Yuri Olesha created his first poems while still at school. After that, he tried himself in different roles: he wrote propaganda poems, texts for posters, feuilletons for the Gudok newspaper, worked on the fairy tale about the revolution Three Fat Men and the novel Envy. In the 1930s, his play about the duality of Soviet power was released, and after that Olesha's works came under an unspoken ban.
"The Last Man of the Century": childhood and youth of Yuri Olesha
“Heine, born in 1801, called himself the first man of the nineteenth century. Born at the other end of the century, I can call myself its last man., - Yury Olesha spoke about himself. The future writer was born on March 3, 1899 in Elisavetgrad - now it is the Ukrainian city of Kropyvnytskyi. His family came from an ancient family of Polish nobles. The father, excise official Karl Olesha, owned a large Yunishche estate before the appearance of his son, but sold it for a large sum. After a few years, there was no trace of the proceeds: Yuri Olesha's father and uncle were gamblers in cards. “I remember some kind of family quarrel, accompanied by threats to shoot from a revolver, and this quarrel arises, as I remember, because of the rest of the money, also lost,”- Olesha wrote in the book "Not a day without a line." Only the family coat of arms reminded of the former wealth - a deer, the horns of which were decorated with a crown.
When Yuri Olesha was three years old, the family moved to Odessa. The boy was raised by his grandmother. She taught him arithmetic and Russian, in addition to her native Polish.
Soon the revolution of 1905 began. At the beginning of the 20th century, Odessa was one of the centers of anarchist groups in Russia. City-wide strikes were organized on the streets, barricades were erected, and the police exchanged fire. Little Yuri heard a bomb explode in the center of Odessa, in Libman's coffee shop. It was the bloodiest terrorist attack in the history of the city: 50 people were injured.
In 1905, the sailors of the warship "Prince Potemkin-Tavrichesky" revolted. To replenish supplies of coal, water and food, the rebels sent the ship towards Odessa. “When the battleship Potemkin approached Odessa and stood on its roadstead, everyone in the family, including me, was seized with fear.<...>Of course, I did not understand why there was a mutiny on the battleship. I knew, however, that this rebellion was against the king,- recalled Yuri Olesha.
The first works of the young writer
By 1907, Odessa became calm. When Yuri Olesha was 11 years old, he entered the Odessa Richelieu Gymnasium. This educational institution was considered one of the best in the city and was famous for the fact that Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol were guests of honor in it. In the book “My Diamond Crown”, the Soviet writer Valentin Kataev mentioned that in the gymnasium environment, the Richelieu students were considered aristocrats. They even wore uniforms of a different color - gray, while in other Odessa schools it was black.
Among his comrades, Yuri Olesha was known as an ironic and sharp-tongued young man. He was a little afraid: no one wanted to become the subject of ridicule. Literature during this period interested the future writer much less than football, a new sport for that time, which quickly became popular among high school students. Olesha played for the team of the Richelieu gymnasium in the final of the Olympic Games of the Odessa educational district.
Oh, it was far from literature - these games on a green sports field with narrow flags at its four corners - not only far, but even hostile! We were athletes, runners, pole vaulters, pole vaulters - what kind of literature is there! I am still deaf to the miracle that is happening next to me - to the birth of Mayakovsky's metaphor.
Yuri Olesha, "Not a day without a line"
However, the dreams of a sports career were not destined to come true: due to a weak heart, the doctors soon forbade him to play football.
Yuri Olesha wrote his first poems when he was in high school. In 1915, the Odessa newspaper Yuzhny Vestnik published his work Clarimonda, and three years later the young poet presented a notebook with 35 verses Grape Bowls to Arkady Avtonomov, a teacher of literature.
Together with a childhood friend, the future writer Valentin Kataev, Olesha followed the new trends in poetry that arose in St. Petersburg at the beginning of the 20th century. Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, Igor Severyanin - these names were just beginning to sound in Odessa. The center of literary life was the dacha of the translator Alexander Fedorov, a student of the poet Apollo Maykov. Writers, artists, actors gathered there, and Yuri Olesha came there to listen to talk about art. Fedorov supported young poets, read Olesha's poems and helped him work with rhymes.
Yuri Olesha graduated from the gymnasium in 1917. His graduation was the last of those who received certificates with a double-headed imperial eagle. After school, the future writer entered the law faculty of Novorossiysk University. However, he continued to create works and soon became a member of the Green Lamp literary circle. He was also visited by the Suok sisters, the daughters of an Austrian emigrant. Yuri fell in love with the youngest of them, Seraphim, and she reciprocated. In 1918, Olesha's prose work, "The Story of a Kiss," was published.
"Collective of Poets" in Odessa and Kharkov YugROSTA
In 1920, after several years of unrest, Soviet power was finally established in Odessa. At the same time, a new literary club appeared in the city - the Collective of Poets. It was joined by Yuri Olesha, Isaac Babel, Ilya Ilf, Lev Slavin, Valentin Kataev, Eduard Bagritsky. All of them then wrote poetry, although later many of the "Collective of Poets" became famous as prose writers. The club did not have a leader. The participants gathered first in a cafe, then in a spacious apartment in the city center, read poems and poems, arranged themed evenings. “The attitude towards each other was harsh. We all trained to be professionals. We have been working seriously. It was a school- wrote Olesha.
Yuri Olesha, Eduard Bagritsky and Valentin Kataev worked in the newly opened southern branch of the Russian Telegraph Agency - YugROSTA. They composed texts for posters, wrote propaganda poems. The agency was headed by the acmeist poet Vladimir Narbut. The writers became friends, but a year later Narbut was sent to head the Ukrainian branch in Kharkov.
