SOURCE: Harkins, William E. “No Day Without a Line: The World of Jurii Olesha.” In Russian Literature and American Critics, edited by Kenneth N. Brostrom, pp. 95-101. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1984.

[In the following essay, Harkins notes that Olesha's fragmentary reminiscences show both an esthetic view of life and an absence of a moral or political viewpoint.]

Olesha's No Day Without a Line (Ni dnia bez strochki) was published posthumously in 1965. The book is far more than a series of fragmentary and casual autobiographical memoirs; it is a cycle of small essays that not only cover the life of its writer but provide information concerning his views, tastes, and philosophical and cultural likes and dislikes.¹ The level of its individual, lapidary, and fragmented pieces is notably uneven, but then the book was conceived as an assemblage of fragments. When we consider that its execution comes from a period in Olesha's life when he was otherwise almost silent, we could hardly have expected more. Suffice it to say that the fragmentary character of the work plays a major role in its unevenness; while the form he chooses does relieve the author of all responsibility for continuity, smooth transition, and amplification of effect, it also creates a need for pointed beginnings and endings, and makes cumulative effects, if not impossible, at least difficult.

On reading these lapidary essays the reader is struck by two uniform qualities that help give the work unity. The first is a markedly esthetic view of life and the world: in the writer as a child an attitude of pure esthetic perceptivity rules; in the older writer an esthetic view that is directed toward works of art and events of history or culture is predominant. The second quality that strikes us is the almost total absence of a moral or political point of view. Let us deal with this second quality first.

The total absence of a moral and political viewpoint hardly comes as a great surprise for those familiar with Olesha's writing. I link the words “moral” and “political” together not because they should be confused, but because their linkage or confusion is frequently encountered in popular, and even, at times, official Soviet pronouncements. This shortcoming on Olesha's part occurs as something almost shocking to the Soviet reader and to others familiar with Soviet literature. Thus, when Olesha refers to the shelling of Odessa by the battleship Potëmkin in the Revolution of 1905, the expected political gloss is not made (p. 28). True, Olesha was still a child. The fables of Krylov disappoint the young Olesha: they bore him as too moral, and the animals puzzle him as, unexpectedly, they behave at times like animals, at times like human beings (44-45). Even when Olesha discusses moral questions such as the danger of being infected with syphilis, or the individual's right to commit suicide, the customary, orthodox (or even an unorthodox) moral point of view is lacking (p. 92).

Olesha does display some interest in society, its structure, and its social contrasts, but this is usually linked with esthetic qualities. Thus, he discusses differences in the uniforms worn by poor and rich highschool students. The high point of his interest in a childhood visit paid to the home of a wealthy bourgeois school comrade is the strikingly different architecture of the host's house (66-67).

This esthetic interest in social differences might be compared to Marcel Proust's esthetic analysis of society (see below for other points of similarity between Olesha and Proust). But, tempting though the comparison might be, it is obvious that Olesha never attempted a literary imaging of society as such, his novel Envy (Zavist') and his stories are rather striking for their lack of expected social images (e.g., the absence of family with the Babichev brothers and Kavalerov in Envy). As for economics, Olesha confesses his lifelong lack of interest in the science: a grocery store interests him not as a source of products for sale, but because, “It was illumined by the yellow light of a kerosene lamp which cast on the flagstones of the pavement yellow rectangles, sometimes slanting, which prefigured French painting” (p. 95).

This absence of moral or political themes may seem strange in view of the important role such themes play in Olesha's novel Envy, where Andrei Babichev and Volodia Makarov struggle to build the new Soviet order, while Andrei's brother Ivan develops his “conspiracy of feelings,” a protest in the name of individual human feelings which the new order threatens to overwhelm. In this conflict between the promised Utopian order and the private feelings of the individual we have a real moral dilemma: Utopia will hardly alleviate the sufferings of the unrequited lover, the old maid, or the moron. Olesha's play A List of Assets (Spisok blagodeianii, 1931) continues this theme of the contest of Utopia and private happiness, though it solves it rather artificially, under the pressure toward conformism of the early 1930's, by affirming the superior claims of the Utopian order and society.

