[In the following review of Green and Katsell's translation of The Complete Plays, Niemczyk presents an overview of the works in the collection.]

Although his promising literary career was interrupted by the Stalinist era, Yury Olesha remains one of the most original writers of the early Soviet period. Best known in the West for his novel Envy, published in 1927, he also wrote short stories, essays, and scripts for the stage and screen. He was clearly more comfortable with the short story and novel, but his dramatic pieces nevertheless present interesting examples of the kind of experimentation with form and genre that characterized Russian literature of the 1920s. The activity in Olesha's plays frequently borders on the surreal, with touches of finely tuned irony and comic absurdity. Olesha's dramatic works have been collected for the first time in English in this new volume edited and excellently translated, with an introduction, by Michael Green and Jerome Katsell.

Born in 1899 into a Polish aristocratic family from the Ukraine, Yury Olesha, like many of his contemporaries, consciously broke with his family and background and embraced the Revolution. Never entirely comfortable in the new world, however, he retained a strong attachment to the traditions and values of the old one. This ambivalence toward his own past and background tempered his enthusiasm for the Revolution and its aftermath, and permeates most of his work.

This is certainly the case in the first play in the collection, The Conspiracy of Feelings, which was adapted by the author from his novel Envy. It revolves around the Babichev brothers, Andrei and Ivan, who represent opposing ideologies. Andrei Babichev is a modern bourgeois, a sausage manufacturer, full of physical vitality and energetic plans for the future. His main goals in life are the construction of an innovative workers' cafeteria and the invention of a new type of sausage. His brother Ivan is a romantic visionary, “the last Don Quixote on earth,” a Chaplin-like figure who has invented a machine to destroy all other machines, since it possesses human emotions. His “machine of machines” is named, significantly, Ophelia. Ivan wanders around Moscow with his rumpled yellow pillow, intruding into peoples' lives, forcing them to confront issues they would rather avoid. He even works miracles, albeit in reverse (changing wine into water at a wedding). The man of ultimate pragmatism and rationality, dedicated to the creation of a new world order, is thus opposed to the idealistic dreamer, the champion of love, emotion, and the values of the past. Caught between the two sets of values are Nikolai Kavalerov, a drunkard whom Andrei has taken into his house, and Valya, Ivan's daughter, who is being seduced by Andrei. Olesha wrote two different conclusions to the play, but in both versions Kavalerov fails in his mission to destroy Andrei. Both endings are included in this collection.

In adapting the novel to a play Olesha necessarily made structural changes which make the action disjointed and lacking in cohesiveness. There is only one act, divided into seven scenes. Much of the explanatory detail of the novel, as well as some of Olesha's extraordinary imagery, have been sacrificed to accommodate the material to dialogue format. The absence of the soccer player Volodya Makarov, an important character in the novel, makes the tension between Andrei and Kavalerov and the final scene at the soccer stadium confusing. Ivan's toast to indifference, which concludes the novel, occurs in the middle of the play and loses much of its impact.

Tragically relevant to the contemporary Soviet literary and theatrical scene is the second play in the collection, A List of Blessings. It deals with the conflicts of a prominent Soviet actress, Yelena Goncharova (famous for her portrayal of Hamlet) on a trip to Paris. She finds herself trapped between the rigid, stifling cultural atmosphere of her native land (where her interview is constantly interrupted by the censor's bell) and the tantalizing yet destructive philistine culture of the West (where a theatre manager misinterprets her reading of the “flute” passage from Hamlet and proposes that Miss Goncharova perform an obscene burlesque act with a flute). The actress compiles “A List of Crimes” and “A List of Blessings” of the Soviet regime, and struggles to balance the two. In Paris she is surrounded by deceitful, unscrupulous Russian emigrés and sinister characters from the Soviet Embassy. The tragedy of her situation and final decision is undermined, however, by the contrived, artificial ending of the play.

The Three Fat Men, the third play in the collection, was originally written as a children's tale in 1922 and later adapted to the stage. The play is constructed along more traditional lines than Olesha's other dramatic works. It is divided into four acts, each of which is divided into several episodes of fastpaced activity. The tale takes place in a mythical country suffering under the tyrannical rule of a despotic triumvirate known as “The Three Fat Men.” They are done in, however, by a clever, brave little band of circus performers who reveal the true identity of the heir and release him from captivity. It is not surprising that this has been the most popular of Olesha's works in the Soviet Union, for all of the mysteries are solved, the villains are punished, and the heroes rewarded at the conclusion, and the political subtext remains subdued throughout.

A Stern Young Man a short film scenario, was written in 1934, shortly before Olesha's impassioned speech to the First Soviet Writers' Congress, in which he defended individualism and truth in art. In this work Olesha attempted to portray his own model of a Communist youth, whose personal instincts and emotions came into conflict with the official ideal. The structure of the play is curious, as it consists mostly of stage directions and descriptions, with very little dialogue and activity. This sketch is indicative of Olesha's difficulty with the dramatic genre. He was much better at writing descriptive passages of narrative prose than at creating characters who interact in a credible fashion. The limited action of the play proceeds in a series of stylized “scenes” and contrived meetings. This “play for the cinema” was made into a film by the talented director Abram Rohm, but was never released. By 1934 Soviet critics were uncomfortable with the ambiguous ideology of the hero. This screenplay was to be Olesha's last major literary contribution for almost twenty years. Although he continued to write short stories, essays, and even another film scenario, he was officially “silent” from 1938 to 1956.

The final work in the collection is The Black Man, a fragment which continues the struggle of the writer Modest Zand, introduced by Olesha in an earlier work, to portray the new Soviet man. In order to do this, however, he must first purge from his mind certain “unnecessary” themes—“lizard” themes—which have been plaguing him. In his encounter with the Black Man, a graphologist in a movie theatre, Zand comes to grips with his own doubts and fears. In an introductory note to the play Olesha explains that the Black Man is supposed to be “a caricature of the European thinker of the period of capitalism in decline,” a man “whose ideology is a parody of Freud, Spengler and Bergson.” It is a deliberately dialectical drama, whose point is “the struggle of the idea of death in creative work with the idea of the re-creation of the world through art.” It is Olesha's struggle with himself, with all of the personal and creative conflicts he never managed to resolve. As the Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky, Olesha's contemporary and friend, said of him: “He would build up arches unable to make them meet at the apex—perhaps because he wanted to take everything straight from his heart.”