[In the following essay, Tolczyk calls Olesha a post-realist who found it nearly impossible to reconcile his idea of artistic “truth” with the realities of the Soviet system.]

Russian literary criticism waits for its own The Captive Mind, in which the problem of various writers' attraction to communism, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, would be given as expansive study as Czeslaw Milosz's gave to Eastern European writers and Stalinist dogmas. Yet does the problem of a writer's attraction to communism still pertain to literary criticism? Can it be described in literary terms, or is its only literary context in the fact that we are aware of the political choices of writers? At least in some cases, there does exist a crucial connection between the parameters of literary expression assumed by a writer and his ideological options. For if we treat the parameters of literary expression as remaining in an inseparable relationship to a writer's philosophical model of the universe—either consciously assumed or, perhaps more often, immanently implied in a chosen descriptive strategy—then the question of a writer's ideological choices ceases to be an extraliterary one.

The work of the post-realist Soviet writer Yuri Olesha (1899-1960) embodies such a close mutual conditioning between poetical and political options. The contradictions in his peculiar combination of ideological and poetic assumptions contributed to, if not determined, Olesha's artistic fate. The literary preoccupations of nineteenth-century Russian sentimentalist and realist poetics were consequential to Olesha's development, and the nineteenth-century writers' conception of nature is reflected in his own ideological appropriation of the concepts of truth and beauty.

Modern Russian prose began in the 1790s with Nikolai Karamzin. It owes him not only its original secular idiom but also its “sentimental education.” Karamzin's sentimentalist works confronted the Russian reader with an entirely new sensibility and immediately reverberated in the culture. Soon, Karamzinian literary heroes and heroines became the models for many real-life contemporary lovers. Never before had Russia experienced a literary fashion of such powerful appeal.

The title heroine of the most famous of all Karamzin's novellas, Poor Liza, a sentimental peasant girl, confesses to her mother, “Ah, mother dear! What a beautiful morning. How cheerful everything is in the field! Never have the larks sung so well, never has the sun shone so brightly, never have the flowers smelled so pleasant!” Liza speaks in the elegant Karamzinian idiom, convincingly enough to make her mother realize the beauty of the morning. “In actuality,” Karamzin writes, “[the morning] seemed exceedingly pleasant to her; her dear daughter had through her own cheer made all of nature cheerful for her.” Of course, it was neither nature, nor morning, nor larks that changed so suddenly and became more beautiful. What changed was Liza herself, who had fallen in love. Several pages later in the story, she would explain it to Erast, a nobleman from Moscow whom she loves and who was not yet aware that he would eventually abandon her for a rich Moscow lady: “Without your eyes the bright moon is dark; without your voice the nightingale's singing is boring; without your breathing the light breeze is unpleasant for me.”

The age of sentiment was a time when Nature (capitalized and treated as a persona) was portrayed as being responsive to human feelings, especially the feelings of lovers. Artists had traditionally tried to convince readers that certain people could see, hear, or feel reality more acutely than ordinary people could. Schopenhauer later was to philosophically undermine this notion of human harmony with nature, but earlier than his influence on Russian literature (for example, in 1859 he strongly inspired Turgenev, who recommended him to Herzen), the radicals of the 1840s were calling into question the idea of the artist-contemplator who claimed to have achieved an intimate relationship with nature. Vissarion Belinsky (1811-48), an influential critic of contemporary literature, preferred mediocre but democratic literature rather than work by aristocrats of the spirit who aspired to esoteric heights. In this period, poets began to lose their authority over Russian literary life. While brought about by a complex combination of factors, literary as well as extraliterary, this phenomenon may be seen as a sign that the literary audience's trust in those writers who tried to document their intimate relationship with nature by means of metaphors was waning.

To the new critics who called themselves realists, metaphor, based on a hierarchic combination of reality, was not only an old-fashioned stylistic device but also subjective and therefore not verifiable; it did not match contemporary categories of truth. The new mode of “democratic” writing favored metonymy. Metonymy, based on the temporal and spatial juxtapositions among its elements, could fulfil aims coincident with those of the language of science. Metonymy could present an object through a verifiable explanation of its relationships to other objects in a one-level empirical universe. This diametric change of perspective deeply influenced the artist's relationship to nature: a traditional reservoir of metaphors and a model for human harmony became an object for human expansion. Both the scientist and the writer were determined to incarcerate nature in the net of temporal and spatial categories. The hero of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, the young materialist Bazarov, put it briefly (in what became one of the most often quoted maxims in Russian literature): “Nature is not a temple but a workshop.”