It is of course true that Olesha's esthetic perception and his sense of social and political morality had already lived together in an uneasy coexistence. From time to time the author even made attempts, more or less successful, to synthesize, if not harmonize, them. The first such attempt is in the conception, in Envy, of the machine Ophelia, which can do anything (Olesha was fascinated with the idea that machines could simulate living beings). Ophelia is designed to carry out the “conspiracy of feelings” and kill Andrei Babichev, the Soviet commissar; instead the machine kills Ivan Babichev, its master (though in fantasy only). The complex image, growing out of Olesha's esthetic delight in machines, fails if only because of its strained expressionistic character. And it also fails as a synthesis, since Ophelia is purely imaginary. A more successful attempt at synthesis is made in the story, “The Cherry Pit” (“Vishnëvaia kostechka,” 1930). The pit, planted in the earth, symbolizes a young writer's unrequited love which he sacrifices to the new order, symbolized in a new building of steel and concrete; in the end he is gratified to learn that the building will have a garden in which the tree that springs forth from his seed will grow and flower.

But such syntheses, still possible of conception in the late 1920's, could not, it would appear, survive the First Five Year Plan and the Stalinist Terror. That which virtually silenced Olesha during the period from 1936 until his death in 1960 (during which period he worked on No Day) also made any chance of return to synthesis impossible. Instead he retreated ever more deeply into a private world of esthetic experience. That Olesha was preoccupied with esthetic perception of the world is of course well known: it is a major thesis of the two more important critical studies of his work to appear to date.² Elizabeth Beaujour expresses this theme well in the title of her monograph's first chapter, “Art as a Means of Knowing and Possessing the World.” If we add that this art is based essentially on visual perception, then it becomes clear what is at stake: Olesha's estheticism is a means of conquest through visual perception, but a visual perception stripped and purified of its customary purposeful connotations. Thus, in the fragment quoted above, a grocery store is of interest not as a source of produce but as a source of visual, artistic images.

Olesha is obviously influenced in his search for esthetic images not only by his childhood experiences, but by the current critical theories of the Russian Formalists, and in particular Viktor Shklovskii.³ Shklovskii's theory of ostranenie (“making strange” or “defamiliarization”) is perhaps more relevant to Olesha than to any other Russian writer of the period. Shklovskii argues that familiarity with objects and sights makes us ignore them; their esthetic perceptual value can be restored, however, if the writer places them in new and unfamiliar contexts. We then attend to them from a fresh (if distorted) point of view, much as if we were looking at a landscape through colored glasses. The passage quoted above concerning the grocery store seen in yellow light may again serve as an illustration: the yellow light of the kerosene lamp serves to distort the appearance of the store, while the geometrical rectangles of light that project from it bring to our perception the point of view of a discipline (geometry) which usually is not primary in our view of the world.

True to this faith in the primacy of images, Olesha narrates his first memory (of being carried from the bath by an unidentified woman) before he gives us the date of his birth (a bare fact that does not give rise to any images); being carried from the bath is in effect a symbolic birth (p. 15). One law seems to rule images in Olesha's visionary world: this is the law of structure. Separate images may connect with one another through design, ruled by lines. Olesha was able to draw such straight lines, absolutely vertical or absolutely parallel to each other, without a ruler; he refuses the ruler his father insists he use (p. 49). A bridge in Odessa lacks structure for Olesha since it is always in full sunlight; only the passers-by cast temporary shadows on it (p. 91).

