SOURCE: Peppard, Victor. “The Poetics of Dialogue.” In The Poetics of Yury Olesha, pp. 96-124. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1989.

[In the following chapter from his book-length study of Olesha's poetic artistry, Peppard points out the ways in which Olesha uses dialogic structures in his work.]

Olesha's best works are so thoroughly dialogical because dialogue takes place in them on a number of different levels. One of the most important of these is the level of narrative structure. For the word in an artistic text to be perceived as dialogical rather than monological, it must, of course, be addressed to another person, either implicitly or explicitly. Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground (Zapiski iz-pod polia) (1864) is certainly one of the most graphic examples of a dialogical narrative. Here virtually every word of the underground man is addressed to an imaginary listener so as to rebut in advance all possible objections the listener might have to the underground man's arguments. The distinctive feature of Olesha's own particular narrative dialogicality is the extent to which the addressee is openly identified as another self of the narrator, usually the narrator as child. This marked circularity and self-centeredness of Olesha's fictional dialogue often gives the appearance of a special kind of soliloquy.¹ And indeed, as Bakhtin has observed, the soliloquy is distinguished by a highly dialogical relationship to oneself.² It is just this dialogical relationship of Olesha's narrative personae to each other that forms one of the most significant threads connecting his work from different periods.

Other elements of Olesha's work also operate dialogically, including especially its thematics. As is clear in Envy, his technique is to set in motion a lively debate among various competing ideas and themes, to state the issues “as an equation of pro and contra.”³ The fact that he does not declare the winners of the debate has been viewed by critics with various political and ideological axes to grind as a kind of irresponsibility or oversight. The fact is, however, that his dialogical treatment of theme is a consistent feature of his work and one of the primary bases of his special poetics.

DOUBLE-VOICED NARRATION AND THE SEARCH FOR CHILDHOOD

In No Day without a Line Olesha wants to restore his life “to the point of distraction” (363) and to be able to experience it again not just intellectually but tactilely. In order to do so he engages in acts of literary conjury. As a boy Olesha liked to cut out play armor from cardboard: “I remembered to the point of hallucination one of the moments when I was engaged in that game. … I am holding the cardboard as it turns blue in the twilight. My God, I'll stretch out my hand, and the cardboard will turn up in my hand—and the moment will repeat itself!” (363).

This intense desire to recapture his childhood and the ways in which he saw the world as a child is certainly one of the most powerful impluses, if not the most powerful, behind Olesha's best work. The desire to perceive things as a child no doubt accounts in large measure for Olesha's great affinity for and wide-ranging exploitation of the Shklovskian technique of estrangement. For making the familiar world strange or unfamiliar relies again on the device of showing it as though seen for the first time,⁴ a vantage point that is accessible, it may be assumed, only to a child. Olesha's search for childhood is also graphically embodied in and exemplified by his narrative techniques.

Considering that Olesha claims that he is not interested in writing novels in the style of Tolstoy (426), it is perhaps ironic that his own narrative techniques so closely resemble the scheme Tolstoy employs in his novel Childhood (Detstvo). In Childhood, as Boris Sorokin has observed, Tolstoy produces a kind of “double vision” by using the point of view of both the child and the adult narrator in tandem with each other.⁵ Exactly this point of view constitutes the basic narrative stance in most of Olesha's fiction. If one were to make a composite image of the narrators in Olesha's stories from the late 1920s, it would be that of an adult looking backwards in time, sometimes through the eyes of a child and sometimes through his mature eyes. In some instances Olesha's child narrator is looking forward to future adulthood. In others the reader is not sure exactly which point of view is in control, so that there emerges a blended point of view of the adult and the child. In some works the child's point of view is explicit in the overall narrative structure, but in others infantile or childlike perspectives appear only occasionally in order to present the world as though seen for the first time. Thus the reader often perceives events through a kind of double filter in which there may be constant tension and competition between the child's and the adult's points of view.

The competition that is embedded in Olesha's typical narrative structure is one of the main sources of the tremendously dialogical character of his best works. The voice of the child alternates with and vies with the voice of the adult so that the reader receives a story as though told by means of a double-voiced dialogue.

The narrative structure of Envy would appear at first glance to form an exception to the dominant trend in Olesha's narrative techniques. The first part of the novel is told from the point of Kavalerov in the first person. Part two is told in the third person, largely from the implied vantage point of Ivan Babichev. The basic stylistic congruity between the two parts makes for a smooth transition between them.⁶ Another aspect of Envy's narrative structure that should be mentioned is the covert presence in the narrative point of view of a child. When Kavalerov describes the way in which Andrei Babichev has taken him in off the streets this child comes out of hiding: “In my life there have even appeared the ivory buttons of a blanket cover, and in them—you just have to find the right spot—there swam the iridescent ring of the spectrum. I recognized them immediately. They had returned to me from the farthest, long forgotten corner of a child's memory” (37).

Here the boy of Kavalerov's childhood steps forward momentarily to reveal one of the mainsprings of Olesha's technique in the novel, and indeed in all of his work: that the many observations in Envy about such things as salt falling off the edge of a knife or the visual impressions made by the buttons on a blanket cover are really the kinds of observations a child might make about the world around him. At the same time the reader senses that this child's poetic perception is rather precocious, perhaps too precocious for a child. And in fact the observations made by the narrative persona of Envy are often the sort that an adult in search of childhood perspective would make.

The dialogue between the child and the adult appears in various formulations throughout most of Olesha's fiction. In certain stories, such as “The Cherry Stone” and “Love,” and in a sketch like “In the World,” the basic point of view, as in Envy, is that of an adult; but there are also either implicit or explicit manifestations of infantile or childlike points of view whose object is to present the world as though seen for the first time. In other stories the child's point of view asserts itself quite explicitly. If one compares the two autobiographical sketches “I Look into the Past” and “Human Material,” the impression arises that Olesha uses them as a kind of narrative workshop. The first words of “I Look into the Past” are “When Bleriot flew across Lamanche I was a little school boy” (220). Here the reader finds the point of view of an adult looking back to his childhood. At the beginning of “Human Material” Olesha reverses this perspective so that the child's point of view is primary, and the child is looking forward into the future: “I am a little school boy. When I grow up I will be just like Mr. Kovalevsky. My whole family demands that of me. I will be an engineer and a homeowner” (226).

Just as there is always a child lurking in Kavalerov's outlook, there is an adult waiting to announce himself in the autobiographical narrator of “Human Material.” He eventually does so openly with the words “Now I look around and I don't see any beards! There is no one with a beard!” (227). The narrator of this argumentative autobiography rejoices that now no one is forcing him to be an engineer and that now he can be concerned with justice for the oppressed rather than with the accumulation of wealth for himself. Finally, the narrator says that he is going to strangle that part of himself that wants “to extend his hands to the past” and that he is going to “smother in myself the second ‘I,’ and the third ‘I,’ and all the ‘I's’ who are crawling out from the past” (229). Here Olesha is also carrying on a dialogue with those critics who accused him of dwelling too much on the past. His candor is both disarming and unsettling, because he exposes the method behind his narrative for the purpose of renouncing that which is most dear to him, that is, his several “I's” who constantly make him revisit his childhood.

The kind of narrative technique found in “Human Material” is executed with greater subtlety and to greater effect in “The Chain.” This story and “Liompa” stand out as Olesha's greatest achievements in the genre of the short story. In fact, they must be considered high-ranking in the entire corpus of Soviet Russian short stories. In addition to its richly woven stylistic fabric, “The Chain” exhibits Olesha's characteristic narrative structure in its most sophisticated form. The story is told from the first person by a child. The child's point of view is, however, not the only one, not even the controlling one. For behind it, and in competition with it, is the viewpoint of an adult who is looking back on his impressions of youth.