In 1921, Kataev and Olesha, with their beloved Serafima Suok, moved after Narbut.
Meanwhile, Yuri Olesha's parents were allowed to leave for Poland. “Our family collapsed financially, my father did not serve, because there was no service that he performed before, he did not play cards, because clubs had been feverishly existing for a long time, now closing, then opening ...”- recalled Yuri Olesha. Parents called their son with them, but he refused. By that time, he had parted with Serafima Suok, and she soon married Vladimir Narbut.
In order to earn at least a little money, Olesha compiled agitation during the day, and in the evenings he performed in the Caucasian restaurant "Verdene" as an entertainer. He did not live long in Kharkov: in 1922, friends suggested that he move to Moscow. Kataev was the first to leave: he was going to get acquainted with journalists and find a publication to publish his works. Then Vladimir Narbut and Serafima Suok went to Moscow. Olesha himself was the last to leave Kharkov.
Feuilletons for "Beep"
In Moscow, Yuri Olesha got a job in the railway workers' newspaper "Gudok". It published works by Mikhail Bulgakov, Ilya Ilf, Evgeny Petrov, Konstantin Paustovsky. At first, Olesha sent letters on behalf of the newspaper and kept other documentation, but one day the head of the department entrusted him with writing a feuilleton based on a letter from a working correspondent. The editor liked the text, and the works of the young writer began to be published under the pseudonym Zubilo. The author took topics for articles from letters that came to the editor: in them, readers and worker correspondents complained about bureaucrats, plunderers, violators of the new Soviet order. As long as they were published unchanged, the column was considered the most boring in the newspaper. But when it was replaced by Olesha's feuilletons, the circulation of Gudok increased: now it was read not only by railway workers. “Bulgakov and I drowned in the radiance of Zubila's glory. No matter how hard we tried to come up with catchy pseudonyms for ourselves, nothing could help., - Valentin Kataev recalled this time.
The newspaper's management often sent the most popular authors, including Yuri Olesha, on "tours" to major railway junctions. Tickets for Zubilo's performances were sold out instantly. Spectators also participated in his creative evenings: Olesha suggested that one half of the audience shout out any words that come to mind. The second half picked up rhymes for them. The secretary wrote down all the pairs of words, then the entertainer announced: “And now Comrade Zubilo will compose a poem out of these words in front of everyone’s eyes!” Olesha quickly composed a poem in which he used all the named words in the same order.
Competition with Andersen: the fairy tale "Three Fat Men"
In 1924, Yuri Olesha met 13-year-old Valentina Grunzaid, the daughter of a tea supplier, who lived opposite his house. Before meeting, the writer often saw her sitting on the windowsill with a book. Grunzaid told Olesha that she loved the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, and he promised to create a better story for her than the Danish writer. Thus began work on the novel-fairy tale "Three Fat Men". Olesha unwound paper from a newspaper roll in the printing house, rolled it out on the floor in the room and wrote at night. The work was created in just eight months. The prototypes of the Suok girl were the author's former lover, Serafima Suok, and her sisters, Olga and Lydia.
But "Three Fat Men" did not immediately get into print: it seemed inappropriate for publishers to write about the revolution in a fairy-tale form. First, in 1927, Olesha's novel "Envy" was published. This work was praised for "good audacity" by Maxim Gorky, Olesha's talent was noted by Vladislav Khodasevich and Vladimir Nabokov.
The émigré critic Mark Slonim wrote of the novel: “The content centers around the conflict between the individual and the era. The era requires a person to get involved in the work of a new gigantic social mechanism, sacrificing feelings, personal happiness, transcendental values. In two years
In 1930, Yuri Olesha created the play "The List of Good Deeds", in which the main character wrote down the good deeds and crimes of the Soviet government in a notebook. The author put the following words about the new state into the girl’s mouth: “In my mind, I fully perceived the concept of communism. With my brain, I understood that the triumph of the proletariat was natural and logical. But my feeling was against it, I was torn in half. The director Vsevolod Meyerhold wanted to stage the work, but the play was banned.
"The workers of the Krasny Proletarian plant took patronage over a group of writers in order to bring their work closer to the shop", - said in a note that appeared on the pages of the Literary Gazette on November 5, 1930. Yuri Olesha also belonged to this "group of writers", who was criticized at the meetings, urged to "merge with the masses", to write simply and straightforwardly. He refused such creativity and wrote in his diary that literature was over for him. In 1934, at the First Congress of Soviet Writers, Olesha said in his speech: “I could go to a construction site, live at a factory among the workers, describe them in an essay, even in a novel, but this was not my theme, it was not a theme that came from my circulatory system, from my breath. I was not a real artist in this topic. I would lie, invent; I wouldn't have what is called inspiration. It is difficult for me to understand the type of worker, the type of revolutionary hero. I can't be them."
After that, Olesha's books were no longer published. In 1934, he wrote the screenplay for The Strict Youth. But the film based on it was banned: the author was accused of pessimism and "gross deviations from the style of socialist realism."
Olesha survived the Great Patriotic War in evacuation in the Turkmen city of Ashgabat. The writer spoke on the radio, worked on scripts for the Kyiv film studio.
The forced silence of the writer lasted until the 1950s. Even when the ban on printing his works was lifted, Yuri Olesha wrote little. On May 10, 1960 Olesha died. In 1965, the collection "Not a Day Without a Line" was published, which included notes from the writer's diaries, archives and notebooks.
The Russian Soviet writer and poet, playwright, satirist and screenwriter Yuri Olesha presented the world with the novel-fairy tale "Three Fat Men" and dozens of other amazingly talented works staged on the theater stage and forming the basis of feature films and animated films.