Olesha's particular penchants—for sports, for fantastic machines, for the circus—are well known. They all relate closely to his quest for images of the world. Sport embodies human movement without direct practical purpose, but movement controlled by form; it is thus an example of ostranenie, and a source of images that can be described. Fantastic machines imitate and parody human movement; Olesha is inclined, as in his characterization of the planetarium in his story “Aldebaran,” to stress their success as imitators rather than their implicit parodying character. The starry sky of the planetarium affects the lovers as much as a real sky might do. But since machines do not will their own motion, their movements are also opportunities for ostranenie. Finally, the circus, like sport, represents presumably purposeless movement. But the circus is superior to sport in that the esthetic principle is invariably present: here we have spectacular human movement subservient to esthetic considerations. One might well expect ballet to have figured in Olesha's world of images, but curiously it does not, perhaps because he did not see it in childhood, while he did make countless trips to see the Odessa circus; his childhood ambition was to become a circus performer (100-10).

There is of course a contradiction in Olesha's use of childhood images in No Day: this is the fact that the images invoked are no longer present, but must be invoked in memory. Of course, this is true of most literary images to the extent that they are not noted down directly from life or imagined. The problem is seemingly more acute for childhood images, which must be recollected across the barrier of time. A theory of memory is required. Olesha attempts to supply one by calling on Marcel Proust. We have already seen above that Olesha largely lacked Proust's interest in society. But he obviously shared Proust's estheticism and his delight in visual imagery. Curiously, Olesha has forgotten the crucial role of the little Madeleine in unlocking the gate of memory for Proust and bringing the world of the past back to him. Instead he places the crucial moment for Proust's theory of memory in the recollection of the magic lantern show and the knight Golo, whose body, projected, corresponds to the door handle, resulting in ostranenie (p. 59). Olesha has partly missed the point, as Elizabeth Beaujour observes.⁴ For Proust, Golo is threatening because his presence destroys the customary aspect of the room, which is the child's bedroom; for the French writer habit and security are apparently almost as important as esthetic perception. Of course this is not very significant, since Proust frequently does achieve ostranenie through his imagery, and Olesha could easily have chosen a more apt example. But what is distinct is their views of time: for Olesha time seems to represent accumulation, and his book is a collection of memorable perceptual (and other) experiences. For Proust, time is more than mere accumulation: time is also a barrier that must be broken down. And it also has an analytic function: time permits us to see phenomena (including people) at different stages in their development and to contrapose these different stages. The final result of this analytic process is not merely esthetic; it is also profoundly moral. Hence the shocking effect of the perception of Charlus chained and whipped in a homosexual brothel, or of Mme. Verdurin risen to become Princesse de Guermantes.

Interestingly, Olesha's pursuit of esthetic perception is largely confined to the first section of his book entitled “Childhood” (9-58), while in the second part, “Odessa” (59-138), the role of culture and history becomes more important and threatens to overshadow that of esthetic perception. There is still the same curious absence of moral, political, and social motifs, however, and even historical happenings (e.g., World War I, the Revolution, and the Civil War) appear as phenomenological events, uninterpreted for the reader. The later sections of the book are largely given over to a discussion of culture, usually of works of literature, with Olesha as critic. The esthetic point of view remains constant, of course, but we now have the slightly unpleasant sense that Olesha is no longer a writer and, having lost the art, is now doing a stint at second-best: the literary critic. Nor is there any longer that charming naiveté the child could bring us: when presented as a child (still untaught to read) with a volume of Pushkin, Olesha is able merely to describe the book and tell us it was called Pushkin: what it contained—“a poet, verses, a work of literature, a writer, a duel, death”—and what these things mean, the child cannot tell us (43-44).

Only toward the end of the book, as if in reproach for his own infidelity, does Olesha return to esthetic perception, and now, as rarely in his work, he uses visual images to fashion a myth, as he had done before in “The Cherry Pit.” This transcendent act of creation he performs under the influence of approaching death. And again there is ostranenie: “All my life I've been going somewhere. All right, I think, then I'll get somewhere. But where? Paris? Venice? Krakow? No, I'll get to the sunset. And now I'm on my way, even though I know one cannot reach the sunset. This, evidently, was my dream of immortality” (p. 301.) And at the very end: “What does that mean—the sun? There has been nothing in my whole life that could have managed without the sun—the actual or the concealed one—the real or the metaphorical one. Whatever I have done, wherever I have gone, asleep or awake, in the dark, young or old, I have always been at the tip of a sunbeam” (p. 303.)