Competition between an adult's point of view and a child's is suggested already at the beginning of “The Chain,” where the child narrator is struggling to enter the world of adults and to have his outlook on the world accepted by them. He feels that “I do not have the right to participate in the life of the world. I even feel guilty expressing myself so intelligently: Bleriot … The English Channel” (203). The narrator believes that he is better informed than the student, Orlov, who comes to visit his sister, but he feels awkward about declaring this openly.

The narrative of “The Chain” is characterized by subtle shifts between the child's and the adult's points of view. As the narrator sets out on his bicycle ride, his childish point of view is clearly dominant: “Why does an insect, having landed in my eye, immediately perish? Do I really put out poisonous juices?” (204). But as the ride continues, the voice of the adult narrator intrudes and takes over briefly: “The running of the bicycle is accompanied by a sound similar to frying. Sometimes it's as though a firecracker explodes. But that's not important. These are details which you can pile up as many of as you like. You could talk about the cows that have been torn apart from the inside by a skeleton and look like tents. Or about the cows in white suede masks. What's important is that I lost the drive chain. Without it you can't ride a bicycle. The drive chain flew off at full speed, and I noticed it too late” (204-5).

With the words “these are details which you can pile up as many of as you like,” the illusion of the child's speech is broken off, and the adult narrator imposes his own point of view. The self-conscious child has momentarily become a self-conscious adult who is drawing attention to the brilliant artifice of his narrative. Soon, however, the point of view of the child narrator reasserts itself: “I am walking and pushing the machine by its fiber handlebar. The pedal hits me below the knee. Three boys, three boys I don't know are running along the edge of the ravine. They are running away, gilded by the sun. A blissful weakness arises below my stomach. I understand: the boys have found the chain. They are running in the depth of the landscape” (205; italics added).

In this passage and in others like it in “The Chain” we encounter Olesha's narrative technique at its most subtle and most refined. Chudakova maintains that the description of the three boys, shown here in italics, is “more an illustration to an unknown story than a legitimate part of the story we are reading.” Furthermore, this description amounts to “a destruction of the usual literary connections between the hero and what he sees around himself, of the proportions between the ‘psychological’ part and ‘the description’.”⁷ According to Chudakova, in the realistic tradition what the characters see tells us about their psychological state. In the work of Olesha and some of his contemporaries, however, we are freed of the necessity of such a link. The characters' impressions are not motivated in the conventional way so that “the hero sees that which it seems he ought not to see in his present spiritual condition.”⁸ In the example at hand, the child narrator's impression of the three boys as “gilded by the sun” is something he ought not be able to see. Having denied that there is a connection between the description and the character's psychological experience, Chudakova hedges somewhat on her thesis by asserting that the boys “gilded by the sun” are the “strange, almost indifferent point of view of a person gripped by fear and desperation.”⁹ What then is really going on, and what is the significance of Olesha's narrative technique in this passage?

The crucial distinctive feature of the narrative in “The Chain” is its double point of view in which the perceptions of the child are intermingled with those of the adult. As has been shown here, the shifts between these two points of view may take place suddenly and without notice or apparent motivation. The caprice inherent in this particular narrative scheme is both one of its privileges and one of its merits. In some stories Olesha uses the point of view of a child to produce the impression of things seen for the first time. In “The Chain,” on the other hand, the adult narrator invades the child's narration in order to provide his own perspective. Thus the two points of view are interwoven with each other and operate almost simultaneously. If we need to establish the origin of the image of the gilded boys, then it seems most likely that this is a product of the adult narrator's imagination rather than that of a child.

At the end of “The Chain” the adult narrator, who has previously entered the narrative only surreptitiously, introduces himself overtly.

This is a story about the distant past.

My dream was to have a bicycle. Well then, now I have become a grown-up. And then, the grown-up, I say to myself, the school boy:

Well, go ahead and ask now. Now I can take revenge for myself. Speak your cherished wishes.

(207)

Here the interplay and dialogue between the child and the adult that is implicitly embedded in the story's narrative receives its explicit disclosure. The adult narrator is struck by the tremendous distance he feels between himself and his childhood. There was something heroic about his childhood: “You were a contemporary of the century. Remember? Bleriot flew across the English Channel” (207). But now he is chubby, and he has lagged behind: “Now I have stayed behind, look how I've stayed behind, I am shuffling—a fatman on short legs—… Look, how hard it is for me to run, but I'm running, even though I'm out of breath, even though my legs get stuck—I'm running after the thundering storm of the century!” (207). This second ending of “The Chain,” a kind of epilogue, contains one of Olesha's most famous winged phrases in the image of the fat man “running after the thundering storm of the century.” These last words of the epilogue dovetail perfectly with the last words of the story proper.

After losing his chain and engaging in a reverie about what will happen to him when he gets home, the narrator meets up with Utochkin, the famous racer of bicycles, cars, and motorcycles. For me reason Utochkin is considered in Odessa to be an eccentric, the town mad man (gorodskoi sumashedshii) (206). When Utochkin takes the narrator and his bicycle home in his car, the narrator suddenly feels a surge of masculinity and boldness that replaces his fear of punishment for having lost the bicycle chain: “I'm rushing to punish mama, papa, Vera, and the student. … We're men. There he is, a great man: Utochkin!” (206-7). When they arrive, Utochkin goes up to the student, to whom the bicycle belongs in the first place, and tells him, “You shouldn't offend the child. Why have you offended the child? Be so kind as to give him back the chain” (207). As Utochkin drives away from the dacha, the student shouts after the storm that is flying away, “Swine! Charlatan! Mad man!” (207). The description of the “storm that is flying away” paves the way for the last words of the story about the “thundering storm of the century” and thereby gives the double conclusions to the story an effective stylistic symmetry.

The surprise denouement with its humorous twist in which Utochkin accuses the student of taking the chain to his own bicycle gives the ending of the story a delicious ambiguity. Did the narrator, who fantasizes taking revenge on the student, make up a story for Utochkin that the student had taken the chain to his, the narrator's, bicycle? Or was the narrator's story so garbled by his fear of punishment and his awe of Utochkin that the facts became confused? Or did Utochkin, who is both impetuous and rash, simply interpret the narrator's story in a way that suited his own fancy? Certainly one or another permutation of these possibilities took place, but Olesha leaves it to the reader to decide. Thus Olesha achieves yet another double effect at the end: he brings the action to a neat conclusion but leaves the significance of the events ambiguous. “The Chain” is an excellent example of Olesha's ability to create a tightly knit plot with its weight on the ending.

In “The Chain” Olesha does more than simply point to the great events of the day or note the existence of the enigmatic Utochkin. He integrates the heroic motif of the channel crossing into the story's fabric not just as a fact to behold in wonder but as an effective means of revealing the character of the young narrator. Olesha also incorporates the character of Utochkin, one of his real childhood heroes, into the story with a superb blend of sympathy, awe, wry humor, and irony. The linchpin of this story's effectiveness, though, is the double-voiced dialogue that takes place between the two sides of the narrative persona. In this dialogue youth's perceptions of adulthood and age's perceptions of youth reflect mutually on each other, producing the story's elusive ambiguity and great poignancy. Together with the expertly crafted plot, the pithy exposition of character, and gemlike style, this dialogue makes “The Chain” one of Olesha's true masterpieces.

