciliation of opposites, if only in fun. Thus, in “Aldebaran” the lovers can watch the stars (and make love) as effectively at the planetarium as in the open air. Does this point to their own materialist limitations, or rather to man's power to convert technology to serve his higher purposes? Oleša leaves the reader in the air. In “Nataša” (1936) a girl who practices parachute jumping tries to conceal the dangerous pastime from her father, telling him that she is spending the time with her friend Štejn. When the father penetrates the deception, he supposes not illogically that there is no friend, and that the story of a friend was only an invention to conceal the truth. But in fact the friend not only does exist, but is also a parachute jumper; there is no contradiction, but an overlapping of two apparently opposed kinds of truth.

These bridges between vitalist and materialist worlds are strongest for young people, and for the world of the future. In “Aldebaran” the lovers outwit an older man who, enamored of the girl, attempts to hold her to a promise to meet him one evening if it rains (in which event she and her lover will have no stars to watch). But the young people evade the logical dilemma by taking refuge on the rainy evening in the technological world of the planetarium.

In “The Cherry Stone” the hero Fedja fears that the cherry tree he has planted will die, a victim to the Plan, for on the spot where he has planted his tree a skyscraper is to be built. But the Plan has also provided the building with a garden, and here the tree will grow. This possibility of a synthesis of vitalism and materialism the author describes as a “third way”, one neither “new” nor “old”:

All this occurs in an invisible world, since in the world open to normal perception something quite different is going on: the pilgrim simply meets a dog, the sun sets, the barrens lie green …

The invisible world is the world of attention and imagination. The pilgrim is not alone! Two sisters go by his side and take him by the hands. One sister is called Attention, the other, Imagination.

So what then? So then, in spite of all, in spite of order and society, have I really succeeded in creating a world not subject to any laws save the illusive laws of my own sensation? What does that mean? There are two worlds, the old and the new, but what world is this? A third world? There are two ways, but what sort of third way can this be?

The third world is that of the future, in which a miraculous synthesis of technology and life will be possible. It is the world of the cherry tree germinating from the stone, at once a symbol of barrenness and fruition. The two sisters, Attention and Imagination, are science and art; their union is man's created future. And Fedja sees with his new-found prophetic vision how the young tree which he has planted will appear in five years time.

Šuvalov's bored musings in the opening scene of “Love” likewise correspond to these two rubrics of observation-science (his botanical classifications) and imagination-art (the construction of aerial cities from the lines of flight of birds and insects). These activities prepare him, like Fedja, for a glimpse of the world of the future, and he too, like Fedja, waits in boredom for a girl who does not come, and like him, he later beholds a tree of five years growth, springing up on the spot where Lola had thrown away an apricot seed.¹

The world of sports is another symbolic world in which one may transcend the paradoxes of idealism and materialism, for sports represent the mastery of spirit over matter, the performance of the apparently impossible physical feat by skill and discipline. Hence the lengthy description of the soccer game in Envy. In fact, Valja's love for Volodja Makarov seems little more than the adulation of a sports hero, though this may be partly the effect of the author's failure to give either of the young people anything like a real personality.

It is the older generation which for Oleša is incapable of achieving the philosophical synthesis of life and nature, of vitalism and materialism. Hence its members approach experience by attempting to impose their false logical dichotomies upon it. Nataša's father (in the story called “Nataša”) supposes that she is either parachute jumping or seeing her lover; in fact she is doing both at once. The older man in “Aldebaran” attempts to force on Katja the dilemma of choice: if it rains she will go with him to the movies (technology only imitating life) instead of watching the stars with her lover. But the planetarium offers a technological escape from the false dilemma.

It is in Envy, of course, that the opposition of younger and older generations is most fully developed by Oleša. If his short stories suggest the possibility of a synthesis of technology and life, of science and art, of materialism and feeling, achieved by the young in some creative synthesis of the future, Envy rather tends in the opposite direction: toward an opposition between generations which only deepens the fundamental oppositions. There is no synthesis or transcendence: the old, like Ivan Babičev, are prisoners of a sterile romanticism, while callow youths, like Volodja Makarov, are duped by their own materialism. Far from flying through the air in transports of love, Volodja vows priggishly to wait on even four years for Valja.²