Childhood and youth
The writer, beloved by millions, was born in 1899 in Elisavetgrad (now Kropivnitsky). The Olesha clan is ancient, its roots can be traced back to the 15th century, from the boyar Olesha Petrovich, to whom the appanage prince Fyodor Borovsky transferred the village of Berezhnoye, then part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland (today Belarus), into possession. The Orthodox Olesha Petrovich became Polonized and converted to Catholicism.
Two centuries after the division of the Commonwealth, the land passed to the Russian Empire, and Olesha became Belarusian nobles, leaving Polish as the language of communication. The father of the future writer, Karl Olesha, was an excise official and a landowner: he owned a forest estate called Yunische. Karl and his brother - avid gamblers - sold the estate for debts.
In fragments of childhood memories of Yuri Olesha, trotting, life in a luxurious apartment and scandals due to father's drinking and late returns from clubs remained. Later, Olesha will write that "clubs are one of the main words of my childhood." Yuri's mother is a talented artist and beautiful Olga, who was called.
Yuri Olesha in childhood with his sister Wanda Yuri lived in Elisavetgrad for the first 3 years, then the family moved to Odessa. The boy was raised by a Polish-speaking grandmother. The petty-bourgeois Olesha family took the revolutionary events with caution. The arrival of the rebellious battleship Potemkin in Odessa caused horror and the expectation of the inevitable end of a prosperous former life.
At the age of 11, Yuri became a student at the Richelieu gymnasium. The young ironic gentry was afraid in the class: to fall into the field of attention of the caustic Olesha meant to become the laughingstock of the entire gymnasium for a long time. Even then, the boy had an incredible imagination and aptly expressed himself.
Yuri Olesha wrote the first rhyming lines in high school. The young man made his literary debut in the Odessa "Southern Vestnik": the editors took the poem "Clarimond" to print. In 1917, Yuri Olesha received a matriculation certificate and entered the Odessa University, choosing the Faculty of Law.
Literature
Yuri's relatives, who did not accept the revolution, immigrated to Poland, but he refused and remained in South Palmyra, where literary life was in full swing. Together with and he joined the "Commune of Poets". Literary associations arose one after another in the city on the Black Sea coast. In the 8th auditorium of the university on Thursdays, creative evenings of talented Odessans were held. The youth called idols,.
Yuri Olesha in Odessa Olesha's dramatic debut took place in Odessa - a play called "Little Heart". It was staged by members of literary circles. The text of the essay was lost, but the play played a role in the creative biography of the writer: Yuri heard the first enthusiastic responses.
In 1920, the pearl by the sea, which repeatedly changed hands, was occupied by the Red Army. Waves of refugees brought very talented people from all over the ruined empire. The poet and prose writer Vladimir Narbut came to the city and influenced the life of Yuri Olesha.
Now Odessa writers composed campaign texts for posters and leaflets, staged performances in workers' canteens that had opened in previously fashionable restaurants and cafes. Olesha's new one-act play "Playing in the Scaffold" was seen on the stage of the Theater of Revolutionary Satire.
In the spring of 1921, Olesha and Kataev moved to Kharkov to follow Narbut, where the writer was entrusted with leading the Ukrainian radiotelegraph agency. Yuri Olesha got a job at the Balaganchik Theater, but a year later the company moved to the capital. In Moscow, an Odessan settled in a writer's house and got a job in the Gudok newspaper, on the pages of which Ilya Ilf and were published. The writer called the Gudkovsky period the best in life.
Yuri Olesha in the editorial office of the newspaper "Gudok" Yuri served in the information department, where he sealed envelopes with editorial letters: in Moscow, after provincial Odessa, Olesha began his career from scratch. A year later, the head of the department, having read the works of a subordinate, entrusted him to write a feuilleton in verse. When asked who to sign, he advised the pseudonym "Chisel".
The debut was a success. In Gudok, one after another, new feuilletons appeared, signed by Chisel. Materials for Olesha were supplied by work correspondents who wrote about theft, nepotism, bureaucracy and other sores of society in the regions. Readers liked the biting poetic opuses of Yuri Olesha, hundreds of responses came to them.
In 1924, the writer presented readers with the first voluminous prose work - the fairy tale novel "Three Fat Men". It was published 4 years later. The idea to write a fairy tale came from Yuri Olesha in the Gudok hostel (Ilf and Petrov described this unfurnished room behind a flimsy partition in 12 Chairs). In the window opposite, the writer saw a young beauty, enthusiastically reading a book. The girl's name was Valentina Grunzaid. After 4 years, she became the wife of Evgeny Petrov.
And then, fascinated by 15-year-old Valya Olesha, who was immersed in reading fairy tales, he vowed to compose a fairy tale better than that of a Dane. In the printing house, he grabbed a roll of paper and, having rolled it out on the floor, wrote a novel at night. The first edition was dedicated to Valentina Grunzaid.
Warm Odessa was guessed in the city of Tolstyakov. The carnival tale with a revolutionary plot was easy to read, the author's fantasy and brilliant metaphors delighted children and adults. In 1930, the fairy tale was staged for the first time on the stage of the Moscow Art Theater. The dramatization has been translated into 17 languages and is being staged on world stages today. In 1966, the film "Three Fat Men" was shot with Iosif Shapiro.
The tale got into print only after the resounding success of Olesha's second novel, published in 1927 under the title Envy. The novel about the fate of the intelligentsia after the revolution is considered the best in the legacy of Yuri Olesha. The dreamer from "Envy" Nikolai Kavalerov, in whom the features of the author are guessed, was called by contemporaries the hero of the time. In the mid-1930s, Abram Room filmed the drama The Strict Youth based on the novel.