Thus Olesha ends his book. This final word, addressed by him to the “future,” ties it together to the past, to the childhood so rich in images. It is as if the middle part, the derivative part concerned with culture, had never been.

Curiously, No Day in its development replicates in some way Olesha's story “Liompa” (1928).⁵ This story contrasts the world of a dying man, for whom only meaningless names are left, to that of a child, who as yet knows no names, but for whom the world of objects is brilliantly alive. The child Olesha corresponds to the “rubber boy” of the story, who learns the name of the large object brought after the old man's death—“coffin”—but does not yet know what that word means (just as the boy Olesha perceived the book entitled Pushkin but did not know what “Pushkin” meant).

Olesha's preoccupation with culture throughout the latter part of No Day may be likened to the dying man's knowledge of the names of things he is now powerless to control, things that are now deserting him. But we cannot simply accept that the young child, the “rubber boy,” is an artist, while the dying old man is a philistine. On the contrary, the ability to view, even to project nameless, uncontrolled images is not yet art. The whole world of the child is a world of ostranenie in which the normal or customary contexts of things are not yet shaped; yet without names and normal purposes it is still chaos, of great potential for art but without actualization.

For this reason Olesha has placed a third character in “Liompa,” who mediates between the child and the old man. This is the boy Alexander, who builds a model airplane that will fly. Alexander's activity symbolizes that of the artist creator, it does not function in a purely esthetic world, but in one that contains purpose, names, and definitions as well. The flight of the plane is at once a symbol of unconstrained imagination, as well as a consequence of a knowledge of scientific law. Unlike the dying man, Alexander not only knows names; he can manipulate them.

Olesha does not attribute to the dying Ponamarev any insight akin to that experienced by the real Olesha at the end of No Day. But Ponamarev, overfreighted with the knowledge of purposeless names, suddenly comes upon the name of a rat he hears running about in the kitchen and, in the agonies of death, cries out that name: “Liompa!” This meaningless cry is perhaps the reductio ad absurdum of the name: in itself it signifies nothing. We may perhaps see in it the nostalgia of a dying man to return to those things that have now deserted him.

In No Day Olesha has left us an apologia pro sua vita, as well as a commentary on his art. An apology for those tormented years of silence under Stalin. We must be grateful that the implicit discipline invoked in the title of his book, “no day without a line,” never quite deserted him.

Notes

1. Iurii Olesha, Ni dnia bez strochki: iz zapisnykh khnizhek (M.: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1965), p. 303; all quotations and page references are from this edition. There is an English translation by Judson Rosengrant: No Day Without a Line (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1979). The reader will find an excellent chapter on Olesha's book in Elizabeth K. Beaujour, The Invisible Land: A Study of the Artistic Imagination of Iurii Olesha (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1970), 174-94. It also serves as a major source of material analyzed by M. O. Chudakova in her monograph, Masterstvo Iuriia Oleshi (M.: Nauka, 1972).

2. Beaujour and Chudakova, cited above. See also Nils Ake Nilssen, “Through the Wrong End of Binoculars,” Scando-Slavica, XI (1965), 40-68.

3. See Beaujour, op. cit., pp. 22-24 and passim. For a translation into English of Shklovskii's article “Isskustvo kak priëm,” see “Art as Technique” in Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (Lincoln, Nebr.: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965), 3-57.

4. Beaujour, op. cit., pp. 181-82.

5. On the story “Liompa,” see Beaujour, op. cit., pp. 24-30, and Andrew Barrett, “Yury Olesha's Three Ages of Man: A Close Reading of ‘Liompa,’” Modern Language Review, 75, no. 3 (July 1980), 597-614.