This new view of nature brought a new metaphysical problem. The early critics of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, for instance, consumed by polemics over Bazarov's political radicalism, did not quite realize that this late patron of the nihilists paid a terrible price in the novel for his views. Indeed, the seeds of literary revolution were already present in the ground of realistic poetics. In Turgenev's novel nature is deaf and dumb for Bazarov, and this silence of nature is tragically portrayed by Turgenev. Bazarov's ability to love was doubtful; his deficiencies were self-inflicted, a result of his lack of beliefs. The last scene of Fathers and Sons shows us the grave of this unfulfilled “conqueror” of nature. He, unlike Karamzin's Liza, died without the compassionate silence of birds, and flowers blossomed on his grave, quite indifferent to the sadness of his death.

Turgenev's A Hunter's Sketches was considered almost a model of realistic writing. Yet its ambivalence toward the poetics of realism is present at a deeper level in the stories. “Biryuk” opens: “I was coming back from hunting one evening alone in a droshky.” The very first sentence gives a great deal of information; we have in it time, direction, cause, circumstances, a precise quantification of motion, and purpose. The narrator keeps adding information: “I was eight versts from home. … A thunderstorm was coming on. In front, a huge purplish storm cloud slowly rose from behind the forest; long gray rain clouds raced over my head. …” The presence of all the objects mentioned here is explainable in terms of temporal and spatial relationships. The narrator himself is a necessary point of reference, a “camera” which notices objects in a visual relationship to itself (“in front,” “over my head,”). His perception gives the impression of consequential objectivity. Then, a storm comes and the light suddenly changes, blurring the images seen by the narrator-protagonist. He decides to hide under the trees next to a path. But “suddenly, in a flash of lightning, I saw a tall figure on the road. I stared intently in that direction— and again the figure seemed to spring out of the ground near my droshky.”

“To spring out of the ground” is a colloquialism in the Russian language and not a literary metaphor to be taken seriously. But if we read it seriously, perhaps this expression is not unintentional to the author whose narration slips from an objective, matter-of-fact monologuethe worn-out metaphor. Could it be a more or less literal report of what is happening to the narrator? It is noteworthy that the narrator, having lost his ability to see in the poor and distorted visibility the storm has created, really does see a silhouette coming from under the earth. Claiming that the man appeared at the path from somewhere else other than from under the earth would be, in fact, an abandonment of the empirical principle of the narration in favor of some previous knowledge as a source more reliable than the concrete visual experience. What was meant to be the basis of consequential, almost scientific objectivism became in fact subjective. Our senses perceive images other than our sober reason expects; this truth, customarily associated with the turn away from realism in twentieth-century abstract art, was already present on a deeper level in realistic writing of the nineteenth century.

Yuri Olesha created his most important works in the 1920s. The Impressionist painters' discoveries, undermining the notion of sensual “objectivity” in art, were already well known and had already become the foundation of avant-guard movements. Turgenev's droshky comes to mind again upon reading Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1922 essay, “On Synthetism”:

Yesterday and today are a stagecoach and an automobile.

Yesterday you traveled along the steppe road by unhurried stagecoach. A slow wanderer—a village church—is floating toward you. Unhurriedly, you open the window; you narrow your eyes against the steeple gleaming in the sun, the whiteness of the walls; you rest your eyes on the blue slits of sky; you will remember the green roof, the lacy sleeves of the weeping birch, like the sleeves of a oriental robe, the solitary woman leaning against the birch.

And today—by car—past the same church. A moment—it rises, flashes, disappears. And all that remains is a streak of lightning in the air, topped with a cross; beneath it, three sharp black shapes cut the sky, one over the other, and a woman-birch, a woman with weeping branches. Not a single secondary detail, not a single superfluous line, not a word that can be crossed out. Nothing but the essence, the extract, the synthesis, revealed to the eye within one-hundredth of a second, when all sensations are gathered into focus, sharpened, condensed.