The resounding success of the novel paved the way for "Three Fat Men": previously, the "revolutionary" fairy tale was not published due to the rejection of the genre for the young socialist state.
In the early 1930s, Olesha wrote the play Conspiracy of Feelings based on the novel Envy, but censorship saw criticism of the system in it and banned it. The writer remade the work, calling it "The List of Good Deeds". In 1931, he took the play into the theatrical repertoire. The production ran for three seasons in crowded auditoriums, but soon fell under a ban: officials again found sedition.
The writer was silent for a long time. Many colleagues, close friends of Olesha were repressed, and a ban was imposed on his work. Yuri Olesha survived the outbreak of World War II in evacuation in Turkmenistan.
The ban on books was lifted in the mid-1950s, but Olesha wrote little. Basically, these were dramatizations of the novels of the classics -,. Yuri Karlovich sat over a glass in the restaurant of the House of Writers, where colleagues considered it an honor to treat him. The unspent gift of the writer is evidenced by diary entries collected and published after his death in the early 1960s.
Personal life
The prototypes of the Suok girls from The Three Fat Men were the sisters Lydia, Olga and Serafima, who bore the same surname. Yuri met the girls in Odessa, where the family of the former Austrian attache settled.
Yuri Olesha fell in love with the youngest of them, Sima. They lived in a civil marriage for three years, but the windy muse of Seraphim ran away from Olesha twice. The second time - to a friend Vladimir Narbut.
In the mid-1920s, the writer married the middle of the sisters, Olga, with whom he lived until the end of his days. The couple had no common children, and Yuri Karlovich raised Olga's son from his first marriage.
Death
Yuri Olesha's life was shortened by addiction to drinking. Shortly before his death, the writer, in whose pockets the wind was walking, asked his colleagues what kind of funeral he would be awarded. He was told that the last journey was carried out according to the highest category. With bitter irony, Olesha asked if it was possible to spend on the lowest category, and pay the difference in money now.
The writer died in the spring of 1960. He was buried at Novodevichy. The place was assigned to the "highest category" - in the first row of the first section.
Bibliography
- 1920 - The poem "Agasfer"
- 1920 - The poem "Beatrice"
- 1920 - The play "The game in the chopping block"
- 1924 - The fairy tale "Three fat men"
- 1927 - The novel "Envy"
- 1929 - The play "Conspiracy of Feelings"
- 1930 - The play "List of Good Deeds"
- 1934 - Scenario "Strict young man"
- 1938 - Scenario "Marsh Soldiers"
- 1939 - Screenplay "Engineer Cochin's Mistake"
- 1958 - The play "The Idiot"
- 1959 - The play "Belated Flowers"
- 1959 - The play "Garnet Bracelet"
- 1961 - Diaries "Not a day without a line"
Writer.
Born February 19, 1899 in Elisavetgrad in an impoverished noble family. Olesha's childhood and youth passed in Odessa, where his literary activity began.
Twenty-year-old Olesha, along with the young Kataev and the just beginning Ilf and Bagritsky, was one of the most active employees of the Ukrainian Press Bureau (like the ROSTA Windows), was a member of the Poets' Collective, and wrote poetry.
Since 1922, Olesha lived in Moscow, worked in the railway newspaper Gudok, where his poetic feuilletons appeared almost every day, published under the pseudonym Chisel. While working in the newspaper, he traveled a lot, saw many people, and accumulated a large stock of life observations. The feuilletonist "Chisel" helped the writer Olesha a lot.
Emmanuil Kazakevich, a great friend of Olesha, wrote: "Olesha is one of those writers who did not write a single false word. He had enough strength of character not to write what he did not want."
In 1931, the collection "Cherry Pit" was published, combining Olesha's stories from different years. At the same time, on the stage of the theater. Meyerhold, the premiere of the play "The List of Good Deeds" took place. The film story "A Strict Young Man" was published in 1934, after which Olesha's name was found in print only under articles, reviews, notes, essay sketches, and sometimes stories. He wrote memoirs about contemporaries (Mayakovsky, A. Tolstoy, Ilf, etc.), sketches about Russian and foreign writers, whose work he especially appreciated (Stendal, Chekhov, Mark Twain, etc.).
According to Olesha's scripts, the films "Swamp Soldiers" and "Engineer Kochin's Mistake" were staged; for the theater Vakhtangov Olesha staged the novel "The Idiot".
In the last period of his life, he considered the work that he carried out day by day, having come up with the conditional name "Not a day without a line", assuming later to write a novel, as the main thing in the last period of his life.
My friend Suok
Website: Arguments and Facts
In Odessa, three girls were born and raised in the family of an Austrian emigrant Gustav Suok: Lydia, Olga and Serafima. It was never boring in Odessa, but when the youngest, Sima, entered her “first age” - girlhood, two wars and two revolutions were the scenery for that.
In restaurants, sailors exchanged fake pearls for beer. Disheveled young men gathered in the summer theater and read poetry for hours. There Yuri Olesha met Sima. Among the young men were Valentin Kataev and the poet Eduard Bagritsky, who later became the husband of the eldest of the sisters, Lida.
When the city was occupied by the Reds, a lot has changed. But one of the brightest characters of those days was a lame, shaven-headed man with a severed left arm - Vladimir Narbut. Narbut, a poet with terrible verses and a terrible fate, was the representative of the new government. He wrote: “Oh, the city of Richelieu and De Ribasa! Forget yourself, die and be different."