A DIALOGUE BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH

If “The Chain” has an equal among Olesha's short stories, it is the story “Liompa.” While both Olesha and most of his critics consider Envy to be his greatest achievement, it is possible that “Liompa” is the author's most artistically perfect work¹⁰—for “Liompa” is one of those fortuitous instances when an author exploits all of his strengths to their utmost while simultaneously realizing the fullest potential of the genre he is working in.

Although the quality of “Liompa” is evident, the overall significance of the story is far more elusive and controversial because the story is genuinely difficult to read, and a first reading is unlikely to produce any firm conclusions.¹¹ In this instance Olesha does not make the reading of the text difficult in the self-conscious Shklovskian manner found in other places, where devices are frequently shown off for the reader to note. In “Liompa” the story's difficulty inheres rather in its intricately woven network of references and motifs. There are other ways in which “Liompa” appears at first glance to differ radically from most of Olesha's other stories. Rather than an intensely personal, almost confessional narrative point of view, there is a largely objective third-person stance of omniscience. Instead of a festive or holiday atmosphere, there is an acute analysis of the psychological process of a person's dying. There is also no mention of the burning social issues that often preoccupy Olesha's characters.

Closer examination reveals that “Liompa” is comprised of many elements and motifs that are typical of Olesha. In this story they appear in an untypical arrangement, however, one of the features of “Liompa” that makes it so distinctive. For example, even though the narrative point of view is of a largely neutral third person, this narrator shows the reader the world from a perspective that alternates between that of an adult and that of a child. Thus, the complex, dual narrative points of view of a child and an adult that are explicit in a story such as “The Chain” are only implicit in “Liompa.”

The story is set in springtime: “It was spring, the doors were left open, grass grew by the step, and water that had been spilled on a stone sparkled” (191). One expects a story by Olesha to be set in either spring or summer, but the contrast with the theme of death seems paradoxical. Andrew Barratt has even suggested that “the choice of the springtime setting for a story about death offends against one of the most pervasive literary traditions.”¹² The meaning of the spring setting, which is masterfully understated and muted in this story by comparison with many other places in Olesha's work where it is openly celebrated, emerges fully only at the story's conclusion.

The cast of characters in “Liompa” is also familiar. Ponomarev, the dying man, is obviously a representative of the older generation. In “Liompa,” unlike many of the stories and Envy, the man of the older generation does not serve any socially or politically representative function. Ponomarev's death is shown taking place on a purely personal level. The generational conflict that is found in Envy and so many of Olesha's other works is here stripped of its social and ideological aspects and is thereby raised to a higher intellectual and philosophical plane.¹³ There are two representatives of the younger generation, the boy Alexander, and the young child who is called in the story “the rubber boy” (rezinovyi mal'chik). Alexander is actually in a kind of intermediate stage, since he “acts completely as an adult” (192) in most respects, much like the child narrator in “The Chain” who believes that he is intellectually on a par with adults. The rubber boy is, however, a true child. He provides the strongest foil to the dying Ponomarev, who openly envies him.

The three characters are largely defined in relation to each other by their relationship to the things around them. Ponomarev's situation is made unbearable by the fact that things are disappearing from him: “Countries disappeared, America, the chance to be handsome or rich, a family” (192). All that these things have left Ponomarev are their names. But the names are also slipping away, and thus he struggles at the end of the story to give a name to the rat he hears in the kitchen. Alexander, on the other hand, is a complete master of the things that surround him, a characteristic highlighted by the fact that he is building a model airplane correctly and according to the diagram and that he “knows the laws” (192). The rubber boy is only just coming into consciousness of the world around him: “Every second created a new thing for him” (193), but he does not understand the significance of these things.

Barratt has made an extensive and penetrating analysis of “Liompa,” one which is well worth examining in some detail. According to Barratt, the differences among Ponomarev, Alexander, and the rubber boy are only differences of degree, since they each represent a stage of life through which each man passes. In “Liompa” Ponomarev has a revelation that his belief that he controlled things was mistaken. As Barratt points out, Ponomarev comes to understand that his solipsism was “ridiculously extreme”:¹⁴ “I thought that my eye and ear governed things, I thought that the world would cease to exist when I ceased to exist. … But I still exist! Why do things not exist? … They have gone from me, and only their names … swirl in my brain. But what am I to do with these names?” (193).

In the passage immediately preceding this one, Olesha describes Isaac Newton sitting in an orchard: “Tiny ants ran among the mounds. Newton sat in the orchard. In the apple there was hidden a multitude of causes able to call forth an even greater multitude of effects” (193). Barratt believes Olesha is suggesting here that Newton, who sees the apple only as an illustration of the law of gravity, does not realize that it is also part of “the chain of life.” Barratt concludes that “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.”¹⁵

According to Barratt, Olesha battles against the Newtonian modern scientific tradition because it stifles man's inventiveness and imagination. Olesha is fond of spectacle because it has the power to “destroy or suspend the influence of scientific knowledge on our manner of perception.” In “Liompa,” however, the possibility of suspending the laws imposed on us by scientific knowledge is denied to Ponomarev. In the final analysis, therefore, “In ‘Liompa’ he [Olesha] reveals the precariousness, and the ultimate absurdity of man's imagined grasp of his physical environment, and raises it to the level of tragedy.”¹⁶

There is certainly much to recommend Barratt's interpretation of “Liompa.” As has been seen here, Olesha's use of the spectacular to destroy or at least to suspend the laws of physics is one of the dominant principles of his work, and he constantly shows how tenuous is man's control of the physical world. Yet, even if man's solipsism is ridiculous or absurd, Olesha does not intend to renounce it because it is just this solipsism in the other stories of the Cherry Stone cycle that helps man to break through or suspend physical laws and create an alternate world for himself. This alternate world may prove to be illusory and burdensome, but it is usually beneficial, sometimes even necessary, rarely if ever harmful. It is indisputable that in “Liompa” Ponomarev does not have the chance to engage in this liberating form of solipsism. In this respect, Ponomarev's fate does indeed appear to be tragic. The conclusion of “Liompa,” however, is far more problematic than Barratt allows, because it involves a great deal more than simply the resolution of Ponomarev's fate.

The structure of “Liompa” is profoundly dialogical in the Bakhtinian sense that its constituent elements are contrapuntally juxtaposed to one another.¹⁷ As such it is strongly resistant to the imposition of finalizing or monological interpretations on it. In “Liompa” Olesha does not simply make a static juxtaposition of Ponomarev with “the rubber boy” but rather shows them in a dynamic state of tension, even competition. This tension is underscored when the rubber boy comes to look at Ponomarev on his deathbed and out of spite Ponomarev tries to frighten him by saying, “You know, when I die, nothing will remain. Not the yard, not the tree, not papa, not mama. I'll take everything with me” (193). In addition, the story's underlying central opposition between life and death takes the form of Ponomarev's struggle to hang on to the things of his experience and their names. And, the kitchen, which is bursting with the life of the tenants and the rat, is juxtaposed with the dying world of Ponomarev's bedroom.¹⁸ There is also competition between animate objects, inanimate objects, and even abstractions in the mind of Ponomarev. He is worried not just about the loss of things but also about the loss of the chance to be rich and handsome, as well as the chance to have a family.