In one of the best known among Olesha's stories, “Love,” the protagonist Shuvalov sees nature in images which Turgenev, despite his tendency towards impressionism, would never admit.

He came out into an open space and sat down on the stump of a tree. Insects flew all around him. The grass quivered. The architectural flight of the birds, flies, lady-birds seemed curiously unreal; but he discerned the shapes they made in their flight—dotted lines, contours of arches, bridges, towers, terraces—a whole city quickly changing, every second altering its shape.

Instead of explaining the causes of the fly's flight, its direction and circumstances, as Turgenev would do, Shuvalov succumbs to the magic of free associations generated by an unruly nature. Shuvalov is somebody who perceives nature, as Zamyatin would call it, “in its synthesis revealed to the eye,” but who, at the same time, attempts to recreate some notion of subjective order that would perhaps make nature more human. He is a lover of nature who tries to grasp and preserve that which “rises, flashes, and disappears.”

Olesha's literary method may be said to apply the principles of Russian formalism. Under these principles, if our eye, in the light of a lightning bolt, notices a figure coming from under the earth, we write that the figure came from under the earth, forgetting about the rationalistic censorship of our mind which suggests putting “as if” before the description of what is seen. This strategy is based upon the assumption that the categories of practical reason shed not light but darkness upon our perceptions. Olesha was reiterating an already entrenched truth, that nature is full of miracles unnoticed by most people who, according to the theories of the Bazarovs, had changed nature's temple into a workshop. According to Olesha and the formalists, language itself kept people from noticing the miracle of reality. When Olesha's Shuvalov falls in love, he becomes able to fly, in defiance of the laws of physics. In the story, he is observed to be “flying on the wings of love,” in spite of the fact that this image is metaphorical and therefore, strictly speaking, not true. Olesha's early stories attempt to reestablish the literal meaning of metaphors and to prove that metaphor is the only possible way to communicate the sensual experience of reality.

Critics in the 1920s, trying to describe Olesha's technique, noticed that it was based on an indirect visual perception of objects reflected, in unusual light, through their shadows. His technique, later adopted by other writers and labeled revolutionary, has since become commonplace through repeated use. In Olesha's case, however, he put this technique into practice in his life, dissolving some of the conventional borders between art and life.

When Olesha's character Shuvalov has his fantastic vision of insects flying as if in a city in the air, he also experiences a sudden anxiety:

“They are beginning to have power over me,” he thought. “The sphere of my vision is becoming polluted by them. … What has got hold of me? I am beginning to see things which don't exist.

this kind of anxiety would be impossible in the world of Karamzin's Liza. Shuvalov, however, like Turgenev's Bazarov, lives in a post-Schopenhauerian world: there is nothing surprising in his fear of being seduced by nature. If for Liza nature was a good mother who responded to her feelings, Shuvalov is not sure whether nature is a mother or a merciless stepmother who seduces him with her colors and beauty. Anyone entering into an intimate relationship with this suspect nature is always alone. No one will either confirm or deny the veracity of his vision: contemplating reality involves a rejection of the organizing categories of practical reason and also the opportunity to verify and communicate perceptions. And like a mystical experience, it can never be shared. An artist, a lover, a child, a sick person—those holding keys to the mysteries of nature—are the heroes in Olesha's writing. Olesha himself belonged to that group of writers who tended to live in their art. These writers could be thought of as either aristocrats of the spirit or outcasts, depending upon how their audience treated them. Since no objective verification of the artist's vision is possible, a writer's audience, looking into his work for some notion of truth, must either take it on faith or reject it.

Olesha's heroes constantly turn to other people, “normal” people, for confirmation of their strange visions, and they are always rejected. “I cannot write not having found an analogy between you and me,” Olesha confessed, while addressing his imaginary reader at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. Loneliness and uncertainty seem to be inseparable from the fate of the artist who cannot relinquish his visions, unless the whole society turns to him and shares his vision.