Sima Suok was then sixteen, Yuri Olesha was twenty. Love erupted. Kataev recalled this couple as follows: “Not bound by any obligations, poor, young, often hungry, cheerful, tender, they were able to suddenly kiss in broad daylight right on the street, among revolutionary posters and lists of the executed.”
Soon the lovers began to live together, moved to Kharkov. Olesha called his beloved "Friend". And nothing else.
Time was hungry. Two (already well-known!) writers - Yuri Olesha and Valentin Kataev - walked the streets barefoot. They lived on credit, earning their bread, cigarettes and milk by compiling epigrams and poetic toasts for other people's feasts for pennies.
Among their acquaintances in Kharkov was a certain accountant, nicknamed "Poppy". Mac had a pile of ration cards, the ultimate luxury at the time. At one of the literary evenings, the accountant saw the Suok sisters and began to court. At first without any success. And then the hungry writers had an idea for a scam. Bagritsky (at that time already married to Lida Suok) and Olesha, having decided to shake the rich man, hid their relationship with their sisters. The youngest, Serafima, herself approached the accountant.
“Tell me,” Mack suddenly heard, “do you like these poems?”
- Me? .. - He blushed, as if these were his poems. - Yes, I like it!
The accountant poured food rain on the whole cheerful company. The writers happily chewed salmon with sausage, not noticing that the accountant was already inciting Druzhochka to the wedding.
At that time, registering a marriage was a matter of one day. The divorce took an hour. And one day, Druzhok, with a cheerful laugh, announced to Olesha that she had married Mack. And she has already moved. Kataev brought Sima back. Shocked by the betrayal, Olesha could not even speak clearly.
This is how Kataev described that evening: “Mack himself opened the door. Seeing me, he fussed and began to pull at his beard, as if foreseeing trouble. My appearance was frightening: an officer's jacket from the time of Kerensky, canvas trousers, wooden sandals on my bare feet, a pipe smoking shag in my teeth, and on my shaved head a red Turkish fez with a black brush, which I received by order instead of a hat in the city clothing warehouse.
Do not be surprised: such was that glorious time - citizens were supplied with what God sent, but for free.
“You see…” Mack began, fiddling with the string of his pince-nez.
“Listen, Mac, don’t play the fool, call Druzhochka this minute. I'll show you how to be a blue beard in our time! Well, turn around quickly!
“I'm here,” said Druzhochek, appearing at the door of the bourgeoisly furnished room. - Hello.
- I came for you. There is nothing for you to chill here. The key is waiting for you below. (“Key” Kataev called Olesha.)
"Let me…" Mac muttered.
“I won’t let you,” I said.
“Excuse me, dear,” said Druzhochek, turning to Mack. “I feel very embarrassed in front of you, but you yourself understand that our love was a mistake. I love the Key and must return to him.
"Let's go," I commanded.
“Wait, I’ll get my things now.
- Which things? I was surprised. - You left Key in one dress.
“Now I have things. And groceries,” she added, disappearing into the plush bowels of the apartment and promptly returned with two bundles. "Goodbye Mac, don't be mad at me," she said to Mac in a sweet voice.
The story with Mack has long served only as an occasion for jokes. Olesha was happy again, again they kissed in the streets, and he asked in his high voice:
In 1921, friends decided to move to Moscow. Kataev was the first to leave. After settling down, he waited for the others. Once, on the telephone receiver, Kataev heard Sima's cheerful voice:
Hello, I'm in Moscow too!
- Where is Yura?
- Stayed in Kharkov.
- How?! Kataev was amazed. - Did you come alone?
“Not really,” Suok chuckled into the phone.
- How is it, not really?
— And so! she answered happily. - Wait for us.
And she appeared, and with her, limping, a man without an arm entered the room.
"So, I'm glad," he said to Kataev, stammering strangely. And he added, smiling with one half of his face: "Do you remember me?"
It was not only Kataev who remembered him. Vladimir Narbut was known as a demonic figure. A hereditary Chernigov nobleman became an anarchist-Socialist-Revolutionary. He was once sentenced to death, but he was saved by the red cavalry. "The Crooked One," as he was called, was one of the greatest poets of the beginning of the century. The entire edition of his collection of poems "Hallelujah" was burned on the special instructions of the Holy Synod for blasphemy.
The names of Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Gumilyov, together with whom he created a new literary trend - acmeism, added splendor to his own glory. When he came in, everyone in the room felt uneasy. Narbut's public readings were reminiscent of sessions of black magic. At that moment, his bizarre stuttering disappeared. Shuddering and swaying, he threw out stanzas, as if throwing curses into the heavens: "A dog star, collecting honey in its hive for billions of years." Many believe that Bulgakov wrote the image of his Woland from him.
It was stupid to ask Suok where Olesha was and how he felt now. After spending some time visiting Kataev, the "young" went to look for an apartment.
Olesha appeared a few days later. Fit, calm, confident, but aged. For the next several evenings, he stood under the windows of the apartment where his Suok settled, watching the shadows move on the curtains. He called out to her one day:
- Buddy!
She went to the window, looked down at it, and pulled down the curtain.
“I can guarantee that at that moment she turned pale,” Olesha Kataev later told.
Olesha decided to return it for the second time. He did everything to find her at home alone. It is not known what he said to her, but on the same evening they both returned to Kataev's apartment. And again it was like nothing happened. Olesha, looking into her blue eyes, asked and asked, smiling:
- You're mine, my friend, my...
She laughed, kissed him and stroked his hair, chirped about how she missed him ...
