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Yuri Olesha (1899-1960), the son of an impoverished land-owner who spent his days playing cards, grew up in Odessa, a lively multicultural city whose literary scene also included Isaac Babel. Olesha made his name as a writer withThree Fat Men,a proletarian fairy tale, and had an even greater success withEnvyin 1927. Soon, however, the ambiguous nature of the novella's depiction of the new revolutionary era led to complaints from high, followed by the collapse of his career and the disappearance of his books. In 1934, Olesha addressed the First Congress of Soviet Writers, arguing that a writer should be allowed the freedom to choose his own style and themes. For the rest of his life he wrote very little. A memoir of his youth,No Day Without a Line,appeared posthumously. Ken Kalfus's most recent book is a novel,The Commissariat of Enlightenment.He is also the author of two short story collections,ThirstandPu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies. Marian Schwartz has been translating Russian fiction and nonfiction for over thirty years. Her work includes Edvard Radzinsky'sThe Last Tsar, Yuri Olesha'sEnvy, and many works by Nina Berberova.
Olesha's stories are supreme and timeless cinema. To read his triumphant short novel Envy is to see it, to find the pages transformed into a screen on which to behold man's heroic confrontation with the monsters of his own creation.