This dream of recognition became one of the most powerful among Russian artists, especially those in the avant-garde of the Revolution. As history proved, the temptation of being aristocrats of the spirit was, for many of them, so attractive that they eagerly forgot what it was that had set them apart, that is, their very visions. Olesha was a peculiar case. When his hero, Shuvalov, succumbing to the beauty of nature, says, “I am living in Paradise,” a man sitting nearby asks him, “Are you really a Marxist?” When Shuvalov answers yes, the man retorts, “Then you can't possibly be living in Paradise.” Olesha tried to convince everyone, and himself most of all, that it was indeed possible. In 1934, at the First Congress of Soviet Writers, where socialist realism was irrevocably pronounced the only correct way of writing in the Soviet Union and all discussion were once and for all closed, Olesha spoke, “… the relations between an artist and nature are such that she reveals some of her secrets to him, and she is more sociable with him than with others.” He sounded as if he sincerely believed in what he was saying. Furthermore, he could present to the commissars and literary bosses his metaphors as undeniable proof of the truth. One can certainly speculate about whether Olesha was naive enough to believe that the literary bosses at the Congress would treat his words seriously. Did he expect them to forget for a moment the five-year plan and rediscover the world while reading his metaphors? His two goals as an artist—to contemplate the beauty of nature in its hallucinatory revelations and to achieve some confirmation for the true nature of his vision—stood in mutual contradiction. Olesha could not overcome the terror of being seduced and deceived by his genuine but unverifiable experience of reality. Yet he could not resist the powerful attraction of this experience and failed to capitulate in order to have his literary vision confirmed by society at large.

Like many of his contemporaries, Olesha seemed to believe, at least before the First Congress of the Soviet Writers, that the post-revolutionary period was an entirely new era of social history and that a place for the artist-seer would be found in the new reality. If nature could not be entirely trusted, then history would become the new authority. The new world was to be built on a belief in the infallibility of history. Nadezhda Mandelshtam, in her memoirs, described the atmosphere of this belief in history, which dominated Russian intellectual life in the twenties and thirties:

We had really been persuaded that we had entered a new era, and that we had no choice but to submit to historical inevitability, which in any case was only another name for the dreams of all those who had ever fought for human happiness. Propaganda for historical determinism had deprived us of our will and the power to make our own judgments. We laughed in the faces of the doubters. …

If history supported the artist with its authority, as many thought, it would give to the artist's vision a new objective sense. Then the artist could truly approach Paradise and not only take pleasure in the contemplation but also would know that his visions would find some confirmation in the framework of the objective, historical concept of reality. It was true that the “usefulness of the artist at the current stage of historical development” did not equal the Karamzinian “aristocracy of spirit,” but nothing better seemed available and, after all, one had to start with something. However, in order to be accepted by those who were driving the locomotive of history, one had to appear serious, to make an impression that one believed in what one saw and wrote and that there was some link between one's vision and the “objective truth.” Olesha probably expected that he would be listened to at the First Congress, when he came up with his vision of socialism:

… the new social attitude towards the world is, in its purest sense, a human attitude. The world with its grass, dawns and colors is beautiful, and it was corrupted by the power of money, the power of one man over another. This world under the power of money was fantastic and false. Now, for the first time in the history of culture, it has become real and just.

Olesha also had personal reasons for his faith in an alliance between the artist and history, even in 1934, that were not atypical for writers of his generation. Born in 1899, he matured just at the time of World War One and the Revolution. His literary beginnings can be dated to 1918 when, with other writers such as Eduard Bagritsky, Valentin Kataev, Zinaida Shishova, and Semen Kirsanov, he established a group in Odessa called the Green Lamp. The group was originally interested in purely aesthetic problems and paid no attention to the events of the Revolution. But soon after moving to Moscow, Olesha found himself in the new company of Ilya Ilf, Evgeny Petrov, Mikhail Bulgakov, and others. He began to write agitational poems for the proletarian newspaper, Gudok (The Whistle). In his new role, he almost immediately became a star, and his fame spread beyond the enthusiasm of his fellow writers to the masses. Barely twenty years old, he was known and admired as “Zubilo.” The critic Elizabeth Beaujour observed of this time in Olesha's life:

The “Gudok” period held the same privileged position in Olesha's memory as battlefield fellowship often does for others. Olesha rode the open platforms of trains in snow storms and recalled feeling warm inside because engineers and bearded men in sheepskins called him “friend.” Banal as it may sound, it was extremely important to Olesha, especially in retrospect. For a brief time he was successfully integrated into a revolutionary collective which embraced but did not stifle him. “Zubilo” and Olesha the artist were complementary and interdependent, not mutually exclusive. It would seem that Olesha had no need then to use his writings as a weapon to assert his individual existence. For a moment, he realized his ambition to be one with the Revolution and the workers: “Everything was one there, my youth, and the youth of my Soviet Homeland, and the youth of our press, our journalism”—Olesha wrote later.

A writer who has experienced something close to the fulfillment of the crucial dream of the Russian intelligentsia, to be with the people in their march for progress, does not easily denounce his intimate relationship with history. Soon, however, a growing split between comrade Zubilo, freshly married to history, and Yuri Olesha the artist (a lover of nature) interrupted the idyll.

Olesha illustrates the dilemma in his later story, “The Cherry Stone.” Here, as in his story “Love,” the hero Fedya experiences illuminations as a result of having fallen in love and, having begun to notice the world in metaphors, he becomes an artist, that is, one who sees nature better than others. Once, while waiting for his beautiful girlfriend Natasha at a trolley stop, Fedya is constantly asked for directions by other people. Being a nice fellow, he does not mind telling one person, then another, how to get to the railway station, the museum, and so on. His girlfriend does not appear; he continues to give directions. Slowly, and against his will, the artist feels himself being transformed:

And behold? A whistle hangs between my lips! I am whistling! I have a right to whistle! Children, don't you envy me? Stand back! Oho! Behold … I stand there with one leg forward, my hands behind my back, propping my ribs with a crimson baton. Congratulate me, Natasha. I have become a policeman.

This fantastic metamorphosis, however, is only a dream, anxious and perhaps a bit frightening, but still a dream. Fedya, having woken up, retreats to a quiet Voltairean garden and silently plants a little cherry tree—the tree of his personal hopes and artistic treasures. A surprise meets him here too. A new construction project is planned for just the place where Fedya has planted his little tree. Yet there is still hope; by accident, the very spot where his tree is planted will not be covered by new buildings and, almost by miraculous coincidence, a garden will be planted there. “The Cherry Stone” was written several years before the First Congress of Soviet Writers, and with this in mind, it is hard to reject the notion that Olesha, who hoped he would be accepted as a writer, in fact counted on a lucky coincidence.

Olesha's most famous work, the short novel Envy, is devoted to his efforts to find a place as an artist in the new world, to consummate his stormy affair with history. The new world in the novel is personified by two characters who are men of action, Babichev, a successful manager in the new Soviet meat industry, and Makarov, a young sportsman who dreams of becoming a machine. The artist character in the novel is personified by Kavalerov, who at the same time scorns the new primitive, materialistic men and envies them. He does not doubt for a moment that history (meaning the future, portrayed in the novel as the beautiful sixteen-year old girl Valya) will belong to Makarov and not to him. Makarov the young barbarian has no romantic illusions about history; he simply knows her from his Marxist textbook, which teaches the dialectical view of reality. Makarov reasons:

There was a revolution, wasn't there? A terrible revolution. Why was it so terrible? Wasn't it also extremely generous? In terms of the clock face as a whole it was something fundamentally good. Very well. You have to think about these things in terms of the clock face as a whole, not simply in terms of one or two of the divisions of the surface of the face. It follows therefore that there is no difference between the generosity and cruelty. There is only one thing—time. That's the iron law, the ineluctable logic of history. History and time are one and the same thing. They are just like Siamese twins. … The most important thing in the world is undoubtedly and indisputably an understanding of the nature of time.