Overjoyed, Kataev walked in circles around the room, putting teapot after teapot, regaling the lovers. Late in the evening someone knocked on the window. The knock was as if death itself was knocking. In the window loomed the upper part of the figure of Crooked Legs, his profile of the living dead.
“We must go to him,” Olesha said hoarsely. Nobody answered him.
As the owner of the house, Kataev came out into the yard. Narbut looked at him heavily and, interspersing his words with his eternal “otto”, asked him to tell Serafima Gustavovna that if she did not immediately leave Yuri Karlovich, he would shoot himself right here, in their yard.
Pure as an angel, the heroine of the film fairy tale "Three Fat Men" Suok is completely different from the prototype that gave her name. And she left. Forever this time. Only her one glove remained on the table. Life again lost its meaning for Olesha. But a year later, Yuri Olesha married the middle of the Suok sisters - Olga. It is to her that his famous fairy tale "Three Fat Men" is dedicated. But for everyone who knew Sima Suok, it was obvious: she was the circus performer Suok and the doll of Tutti's heir. It was not a secret for Olga either. Olesha himself told her: "You are the two halves of my soul."
Serafima was probably happy with Vladimir Narbut. In any case, no more tricks followed from her. In 1936, Narbut was arrested and subsequently disappeared in the Stalinist camps. Bagritsky's widow, Lydia Suok, tried to intercede for her relative before the NKVD commissars. She defended it so ardently that she herself left the Gulag after seventeen years.
After the death of Narbut, Sima was married twice more. Both of her new husbands were writers: Nikolai Khardzhiev and Viktor Shklovsky.
Periodically, he appeared in the Shklovsky-Suok family. Usually Shklovsky went into the office, tightly closing the door. Nervous. There was a conversation going on in another room. Loud - Simochki, quiet - Olesha. Five minutes later, Olesha went out into the corridor, disgustedly holding a large bill in his fingers. Sima saw him off, wiping her tears.
During his life, Yuri Olesha did not say a single rude word about Seraphim. He called his painful attachment to Druzhochka, who betrayed him more than once, the most beautiful thing that happened in his life.
Interesting facts from the biography of Olesha
"Girl" Suok
Most of you, dear readers, have probably read the story-tale by Yuri Olesha "Three Fat Men" and remember one of the main characters of this work, the circus girl Suok. Once Yuri Karlovich was asked: "And the girl Suok from "Three Fat Men", where did you meet this little charming circus performer? You have not managed to create a more poetic image yet!" Olesha smiled sadly: "If I tell you, you won't believe me." And he said that the little girl Suok had a real predecessor. It was a golden-haired acrobat girl, with whom Olesha, a gymnasium student, fell in love when he saw her at the circus during a performance. Subsequently, to Olesha's horror, it turned out that this was not a girl, but a cynical boy, spitting long through his teeth.
About the process of creating "Three Fat Men"
Yuri Olesha in his youth worked in the newspaper "Gudok", wrote poetic feuilletons and signed them with the pseudonym Zubilo. And he lived in a small room at the Gudka printing house. Later, Olesha recalled: “Those were fun times! There was a huge roll of newsprint next to my bunk. I tore off a large sheet and wrote “Three Fat Men” with a pencil. These are the conditions sometimes masterpieces are created.
Minkus
Once Olesha and Eisenstein visited the Bolshoi Theater together to see Ludwig Minkus' ballet Don Quixote. They liked the name of the author of the ballet so much that they started a kind of game in which they endowed certain phenomena or people with this word. One could often see how they watched the surrounding people or passers-by, and, from time to time, Olesha leaned towards Eisenstein and mysteriously whispered: "Minkus." Eisenstein answered just as mysteriously: "Absolute Minkus."
Olesha and typesetters
Once Olesha corrected typos in the layout of one of his plays and was indignant: “Nightmare! It’s impossible to fight with compositors! round, like a railing". And here, admire: "Your hands are round, like a feather bed." And what did they do with the remark: "Who should I shoot at because the connection of times has broken up?" They printed: "I should shoot at the window because the connection of times broke up?" And, finally, instead of the phrase: "You came from childhood, where the city of Nim was built by the Romans," there is super nonsense: "You came from childhood, where the city of Rome was built by the Romans." Olesha was consoled: “Yuri Karlovich, but you have corrected all this now?” He grumbled: “Of course! So what?" They continued to reassure him: "Let's hope that everything will be fixed." Olesha exploded: "Abandon hope, everyone who enters here! It is impossible to fight compositors!.." Olesha turned out to be right, since the book came out with the same distortions.
Receiving a fee
Once Olesha came to a publishing house to receive a rather large fee. Olesha forgot his passport at home, and he began to persuade the cashier to give him a fee without a passport. The cashier refused: "Today I will give you a fee, and tomorrow another Olesha will come and demand a fee again." Olesha drew himself up to his full small stature and said with majestic calmness: “In vain, girl, worry! Another Olesha will not come earlier than in four hundred years ...”
Olesha and Lerner
Olesha and Shostakovich
When Shostakovich returned from a trip to Turkey, Olesha began to question him about his impressions. Shostakovich said with enthusiasm that all Soviet artists were especially impressed by the reception of President Kemal Atatürk, who presented gold cigarette cases to all men, and bracelets to women. Olesha suddenly startled Shostakovich with a question: "Tell me, Mitya, when Kemal Kemar is singing, is it quiet in Ankara?"