Ponomarev's struggle to give the rat a name is particularly interesting. It is on one level his last attempt to regain some mastery over the world that is inexorably receding from his power to control it. By naming the rat he will be placing an abstraction, a name, on a living being, and thereby gaining not just control, however illusory, but understanding of it. The name Ponomarev finally blurts out, “Liompa,” is not only un-Russian in its sound, but it also suggests more the name of an inanimate thing than an animate being. The merging or, better, the interchangeablity of inanimate characteristics with animate ones is reflected not just in the name of the rat but in the description of the “rubber boy,” who has the attributes of an inanimate substance. In “Liompa” Olesha is not just analyzing the way in which man relates to and apprehends the objects around him. He is also demonstrating the mutable, dynamic, unstable nature of those objects and their relationships to each other: “A bicycle leaned against the wall by its pedal. The pedal had made a scratch in the wallpaper. It was as though the bicycle supported itself by this scratch on the wall” (183). The nature of things and their relationships to each other depend on the perspective from which they are viewed. When the little boy visits Ponomarev he sees an optical illusion, but as soon as he starts toward it the “change in distance destroyed the illusion” (193).

The end of “Liompa” contains another important example of the mutability of things depending on the perspective from which they are viewed, as well as other keys to the story's overall meaning. When Ponomarev dies a coffin is brought in:

In the afternoon a sky-blue coffin with yellow decorations appeared in the kitchen. The rubber boy looked from the corridor, crossing his hands behind his back. They had to turn the coffin every which way for a long time in order to carry it in the door. They bumped into a shelf, a saucepan, and some plaster fell down. The boy Alexander climbed up on the stove and helped, supporting the box from below. When the coffin finally penetrated into the corridor, it immediately became black, and the rubber boy, shuffling his sandals, ran ahead.

“Grandpa! Grandpa!” he cried. “They've brought you a coffin.”

(194)

This conclusion is remarkable for the succinct yet subtle way in which it both recapitulates the major themes and motifs of the story and suggests their ultimate significance. What this passage demonstrates is that even after Ponomarev's death, man's struggle to master the things around him continues. The wrestling with the coffin and the crashing into objects in the kitchen are graphic illustrations of this struggle. The boy Alexander's climbing up onto the stove in order to help hold the coffin shows that man will continue to battle against Newton's law of gravity. The difficulty in dealing with the coffin also hints that things will continue to be unmanageable, perhaps even inscrutable. By locating the activity surrounding the coffin in the kitchen Olesha reiterates the kitchen's status as the locus of the story's lively activity. In returning the action of the story to the place where it begins, Olesha not only gives the story a neat structural symmetry but also suggests that even in the face of death, life continues.

Olesha has already developed the notion that life will go on in a number of ways. As Kazimiera Ingdahl has pointed out, the apple Newton sees in the orchard is a symbol of life and death in which “we can discern the circular life cycle.”¹⁹ Even the rat is a dualistic symbol of both life and death:²⁰ the rat's moving around in the kitchen signifies liveliness, but Ponomarev thinks that uttering the rat's name will mean death for him. But the most dramatic suggestion that life continues after death is found at the end of the story in the presence of the two boys who help carry in the coffin of Ponomarev. Throughout the story they are the most important representatives of life's continual force. It is inconceivable that Olesha, who so masterfully crafts every phrase and every epithet in “Liompa,” does not intend their participation in the final scene of the story to carry substantial meaning. And in fact, their involvement at the end of the story means that Ponomarev's death and his failure to come to grips with the world around him is not a final or necessarily tragic event. For the boys clearly represent not just the continuation life but its constant renewal.

So far we have noted the struggle with the coffin, but not the coffin itself. When it lies in the light of the kitchen it is sky-blue (goluboi) with yellow decorations, but in the dark of the corridor turns black. Again, it is beyond question that Olesha invests the juxtaposition with great significance. The change in coloration is a succinct way of restating the motif of the mutability of things in different environments and different perspectives. But here the switch in color is not simply an illustration of objects' changeability. The colors blue and yellow, especially in a decorative pattern, suggest celebration and gaiety, and black, needless to say, symbolizes death. Thus, the coffin contains simultaneously within itself both the possibility for the celebration of death and death itself. The idea that death may be celebrated is reinforced by the rubber boy's calling out to the dead Ponomarev that they have brought him a coffin. In his eyes the bringing in of the coffin is the event that is festive in a way an adult would not usually perceive it to be. His cry then is not simply a case of unconscious irony of humor.²¹

As has just been noted here, “Liompa” recasts and reinterprets familiar Oleshan elements in unfamiliar and sometimes surprising ways. One of these is a subtle but nevertheless perceptible suggestion of a carnivalistic outlook on life. For in the conclusion to “Liompa,” indeed throughout the course of the story, Olesha evokes a principle that is fundamental to the carnival view of the world. As Bakhtin puts it, “Old age is pregnant, death is gestation.”²² In the carnival and in the carnivalistic approach to life, death is celebrated, partly because it contains within itself both renewal and rebirth.

In the context of “Liompa,” the very pairing of the old, dying Ponomarev with the young, active boys has powerful carnivalistic overtones. The juxtaposition of youth and age and the succession of old and new are constant themes of the carnival that have their origins in the carnival's basic duality of life and death. That “Liompa” should be set in the springtime is not simply a paradox or a reflexive action on the part of Olesha. Spring is the time of year when the carnival that celebrates the renewal of life after winter takes place. Even the contemporary Mardi Gras celebrations, while certainly a weak echo of the genuine, medieval carnival, preserve this particular element. Spring is also the time of year when young boys make model airplanes and run after them. At the very moment that he dies, the last thing Ponomarev sees is Alexander chasing after his airplane. This moment contains in a brilliantly capsulized form the epitome of the simultaneity and the interrelatedness of life and death found both in the carnival and in “Liompa.” In the dialogue Olesha creates in “Liompa” the spring setting and the lively activities of the young boys act as a counterweight to Ponomarev's death and his failure to maintain his grasp on things. They are the light, gay side of life that is in competition with the dark, troubled side of life symbolized by Ponomarev. The interaction and struggle of light and dark, life and death that are the fulcrum of “Liompa” suggest not so much finality or tragedy as the continuity and duality of the carnival.

A RETURN TO DIALOGUE AND BELATED FOOTNOTES

No Day without a Line is remarkable for the ways in which it recapitulates many of the salient features of Olesha's earlier prose and makes postscripts to its central themes and motifs. In a sense he takes up in No Day without a Line where he left off in his best fiction of the late 1920s. One of the most conspicuous manifestations of this is his return to his most compelling theme, his own youth. During the 1930s Olesha had attempted in a work like A Strict Youth to make the treatment of the new Soviet youth into a surrogate for his real interest. In No Day without a Line he comes back to his main enduring genuine concern: himself. As in his early stories one of his principal mechanisms for dealing with this subject is the creation of a dialogue between age and youth and life and death. The dialogues of No Day without a Line often take the form of imaginative representations of discourses with Olesha's several selves: Olesha the child, Olesha the poet, and Olesha the athlete. In one place Olesha, who had a stepson but no children of his own,²³ even imagines himself as a father.