Thus the author's sympathies in Envy are neither with the old nor the young. And to the Marxist materialism of the young he opposes Bergsonist vitalism. Indeed, the hero of “The Cherry Stone” is accused by a Marxist friend of holding Bergsonist views. Šuvalov's observations on the motion of birds and insects recall Bergson's critique of analysis of motion as something static, reduced to a geometrical line which we substitute for motion itself.³ Instead of perceiving motion as such, Šuvalov perceives abstracted geometrical lines, which his imagination proceeds to reconstruct as architectural forms. Bergson describes the not dissimilar fantasy of a child:

From the original, and, one must add, very indistinct intuition which gives positive science its material, science passes immediately to analysis, which multiplies to infinity its observations of this material from outside points of view. It soon comes to believe that by putting together all these diagrams it can reconstitute the object itself. No wonder, then, that it sees this object fly before it, like a child that would like to make a solid plaything out of the shadows outlined along the wall.⁴

Oleša also recalls Bergson's critique of language. In “Liompa”, perhaps the most interesting of the philosophical tales, an old man dies realizing that he has lost hold of the real world and can recall only the now meaningless names of things about him; at the same time a child, undistracted by the knowledge of names, perceives these same things as they really are, as pure experience. In Creative Evolution Bergson has written in a similar spirit:

Without language, intelligence would probably have remained riveted to the material objects which it was interested in considering … Language has greatly contributed to its liberation.⁵

But language is also suspect for Oleša as an intellectual construct which may distract us from life and even come to be a vicarious substitute for living. Thus, in “The Cherry Stone” Fedja asks vainly whether a certain bird is not a thrush (it is the word, obviously, which intrigues him, and not the bird), while the two lovers whom he questions are absorbed in a kiss.⁶

In his attitude toward technology, Oleša seems to share Bergson's ambivalence in comparing instinct and intellect. Man's intellect creates the instruments of technology; indeed, Bergson specifically characterizes man as homo faber, the creator of tools. On the one hand, these instruments are less perfect than instinct, which achieves its purposes more directly, yet on the other they are more perfect, for they represent the fruit of organic transcendance of instinct by the more flexible and creative intellect.⁷

Yet it would be wrong to regard Oleša's stories as anything like a literary “setting” of Bergson's philosophy, and there are important points of divergence. One of these, for example, is the personification of Attention and Imagination in “The Cherry Stone”; neither of these terms is especially characteristic for Bergson. What is probably more significant for Oleša than the philosophy of Bergson as such is the very strong biological and vitalist element in Bergson's thought. Probably Oleša is to be regarded as a reflection of the wave of vitalism of the period, to a considerable extent the effect of popularization of Bergson and the pragmatist philosophers.

Granted, both “Love” and “Aldebaran” are playful in mood, and they toy, gaily and ironically, with ideas. “The Cherry Stone” is more serious, and here the author imagines (perhaps also ironically) a future synthesis of the mechanical and the organic, of the Plan and the life symbolized by the germinating cherry stone.

Thus Oleša seems to oppose the imposition of any formal order upon life, yet he appears to look forward to a positive synthesis of order and life in the future. But we should not attempt to hold an author to a literal formulation of ideas. To state an idea in a work of literature is often to imply its contrary; for literature is not concerned so much with stating or defining ideas as it is with manipulating them in terms of life situations. Thus in Dostoevskij's religious novels belief and scepticism have an equal place on the stage as ideas, whatever the author's personal attitude toward them may have been. Oleša's fixation on a philosophical antithesis naturally led him to imagine the synthesis, located, quite properly, in the world of the imagination and the future. None of this implies that he believes that such a synthesis will necessarily take place.

What is perhaps most striking in Oleša's work is the atmosphere of light irony (totally without cynicism), and the freedom and spontaneity with which he treats philosophical ideas. In this respect he is well-nigh unique in twentieth-century literature.

Notes

1. The bored but perceptive state of Šuvalov and Fedja suggests the passive receptiveness to impressions of Blok's artist in the poem “Xudožnik” (1914).

2. Unfortunately the present article does not afford scope for a more thorough analysis of Oleša's Envy, in certain respects unlike his stories both in imagery and ideas.

3. See Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Paris, 1889), pp. 85 ff.

4. Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme (New York, 1949), p. 35.

5. Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York, 1911), p. 159.

6. It is interesting to compare the similar attitude toward language of another writer influenced by Bergson, Karel Čapek, in his early story “The Island” (Ostrov, 1916).

7. Creative Evolution, p. 135 ff.