Olesha and the tree
One morning, Olesha went out into the courtyard of the Odessa hotel, where in the summer the restaurant set up its tables, and saw that a huge tree that grew near the fountain had collapsed and blocked half of the courtyard. Olesha began to reason: "After all, there was no storm at night ... We went to bed late ... It was quiet - no rain, no wind ... What's the matter - why did the tree collapse?" Nobody could answer him. Olesha shrugged his shoulders and turned his head to the front page of Izvestiya. After running his eyes over a few lines, he exclaimed: "Ah, that's it! Michurin died. A great gardener. Now I understand why a tree collapsed here yesterday. Nature responded to the death of her brilliant helper. He was very old and also resembled a mighty tree ... "
Malro and Olesha
When the French writer André Malraux arrived in Moscow, Olesha decided to show him something unusual and invited him to the barbecue house, which was located in the basement, opposite the Central Telegraph. It was very crowded and noisy there, and it was simply impossible to talk to the accompaniment of a Caucasian orchestra. The orchestra was especially furious during the performance of national dances by young horsemen. Through an interpreter, Malraux was asked: "Tell me, monsieur, how did you like it in our country?" Malraux replied: "I liked it very much! Only, you know, capitalism has one advantage over socialism ..." Olesha burst out: "What?" Malraux said: "In the capitalist countries there are restaurants where there is no orchestra..."
Memoirs of Piast
When Olesha looked through the memoirs of Vladimir Pyast, he was asked: "What do you think, Yuri Karlovich, why does he not talk about Blok?" Olesha said: "Very proud. Block, they say, on his own, and Piast on his own. He does not want to leave at the expense of the great poet. Piast is a gentry. Polish blood. The blood of Polish kings from the Piast dynasty." Olesha was corrected: "What are you, Yuri Karlovich, what kind of kings? After all, the real name of Vladimir Alekseevich is Pestovsky. What do the Polish kings have to do with it?"
Olesha grumbled: "Especially..."
Much and little
One writer who published many books once said to Olesha: "How little you have written in your life, Yuri Karlovich! I can read all this in one night." Olesha instantly retorted: "But in just one night I can write everything that you have read in your entire life! .."
Starting point
Once Olesha was sitting with a group of literary friends in the cafe of the National Hotel. Not far away, two friends were sitting at another table and arguing fiercely about something. One of the friends said to Olesha: "We all know that these two are the most stupid of us. I wonder what they can argue about like that?" Olesha explained: "They are now figuring out who was more stupid - Goethe or Byron? After all, they have their own account - on the other hand ..."
The pain of creativity
One late night, Olesha and his friends were returning home and noticed that in the house of writers in the passage of the Art Theater, all the windows were dark. His indignation knew no bounds: "Just think: everyone is already sleeping! And where is the night inspiration? Why is no one awake, indulging in creativity ?!"
Olesha about life
One of the leaders of the Writers' Union met Olesha at the Central House of Writers and greeted him politely: "Hello, Yuri Karlovich! How are you?" Olesha was delighted: "It's good that at least one person asked how I live. I'll tell you everything with great pleasure. Let's step aside." The activist was dumbfounded: “What are you, what are you! I don’t have time, I’m in a hurry for a meeting of the section of poets ...” Olesha insisted: “Well, you asked me how I live. Now you can’t run away, you have to listen. I won’t detain you and I’ll meet within forty minutes ... "The leader barely escaped and ran away, and Olesha grumbled offendedly:" Why was it necessary to ask how I live?
OLESHA, YURI KARLOVICH(1899-1960), Russian Soviet prose writer, poet, playwright.Born February 19 (March 3), 1899 in Elisavetgrad. His father, an impoverished Polish nobleman, was an excise official. Thanks to his mother, the atmosphere in the family was imbued with the spirit of Catholicism. In 1902 the family moved to Odessa. In memories Olesha wrote: “In Odessa, I learned to consider myself close to the West. As a child, I lived, as it were, in Europe. The rich cultural life of the city contributed to the education of the future writer. While still in high school, Olesha started writing poetry. Clarimond's poem (1915) was published in the newspaper "South Herald". After graduating from high school in 1917, he entered the university, where he studied law for two years. In Odessa, together with V. Kataev, E. Bagritsky, he formed the group "Collective of Poets".
During the Civil War Olesha remained in Odessa, where in 1919 he experienced the death of his beloved sister Wanda.
In 1921 he left hungry Odessa for Kharkov, where he worked as a journalist and published poems in periodicals. In 1922 Olesha's parents got the opportunity to emigrate to Poland.
In 1922 Olesha moved to Moscow, wrote feuilletons and articles, signing them with the pseudonym Zubilo, for the railway workers' newspaper Gudok, with which M. Bulgakov, Kataev, Ilf, and other writers collaborated at that time.
In 1924 Olesha wrote his first prose work - a fairy tale novel (published in 1928, illustrations by M. Dobuzhinsky), dedicating it to his wife O. G. Suok. The genre of the fairy tale, the world of which is naturally hyperbolic, corresponded to Olesha's need to write metaphorical prose (in the circle of writers he was called the "king of metaphors"). The novel Three Fat Men was imbued with the author's romantic attitude to the revolution. The perception of the revolution as happiness is characteristic of all positive characters in Three Fat Men - the circus performer Suok, the gymnast Tibul, the gunsmith Prospero, Dr. Gaspard Arneri.
The tale aroused great reader interest and at the same time skeptical reviews of official criticism (“the children of the Land of Soviets will not find a call to struggle, work, a heroic example here”). Children and adults admired the author's imagination, the originality of his metaphorical style. In 1930, by order of the Moscow Art Theater Olesha made a dramatization of the Three Fat Men, which to this day is successfully staged in many theaters around the world. The novel and the play have been translated into 17 languages. A ballet (music by V. Oransky) and a feature film (dir. A. Batalov) were staged based on Olesha's fairy tale.