In No Day without a Line Olesha's narrative persona is constantly trying to move in two directions at the same time: trying to recapture his youth and saying goodbye to the world. Restoring life and parting with life are in No Day without a Line part of the same process of setting one's accounts straight and coming to some sort of understanding about the meaning of life and death in one's old age. Even the effort at returning to one's childhood is bittersweet, because the pleasure of reconstructing youth is mixed with regret that youth is lost forever. In Odessa the road to Lanzheron holds a number of poignant memories for Olesha. He prefaces one of them with the exclamation “Farewell, road to Lanzheron, farewell!” (371). There follows a description of how the narrator watched his father and his cousin, Tolya, play billiards and drink beer: “It was terribly pleasant for me to watch how they drank beer. I myself didn't want to drink at all, on the contrary, beer always spoke to me of castor oil, but seeing how they drowned their mustaches, which then shook under the weight of the foam, I envied them—I wanted quickly to become a grownup” (371).

In this passage the acts of re-creating life and saying goodbye to it are merged explicitly. The persona of the young boy through whose eyes we witness the beer drinking is looking forward to his adulthood, while the adult uses him to recall an experience from his youth. Here is the epitome of the forwards and backwards, backwards and forwards perspectives of No Day without a Line. Here too is illustrated in capsule form the underlying narrative structure of the book, which has at its basis the dialogically juxtaposed viewpoints of an old man and a young boy. In several passages the dialogue between these two competing points of view is revealed with great clarity. One of Olesha's favorite similes is his characterization of falling leaves as creaking ships. He wonders, “Then I didn't think that they [the leaves] creaked like ships, that comes into mind now. But, however, perhaps I thought about it then too!” (264-65). This dialogue between the adult and the boy is continued in connection with the author's recollections of his grandmother escorting him to take the entrance examinations for the gymnasium:

My grandmother brought a writer, and also a little boy. He did not see everything that the writer recalls now. Perhaps all of that never was! No, it was after all! Undoubtedly, it was autumn and the leaves were falling. … Undoubtedly, sailing past me their sides creaked like ships. And, like ships, sailing around me, they described a circle. … No, the boy saw all of that—the writer only recalls it now and draws it from other recollections, but it was that very boy whose grandmother brought him who saw.

And indeed, where is the borderline? Where did he begin to see? Where was he simply a boy and then suddenly became a poet? And on that morning—oh, undoubtedly—he both looked and saw.

(378-79)

Although Olesha is probably not consciously aware of it, in this part of No Day without a Line he provides the reader with a disclosure of the genesis of his basic narrative strategy in such early stories as “The Chain” and “I Look into the Past.” By trying to establish which part of him, the young boy or the adult writer, is responsible for his artistic perceptions of the world, he reveals the source of competition inherent in his dual narrative structure, where the voice of the child competes with the voice of the grownup. It is this highly dialogical structure of many parts of No Day without a Line that brings it back into contact with Olesha's best early short fiction.

One of the recurrent leitmotifs of No Day without a Line is leave taking. Near the end of the book Olesha writes, “I will have to write a book about parting with the world” (558). An earlier passage gives a rather enigmatic variation on this motif: “I will part with you solemnly once again, choosing a special situation, but for now this is a parting in reminiscence” (446). There follows a description of how he once ate a chicken on the way back to the apartment he shared with Ilia I'lf. Olesha concludes this note with the words “There is one of my rough draft partings, dear life” (446). The meaning of this particular reminiscence is not clear, although we know that he considers the period in which he worked for The Whistle and lived with Il'f, the same period in which he wrote much of his major work, to be a special one. It is possible that the account of how he bought a whole chicken but did not eat all of it because he felt that it was more than one person ought to consume is meant to suggest that the author did not understand how fortunate he was in this earlier time and was consequently wasteful of his talents. Without a more fully developed context, however, this passage remains, as Olesha says, a rough draft.

Olesha's theme of saying goodbye to the things of the world has its best literary expression in the story “Liompa,” where Ponomarev frantically tries to part with the objects around him before he dies. As noted, “Liompa” is something of an enigma among his early works in the sense that, although it treats this theme with tremendous power, it is virtually the only story by Olesha that does. Unlike many of his other stories, which have one or even several companion pieces on similar subjects, “Liompa” seems to stand alone. It is not until the emergence of No Day without a Line that Olesha provides a complement and something of a belated footnote to “Liompa.”²⁴

In No Day without a Line the narrator writes that he is afraid he is losing contact with the world around him. In the springtime he wonders why he does not catch the familiar smell of the first signs of spring: “Perhaps, with the years the possibility of this contact is lost?” (556). He wonders whether he can reestablish contact by going out of the city into the country: “Once I wanted to eat nature, brush my cheek against the trunk of a tree, scraping the skin till it bled. Once, arriving in the country for the first time after an absence, I ran up a little hill, and not seeing that there was a cemetery nearby, feeling ecstatic, fell face down into the feet of the grass, which wounded me, and I cried from the feeling of closeness to the earth, and conversed with the earth” (556).

When the narrator arises from the ground, however, his eye catches sight of the cemetery. In symbolic terms this short sketch represents the obverse of the story “Liompa.” Whereas in “Liompa” life is affirmed in death, in this sketch death makes its presence felt even as the narrator communes ecstatically with the life-giving power of nature. Thus, both the sketch and “Liompa” depict the dichotomy of life and death as a dialogue in which each side always asserts its rights and never gives in to the hegemony of the other. While Olesha's sketch in No Day without a Line lacks the great artistic power of “Liompa,” it is nevertheless testimony to the fact that in No Day without a Line he has indeed succeeded in resurrecting his skill as a writer to a high level.

In No Day without a Line Olesha is greatly preoccupied with death and aging. As with the book's other major themes, he gives these a thoroughly metaliterary treatment, which includes reminiscences, terse statements of belief, passages of literary criticism, short independent sketches, and individual metaphors. The reminiscences of No Day without a Line include a number of sections that comprise a kind of necrology of Olesha's contemporaries in which the author bids them farewell. He also examines the processes of aging and of dying but is greatly more interested in the former than in the latter. Olesha dismisses Tolstoy's depiction of Ivan Ilich's death as “healthy nonsense”; he is convinced that when Tolstoy himself died he did not understand a thing and that his death had nothing in common with the death of Ivan Ilich (552). The phenomenon of aging, however, may be described thus: “One of the sensations of aging is that sensation when you don't feel in yourself the shoots of the future. They could always be felt, now another would grow up, begin to give color and smell. Now they are completely gone. The future has disappeared in me!” (551). In this passage the sense of loss experienced in the act of aging is compensated for by the author's transparent glee at inventing an expressive extended metaphor with which to describe that process.

OLESHA'S SEVERAL SELVES

When Olesha was working together with the producers of his cartoon comedy, A Little Girl at the Circus (Devochka v tsirke) (1958), and they asked him what was going to come next, he always replied that he did not know and that it was not he who was writing the cartoon but some other person inside of him.²⁵ In several passages of No Day without a Line Olesha's ability to detach one aspect of himself from another takes the graphic form of dialogues between himself and his several other selves. One of the most intriguing of these involves the manifestation of something like an entirely separate alter ego.

Once when visiting a bakery he usually shops at, Olesha's narrator undergoes “a surprising experience, which sometimes visits me and which I call ‘the world without me’” (544). The narrator promises to recount this experience in greater detail later, but there is no explicit follow-up to this passage in No Day without a Line. Nevertheless, there is a short sketch in which the narrator describes in detail a relationship with a daughter he never had:

Sometimes through the real circumstances of my life, through its situation, through the things and walls of my home, show through images of some other life, also mine, but taking place not always perceptibly for me, not always, so to speak, in my view. … I never had children. Suddenly for an instant I feel that these are the children of my daughter. I never had a daughter.

Yes, but I have come to see my daughter. I am her father and grandfather. I am visiting my daughter and grandchildren when they have been waiting for me to come to dinner. … I have brought a cake. My god, how I remember the square of cake that was awkward to carry!