The artist, Kavalerov, envies the primitive Makarov (as artists have often envied primitives) mostly because Kavalerov cannot fight the power of his “meek feelings” (a key term in Olesha's vocabulary), so that he could join the victors. He somehow cannot visualize himself as being happily in the “iron laws” of history, in spite of the fact that he acknowledges them and even sincerely desires to submit to them. The prize is the young beautiful Valya, and knowing that Valya will not be his but Volodya's, he falls prey to envy. History, like nature, proves to be a goddess with a heart of stone. Kavalerov shows promise as the hero of a new Notes from the Underground. He prepares to feed himself for the rest of his life with hatred and resentment for his more successful and less sensitive comrades.

The new world was prepared to rescue artists from this dilemma, and many writers appeared to be grateful for salvation. They had to put an end to their tendency toward contemplativeness, their tendency to treat incidental experiences too seriously. Instead, they were advised to put more trust into practical reason, which after all tells us about the difference between what is worth noticing and what is unimportant and illusory. For those writers who required it, the comrades prepared theoretical guides. It seemed an easy thing to do, when one had the great Russian realistic tradition behind oneself and a new philosophy with a teleological order before one. Once again, as in Turgenev's times, writers knew where from, where to, and what for the hunter's carriage goes. And if something came from “under the earth” during a lightning bolt, it was only a metaphor and not reality. For the truth had been revealed, and artists were to feel liberated from the torments of its pursuit.

Olesha himself finally came to an understanding of this. In 1936, during a campaign of slander against Shostakovich, Olesha felt it necessary to explain his views. It also gave him an opportunity to speak about his own artistic philosophy. At a writers' meeting in Moscow, he said:

When I like one or another artist, I tend to exaggerate his merits and to forgive him everything, as if believing that he cannot be wrong. That is exactly how I felt about Shostakovich. And, suddenly, I read in Pravda that Shostakovich's opera is “muddle instead of music.” This was said by Pravda, that is, the voice of the Communist Party. What should I do with my attitude towards Shostakovich? If I was delighted with Shostakovich, and Pravda said that his opera was muddle, then either I am wrong or Pravda is. The easiest thing of all would be to say to myself, “I am not wrong,” and to reject for myself, internally, the opinion of Pravda. In other words, being left with the conviction that, in the given case, the Party is saying untrue things, I would allow the possibility that the Party is wrong. What does all of this lead to? Very serious psychological consequences.

These “psychological consequences” had already been suggested in Olesha's character Kavalerov. In his desire for truth, Olesha now condemns the epistemological subjectivity of his original avant-guard poetics. His choice of artistic forms is an integral part of his ideological assumptions. “Formalism,” he said at the same meeting, “is born out of emptiness. True art emerges when an idea, powerful but naked, requires clothes. When the idea is well thought out, the words come running on their own, like children.”

The truth is expressed in the “party line.”

If I disagree with the Party in anything, the whole picture should grow dim in my eyes because all the elements and all the details of this picture are connected; they spring up from one another, and not one of them can be faulty.

Yet Olesha, in spite of his discovery of the truth in Pravda, did not denounce his metaphors. “It is a typical feature of the intelligentsia,” the Soviet proletarian critic Elsberg observed in the 1930s, “to see one's own error but not to be able to correct it.” Elsberg was right. Olesha belonged to the rare category of writers who cannot write dishonestly. Having chosen what he considered truth, however, he could not find the new beauty that was supposed to accompany it. The later decline of Olesha's literary capabilities seems to have been strongly influenced by his ideological choices. For Olesha, the relationship between his artistic goals and the options offered him by the world in which he functioned was a contradictory and even tragic one. For Karamzin, truth and beauty were inseparable: the contemplation of beauty by the artist was an intuitive contact with truth. For Olesha, the artist must choose between truth and beauty. And this choice led him to his artistic self-destruction.

History was not particularly cruel to Olesha. Of course, he did not play any important part in the official literature of his country, which up to the 1950s kept the ladder of success inaccessible to him. What was left him was the role of a spectator who had played on the stage a long time ago and who was remembered by few. Olesha later wrote quite a few self-centered literary pieces in which he referred to the works of his youth. After West Belorussia was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939, Olesha had an opportunity to visit his parents in the town of Grodno. He decided not to go: he had always wanted people in Grodno to notice him on the street and to say, “This is the son of the Oleshas, a famous writer.” It seemed to him that the time had not come yet. This feeling probably never abandoned him.