[In the following review of Michael Green and Jerome Katsell's translation of Olesha's plays, Beaujour criticizes the translations of colloquial expressions but finds the volume an otherwise valuable contribution to Olesha's body of work.]

The Complete Plays of Yury Olesha includes The Conspiracy of Feelings, The Three Fat Men, The List of Blessings, and a fragment of the unfinished The Black Man. Despite its title, the volume does not include the little drama in rhymed verse: “Play on an Execution Block.” This omission is inexplicable and unfortunate, since “Play on an Execution Block” is almost inaccessible (it is not included in the 1968 Soviet collection of Oleša's dramatic works), and it would have been a real service to have made that intriguing, Blokian text available, even in English. On the other hand, the Ardis volume does include A Stern Young Man, Oleša's screenplay for a suppressed film, an almost equally rare text.

The translations are generally serviceable, except perhaps for The Conspiracy of Feelings. It is tempting to introduce slang and vulgarisms when one translates dialogue containing informal conversation, but it is almost always a mistake to do so, since this practice usually results in the instant dating of the translation's language, and produces lines that are difficult to say on stage. The Conspiracy of Feelings is marred by such “colloquial” padding. For example: Ja ležal p'janyj becomes “when I was drunk silly” (23); pravda: “Sure is true” (16); on sumašedšij: “He's flipped his lid” (42); pirovat': “to chow down” (25); mne nadoelo: “I've had it with all this crap.” (40) The exchange: “Èto žestokost’!” “Èto ne žestokost', net.” becomes “Come on, that's cruel.” “Cruel, Hell, no, no way it's cruel.” (22) There are also a few confusing, if not erroneous translations. The barrier at a grade crossing becomes the crossing itself, leading Kavalerov to declare that a man of talent “has to decide to lift the crossing with some terrible scandal,” and Andrej Babičev to say, as he does his calisthenics, “My leg is like a railroad crossing. Each weighs eighty-five pounds.” (16) Similarly, a dialogue between Shapiro and Valia becomes incomprehensible through the substitution of “You should be ashamed of yourself” (39) for “It is shameful.” It is also too bad that a typo has made the sideboard hit Kavalerov rather than bite him (17), and I would defy any actor to get his tongue around “She threw away the old century's bed headboard” (46) or “He may be at that widow's of his place.” (37)

Despite these infelicities, it is good to have the plays in translation, and Ardis is to be commended for having undertaken the (almost) complete Englishing of one of the most interesting writers of the Soviet period.