(458)

Olesha's description here of “images of another life” confirms what Paustovsky characterized as his ability to create with his imagination a special life for himself out of the reality that surrounded him.²⁶ In No Day without a Line the narrator is constantly aware of other selves living within himself, expressed most often by the dialogue between an older self and a younger self. Sometimes Olesha depicts this dialogue in the form of a miniature sketch. One sketch begins with the passage quoted above in which the narrator announces that the plot of his book is about how a man lived to old age:

Since nothing happens to the sensation that “I live” and it remains the same as it was in infancy, with this sensation I perceive myself, an old man, youthfully, freshly, and that old man is unusually new for me. … And suddenly in the mirror at the young me, who is within and without, looks an old man.

Fantastic! Theater! When going away from the mirror, I lie down on a couch and I don't think about myself that I am the one who I have just seen. No, I am lying in the capacity of the same “I” who was lying when I was a boy. And the other one has remained in the mirror. Now there are two of us, I and he. …

“Hello, who are you?”

“I am you.”

“It's not true.”

Sometimes I even laugh. And the one in the mirror laughs. I laugh until I cry. And the one in the mirror cries.

(459)

In Olesha's works the mirror is often connected with the appearance of a character's double. In the beginning of the second part of Envy Kavalerov's looking into a mirror presages the appearance of Ivan Babichev, his partner in conspiracy and carnivalistic double. In his speech to the First Congress of the Soviet Writers' Union, Olesha talks about the ability that people, especially artists, have for feeling a double within themselves.²⁷ In addition to being able to sense a double within himself, Olesha has a great capacity for creating double characters in his fiction, as Envy and his stories demonstrate. In No Day without a Line, where Olesha deliberately reduces his means of expression to their barest essentials, there are for all practical purposes no other characters than the author-narrator. Yet, the multiple personalities of the narrative persona embrace nearly all of the characters that are essential to Olesha: the child, the adult, the writer-poet, and the athlete. He describes the last of these: “For me there is no doubt that in me still lives someone powerful, some athlete—more accurately, the wreckage of an athlete, a torso without arms and legs, turning around heavily in my body and thereby tormenting both me and himself” (457).

Here the presence of a double within the narrator's persona is not an object of fascination and wonder, not a person to chat with, laugh with, and cry with. In this case the visitation of one's double brings discomfort to both the young man and the old one. Olesha expresses the sense of loss of one's youthful physical capacities by means of an image he associates with himself all throughout his lifetime, the image of the strong, young athlete. All of his life, and decades after he had given up active participation in any sort of physical activity, Olesha continued to view part of himself as a trackman or a soccer player. He continued to regard himself, as did his contemporary and follower, Sergei Bondarin, as an “overweight forward.”²⁸

In No Day without a Line Olesha's act of reconstructing his youth is also intended to play a trick on the forces of nature, that is, to trick them into believing as he does that in the final analysis he is really immortal. Throughout the book Olesha's narrator vacillates between hoping for the trick to work and the realization that it cannot. The conclusion to one of his miniatures in which his younger self yields to his older self makes a concession that the triumph of death is inevitable. When he was a boy and people cried out “boy” to someone else, he would turn around also:

Will I turn around now when they cry, “Old man!”

Perhaps I won't turn around. Don't want to? No, I think that basically the surprise is that it has come so quickly. … Has it really come?

“Old man! Hey, Old man!”

No, it's not me, it can't be.

“Old man!”

No, I won't turn around. It can't be that it has happened so quickly.

“Old man! There, the fool doesn't turn around! It's me—death!”

(547)

This passage then appears to be the inescapable end of the dialogue between the narrator's youthful and aged sides, when the old man has to give up the illusion that by conversing with his younger double he can somehow remain young himself and forestall the natural order of things, when he has to confront death on his own. Yet, Olesha states in another place that “Nevertheless there is the absolute conviction that I won't die” (552). As with the other major thematic juxtapositions of No Day without a Line, such as success and failure, restoration and deterioration, age and youth, Olesha does not give the contest between life and death a definitive denouement. In this fashion he remains faithful to the dialogical dynamic that is at the heart of his major artistic accomplishments.

Valentin Kataev believes that in No Day without a Line, “Olesha's discovery is to show the process of the appearance and construction of an artistic image. It is as though Olesha verbally reproduces the very course of his artistic thinking.”²⁹ Olesha's self-conscious Shklovskian technique of showing off the processes by which he creates his images is found not just in this book but in virtually all of his work. The numerous circular dialogues with the different manifestations of Olesha's narrative selves epitomize the high degree to which No Day without a Line is self-directed and self-absorbed, almost an extended soliloquy. One may even wonder whether the reader has been invited to take part in this self-centered dialogue at all. In fact, as Kataev obliquely suggests, Olesha constantly summons the reader to participate as a witness to his creative processes. When he complains that he has an illness of the sentence, he is in effect telling the reader to watch him at work and see how clever he still is, despite the appearance that he is old and decrepit. It is undeniable that to a certain extent Olesha is exploiting a kind of calculated self-pity in order to gain the reader's sympathies. Yet, he elicits from the reader more than just sympathy and the passive role of an eyewitness to his artistic wizardry. The great dialogicality of his work inexorably draws the reader into his dialogical debates, forcing the reader to decide matters. However much they are based on false premises and assumptions about fiction in general and Olesha in particular, the numerous controversies surrounding his work illustrate how actively engaged his readers and critics are.

THE RAMIFICATIONS OF AMBIVALENCE

One of the reasons Olesha's work is so dialogical is that he has such a highly developed ability to see both sides, sometimes several sides, of an issue, theme, or character simultaneously. Another product of this feature of Olesha's vision that is closely related to his great dialogicality is his perpetual ambivalence. For the most part, ambivalence in Olesha plays a productive role. There are, however, some instances where Olesha's unwillingness or inability to resolve certain questions may work to the detriment of a given work. Such is the case in his scenario A Strict Youth. At the end of A Strict Youth Masha does not make a choice between her husband, Stepanov, and Grisha Fokin, so the mainspring of the dramatic interest in the scenario is left unresolved. In the context of Olesha's idealization of Soviet youth and his depiction of good characters, such as Stepanov, versus better characters, such as Fokin, this lack of dramatic resolution does not so much inspire the reader to figure things out as it leaves a nebulous impression of saccharine ambiguity and irresolution.

In another instance Olesha's ambivalence may have led to a kind of artistic paralysis that prevented him from giving a potentially important work a finished form. He begins his article “Remarks of a Dramatist” with the sensational words “I am interested in the question of the physical destruction of characters in plays.”³⁰ He is also interested in the philosophical and moral questions associated with murder and killing, as the several drafts of “The Death of Sand” (Smert' Zanda) and The Black Man (Chernyi chelovek) illustrate. “Sand” was published in an unfinished form in 1930, and part of the play “The Black Man” was published as a fragment in 1932, but neither of these ever resulted in a completed work.³¹ In The Black Man Sand interviews a man who has committed a crime of passion when he attempted to murder another man out of jealousy. The problem of the conscience of someone who kills is highlighted in this fragment by references to Raskol'nikov's murder of the old pawnbroker in Crime and Punishment and to the killing that was done in the name of the Revolution. Elizabeth Beaujour believes that Olesha never finished Sand/Black Man because to do so would have meant revealing too much of his own true self.³² It also seems likely that he never completed these works because his attitude toward killing, especially killing on the stage, never became firmly established. The alternate endings to A Conspiracy of Feelings are eloquent testimony to this attitude. As it turns out, Olesha's fullest treatment of his Sand theme may be found in this play, where Ivan Babichev encourages Kavalerov to murder Andrei and casually suggests to someone that he kill the husband of his mistress.