The publication of the novel (1927) in the Krasnaya Nov magazine caused controversy in the press. The protagonist of the novel, an intellectual, dreamer and poet Nikolai Kavalerov, became the hero of the time, a kind of "extra person" of Soviet reality. In contrast to the purposeful and successful sausage maker Andrei Babichev, the unsuccessful Kavalerov did not look like a loser. The unwillingness and inability to succeed in a world that lives according to anti-human laws made the image of Kavalerov autobiographical, about which Olesha wrote in his diary entries. In the novel Envy, Olesha created a metaphor for the Soviet system - the image of sausage as a symbol of prosperity. In 1929, the author wrote the play A Conspiracy of Feelings based on this novel.
The image of the main character of the play List of Good Deeds (1930) by actress Elena Goncharova is also autobiographical. In 1931, Vs. Meyerhold began to rehearse the play, remade at the direction of the censor, but the performance was soon banned. The list of good deeds was actually a “list of crimes” of the Soviet government, the play expressed the author’s attitude to the reality around him - to executions, to the ban on private life and the right to express one’s opinion, to the meaninglessness of creativity in a country where society is destroyed, etc. . In the diary Olesha wrote: "Everything is refuted, and everything has become non-serious after the cost of our youth, life - the only truth has been established: the revolution."
In the 1930s, by order of the Moscow Art Theater Lesha wrote a play based on the thought that owned him about the despair and poverty of a person who was deprived of everything except the nickname "writer". An attempt to express this feeling was made by Olesha in his speech at the First Congress of Soviet Writers (1934). The play about the beggar was not completed. According to the surviving drafts, director M. Levitin staged in 1986 at the Moscow theater "Hermitage" the play The Beggar, or Death of Zand.
Further Olesha did not write complete works of art. In a letter to his wife, he explained his condition: “It’s just that the aesthetics that are the essence of my art are not needed now, even hostile - not against the country, but against a gang that established a different, vile, anti-artistic aesthetics.” The fact that the gift of the artist was not lost to him is evidenced by Olesha's numerous diary entries, which have the qualities of a truly artistic prose.
During the years of Stalinist repressions, many of Olesha's friends were destroyed - Meyerhold, D. Svyatopolk-Mirsky, V. Stenich, I. Babel, V. Narbut and others; he narrowly escaped arrest. In 1936, a ban was imposed on the publication of Olesha's works and the mention of his name in the press, lifted by the authorities only in 1956, when the book Selected Works was published, Three Fat Men were republished and partially published in the almanac "Literary Moscow" diary entries.
During the war years Olesha was evacuated to Ashgabat, then returned to Moscow. The writer bitterly called himself in the post-war years "prince of the National", referring to his way of life. The "neurosis of the era", which the writer felt keenly, expressed itself in incurable alcoholism.
The topics of his diaries in the 1950s are very diverse. Olesha wrote about his meetings with Pasternak, about the death of Bunin, about Utyosov and Zoshchenko, about his own bygone youth, about the Comedie Francaise tour in Moscow, and so on.
Biography
Fairy tale "Three fat men"
The novel "Envy"
There is no doubt that the writer saw himself in the image of the protagonist. It was he, the living and real Yuri Olesha, and not Nikolai Kavalerov invented by him, who envied the new society of sausage makers and butchers, who happily joined the construction of a new system, marching in step with the new government and not wanting to understand and accept the suffering of others who did not join their marching system .
"Superfluous Man" - writer-intellectual
The image of the main character of the play "The List of Good Deeds" (1930) by actress Elena Goncharova is also autobiographical. In 1931, Vs. Meyerhold began to rehearse the play, remade at the direction of the censor, but the performance was soon banned. The "list of good deeds" was actually a "list of crimes" of the Soviet government, the play expressed the author's attitude to the reality around him - to executions, to the ban on private life and the right to express one's opinion, to the meaninglessness of creativity in a country where society is destroyed. In his diary, Olesha wrote: “Everything has been refuted, and everything has become non-serious after the cost of our youth, life, the only truth has been established: the revolution.”
An important place in the legacy of Olesha is occupied by the book “Not a day without a line. From Notebooks" (published in 1961, after the death of the writer). Revised edition of The Book of Farewell (1999). This book is extraordinary. This is both an autobiography and the author's thoughts about himself and about what is happening around him. He begins by telling himself about the origin of the book: "The book arose as a result of the author's conviction that he should write ... Although he does not know how to write the way others write." He explained that he should write, because he is a writer, but that is exactly what he is not allowed to do. Yuri Olesha generously and sincerely spoke about himself in his latest autobiographical book, Not a Day Without a Line.
In a letter to his wife, he explained his condition: “It’s just that the aesthetics that are the essence of my art are not needed now, even hostile - not against the country, but against a gang that established a different, vile, anti-artistic aesthetics.” The fact that the gift of the artist was not lost to him is evidenced by Olesha's numerous diary entries, which have the qualities of a truly artistic prose.
Last years
He could often be seen in the House of Writers, but not speaking in the halls, but downstairs in the restaurant, where he sat with a glass of vodka. He had no money, the lucky Soviet writers considered it an honor to treat a true writer, well aware of his great talent and the impossibility of realizing it. Once, having learned that there were different categories of funerals for Soviet writers, he asked what category he would be buried in. He would be buried according to the highest, most expensive category - not for serving his native communist party, but for the true talent of a writer. Olesha asked this with a phrase that went down in the history of the House of Writers: is it possible to bury him in the lowest category, and return the difference now? It was impossible.