There are of course some places where Olesha casts off his characteristic ambivalence in favor of definite moral conclusions. Generally speaking, however, the artistic quality of these works suffers by comparison with works in which true dialogue is maintained. This is especially evident in some of the sketches where Olesha portrays his battles with the older generation not so much as a dynamic struggle but as a kind of pat hand in which his own views are clearly victorious.

There is also the potential danger that Olesha's talent for seeing both sides of an idea may lead not to dialogue but to excessive schematism. One work where he treads a fine line between such schematism and true dialogue is “The Cherry Stone.” The optimistic conclusion of this story, in which the seed planted by Avel will grow into a cherry tree in the courtyard of the concrete colossus, strongly suggests that amicable resolutions between the contesting forces of sensitivity and practicality, romanticism and realism, and imagination and the plan will take place.³³ Yet, Olesha refrains from portraying these resolutions as inevitable and thereby preserves the kind of dialogue between competing ideas that makes his best works so provocative.

Olesha's refusal to take sides has earned the reproach of critics in both the Soviet Union and abroad from the time his works first appeared until now. His play A List of Blessings, his strongest dramatic work, is an excellent case in point, and the critical response to it is therefore worth examining in some detail. Not surprisingly, most of the criticism of the play has centered on its questions of social classes and their relationships. One of the most typical responses to List, expressed by Yu. Yuzovsky, is that the heroine Goncharova's theme of loneliness is a “petty-bourgeois treatment of the idea of personality and the collective.”³⁴ A. Prozorov seconds this interpretation, and calls Goncharova's acceptance of the proletariat, based as it is on the old feelings of love and pity, nothing more than “the other side of her petty-bourgeois individualism.”³⁵ Some critics took great pains to refute the play's most quoted and memorable line, Goncharova's winged saying that “in an epoch of rapid tempos the artist should think slowly” (P 95). Prozorov interprets this saying as a defense of Goncharova's Hamletism of the personality divided within itself and claims that what Olesha really means by it is a plea that the intelligentsia be allowed to slow down the process of its reconstruction. For Prozorov the play is too abstract and too far removed from the concrete problems of socialist construction. What Prozorov wants is for Olesha to show Goncharova's future and her conquering of her own past.³⁶

In fact, rather than any definite social or ideological line, A List of Blessings reflects more ideological ambivalence, exactly the kind of ambivalence the heroine Goncharova experiences.³⁷ For example, Europe, the repository of so much valued tradition, is portrayed in an almost entirely negative way in A List of Blessings. Europe's cultural heritage, which Goncharova feels so close to, is only alluded to. Although she says that she feels at home in her European surroundings, Goncharova is never directly shown experiencing her newfound happiness. All of her direct contact with European life that takes place in the play is thoroughly besmirched with corruption and avarice. Of the French characters met in Paris, only the Communist Santillant is shown to be a person of honor and principle. Among the Russian émigrés, most of whom are crooks and cowards, Tregubova stands out as the only one with a semblance of integrity.

Goncharova's fate remains an ambiguous one. While she repents of her doubts about the Soviet system, she appears equally determined to maintain the integrity of her own personal values and convictions in a spirit of greater understanding with the working class. Her demise at the end of the play leaves unresolved the question of whether she will be able, or whether she will be allowed, to realize some sort of synthesis of her two lists in the Soviet Union, one of its blessings and one of its crimes. At the same time, her death has heroic overtones, since she dies in the defense of the revolutionary, Santillant.

Olesha often frustrates his readers and critics when he does not give clear-cut solutions to the questions found in his works. Rudnitsky has expressed this frustration colorfully in his assessment that A List of Blessings “began sharply and boldly, but at the end it wagged its tail.”³⁸ Yet, as with Envy, the strength of A List of Blessings lies not in the solving of problems but in the acuteness with which Olesha poses them. Furthermore, the problematic conclusion of A List of Blessings is fully in concert with the heroine Goncharova's character. Another ending might have better satisfied Soviet critics in search of clear moral lessons to be learned, but it probably would have violated the profoundly ambivalent nature of both the play's heroine and its author.

The open-ended nature of the conclusion to Envy not only violates readers' expectations about novelistic structure but infuriates critics who are determined to find solutions and clear messages in Olesha. Andrew Barratt considers Envy to be a “profoundly disturbing and nihilistic book, particularly for the reader who is intent on discovering a ‘message.’” He views Envy as a nihilistic work largely because it does not pose a solution to man's existential dilemma.³⁹ Here it seems that Barratt is stretching a point, since lack of resolution to fundamental conflicts and problems, or even lack of a well-defined philosophy, is not necessarily evidence of a nihilistic view of the world.

The ambivalence inherent in much of Olesha's work has produced apparently unreconcilable differences that have arisen in connection with their critical interpretation. One such case concerns No Day without a Line. Chudakova, who usually stresses the lighter aspects of Olesha, believes that it is basically an “unhappy book” because it deals so much with the problems of the author's having forgotten how to write: “In this book there is not the joy which simply bursts from his first books, of which there is a great deal even in Envy, where completely different plans battle fiercely and are not resolved. The book was written already not with ‘pleasure,’ but with bitterness, with desperation.”⁴⁰

Shklovsky, perhaps partly from the desire to refute Chudakova conclusively, finds that “Olesha's last book is optimistic, it flies up above the everyday (byt), it casts off childhood in order not to return to it.”⁴¹ Here Shklovsky is surely carried away with his own paradoxical poeticism, for in No Day without a Line, far from casting off childhood, Olesha constantly uses it in juxtaposition with his adulthood as one of the principal themes of the book. Attempting to recapture childhood has implications both bitter and sweet, just as examining one's old age does. As has been shown here, the essence of No Day without a Line is neither optimism nor pessimism, but the manner in which these two conflicting emotions and other antithetical emotions and ideas compete with each other in an intense dialogue that grants none of them a complete victory.

Both Barratt and Chudakova, as well as others, stress the lack of resolution in Olesha of the questions his works place before the reader. Chudakova also notes the way in which the different elements of Envy actually seem to combat each other. For decades now critics both in the Soviet Union and the West have been struggling with such matters as who represents what, with whom does the author most closely sympathize, and who is ultimately on the side of right in Envy, the stories, A List of Blessings, and Olesha's other works. This debate is natural because of the provocative manner in which Olesha depicts a number of fundamental issues concerning the position of the Soviet intelligentsia, especially that of the artist, in the emerging Soviet society. In a sense, however, all of these explorations are doomed to failure for the very reason that Olesha's poetics strongly resist clear-cut solutions and conclusions. Olesha's poetics do not allow his works easily to be classified as gay or gloomy, happy or pessimistic, positive or negative. The elements of optimism and pessimism, alienation and ecstasy all appear in Olesha, but they appear in varying proportions in different works, and in his best works they are in a state of active competition with each other. This highly competitive, even combative relationship between elements of Olesha's works is one of their true hallmarks and a sign of their tremendously dialogical, and not prescriptive, character. When Olesha resorts to positivistic or didactic conclusions, as he does in some of his sketches and dramatic works, the dialogical quality of his poetics collapses, and brings down the level of artistic quality with it.

Except for a few cases, such as A Strict Youth, where the work's overall structure is itself poorly defined and there is in fact no real dialogue, the ambiguity and ambivalence that often come from Olesha's intense dialogicality should not be viewed as a shortcoming, as many critics have intimated. To the contrary, Olesha's ambivalence may have extremely creative functions. His many variations on certain basic themes and motifs are an example of a productive offshoot of his inability to come to a final position about certain issues. Furthermore, in combination with his struggles against generic canons, his dialogical ambivalence gives great scope to the reader for fashioning meaning and structure from his works. As we have seen with respect to Envy and No Day without a Line, one salient feature of these works is that they contain a multiplicity of textual structures and meanings that the reader may deduce from them. This feature does not mean that one reading is as good as the next. The constant and fundamental error made by so many of Olesha's critics is that they claim to have found his final word in places where there is none. Any reading of Envy and No Day without a Line or the early stories that does not take into account the fact that Olesha gives not one but several words of roughly equal weight will obscure their essentially dialogical character.

One of the most powerful motives behind Olesha's worldview and his poetics is his perception of the mutability of both the objects of the physical world and of people. His frequent showing of objects from contrasting far and near or light and dark perspectives is a manifestation of this motive. Olesha's propensity for playing variations on a given theme, motif, or character—one of the dominant features of his works when considered together—also stems in part from this perception. His sense of the world's changeability also helps to explain why he is often so ambivalent and why he seldom arrives at definitive answers to the questions he poses. There is another, even more important reason for this: Olesha visualizes problems and conflicts not in terms of answers and resolutions but in terms of the dialogical oppositions and carnivalistic juxtapositions that permeate his best works.

Notes

1. In Russian Literature under Lenin and Stalin, 1917-1953, especially 239 and 242, Struve is one of the first to note that Olesha's dialogues are carried out primarily with himself.

2. Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, 138.

3. In The Russian Revolutionary Novel: Turgenev to Pasternak (1982), Richard Freeborn finds that one of the most interesting things about Envy is “its statement of the issues as an equation of pro and contra” (156).

4. See Shklovsky, “Iskusstvo kak priem,” 14.

5. Sorokin, Tolstoy in Prerevolutionary Russian Criticism (1979), 26. It is somewhat surprising that in his attempt to build a typology of narrative techniques Boris Uspensky deals specifically with multiple points of view in A Poetics of Composition (1973), 89-97, and constantly refers to Tolstoy but does not take note of the kind of narrative stance found in Childhood.

6. As Berczynski notes in “Kavalerov's Monologue in Envy: A Baroque Soliloquy,” “stylistic unity is not sacrificed for the sake of the narrational scheme” (375).

7. Chudakova, Masterstvo Yuriia Oleshi, 23.

8. Ibid., 23-24.

9. Ibid., 24.

10. In My zhivem vpervye: O tvorchestve Yuriia Oleshi, 181, Pertsov believes that “Liompa” is “the most perfect and most tragic” of Olesha's stories.

11. In “Yury Olesha's Three Ages of Man: A Close Reading of ‘Liompa’” (1980), Barratt discusses the difficulty inherent in reading this story.

12. See ibid., 599.

13. As Szulkin points out in his article “Modes of Perception in Jurij Olesha's ‘Liompa’” (1968), 309, the absence of political and ideological elements raises the level of the story's universality.

14. Barratt, “Yury Olesha's Three Ages of Man,” 610.

15. Ibid., 611-12.

16. See ibid., 613-14. As is evident from note 10 above, Pertsov also finds “Liompa” to be tragic.

17. Bakhtin sets out his notion of dialogical structure in Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, 49.

18. Barratt describes this juxtaposition in “Yury Olesha's Three Ages of Man” (606).

19. See Ingdahl's article “Life/Death Dichotomy in Jurij Olesha's Short Story ‘Liompa’” (1982), 158. As Ingdahl points out, the words of the story “V mire bylo yabloko” (“In the beginning there was an apple”) are an allusion to the beginning of the Gospel according to John: “V mire bylo slovo” (“In the beginning was the word”). In Ingdahl's interpretation “the description of the apple contains allusions to the Bibical paradise myth, where it functions as a symbol of fertility and death” (193).

20. Ibid., 164.

21. In My zhivem vpervye Pertsov finds this irony to be “especially terrible, because the author has placed it in the lips of a child” (188).

22. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 52-53.

23. As Beaujour notes in “Proust-Envy: Fiction and Autobiography in the works of Olesha,” 127, Olesha had a stepson, Igor, who committed suicide by jumping out of a window in front of both Olesha and his mother, Olga Suok-Olesha. In a note on p. 133 of the same article Beaujour points out that Igor's cousin, Vsevolod Bagritsky, writes about this episode in his book Dnevniki, pis'ma, stikhi (1964), 48. Olesha mentions neither Igor nor his wife in No Day without a Line. Interestingly, the Oleshas seem to have taken something like a parental interest in Vsevolod Bagritsky, for he reports on p. 36 that they bought him a suit. Olesha was the brother-in-law of Vsevolod's father, Eduard. The younger Bagritsky's book contains several references to Olesha, including one on p. 57 about how other writers envied Olesha for his success.

24. Harkins notes the connection between “Liompa” and No Day without a Line in “No Day without a Line: The World of Iurii Olesha” (1984), 100.

25. Brumberg and Brumberg, in Vospominaniia, 146.

26. Ibid., 177.

27. Olesha, “Rech' na I Vsesoiuznom s'ezde sovetskikh pisatelei,” P'esy (1968), 324.

28. This is what Bondarin calls Olesha in his memoir about him in “Vstrechi so sverstnikom,” Gvozd' vinograda (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1964), 175.

29. See Kataev, “Proshchanie s mirom,” 437.

30. See Olesha, “O malen'kikh p'esakh,” P'esy, 291. This article was originally published in 30 dnei no. 8 (1933): 64-65.

31. As Beaujour points out in a note on p. 107 of The Invisible Land, “Chernyi chelovek” was published in 30 dnei no. 6 (1932): 27-31, and “Otryvok iz p'esy Smert' Zanda” appeared in Literaturnaia gazeta (19 October 1930.

32. Ibid., 109.

33. In examining “The Cherry Stone” Harkins writes in “The Philosophical Tales of Jurij Olesha” that “a miraculous synthesis of technology and life” (351) will be possible in the future and states his premise that Olesha's stories “are constructed on a number of antitheses: idealism vs. materialism, vitalism vs. mechanism, romanticism vs. realism, traditionalism vs. futurism” (348).

34. Yuzovsky, “Nepreodolennaia Evropa,” Literaturnaia gazeta, 15 June 1931.

35. “O Spiske blagodeianii Yu. Oleshi,” Na literaturnom postu no. 28 (1931): 36.

36. Prozorov, “O Spiske blagodeianii Yu. Oleshi,” 33-34. Prozorov is not completely unsympathetic to Olesha, and his article is accompanied on p. 35 by a humorous cartoon that depicts a rotund Olesha in Elizabethan garb holding a skull, presumably meant to suggest the skull of Yorick from Shakespeare's Hamlet.

37. Brown notes this ambivalence in Meyerhold on Theater (1969), 242.

38. See Rudnitsky, Rezhisser Meierkhol'd, 439.

39. Barratt, Yurii Olesha's “Envy,” 53.

40. Chudakova, Masterstvo Yuria Oleshi, 96.

41. Shklovsky, “Struna zvenit v tumane,” 201.

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