Yury Olesha

Doctor Gaspar Arney --What a clever man is he!He can trap the sliest fox,He can crack the hardest rocks,He can fly from here to Mars,He can reach the farthest stars! This jolly song takes us in to the world of make-believe created by Yuri Olesha. The scene is set in a fantastic land ruled by three greedy fat men who are engrossed in eating and making merry in their palace. Meanwhile, curious things are happening outside the high palace walls. You will learn all about this and much more when you read this wise, merry tale that is so like the truth. The Three Fat Men, a favorite with all Soviet children, has run to over 30 printings, it was made into a film, and performed at many theaters in Russia. "Yuri Olesha (1899-1960), a Soviet prose writer and playwright, is immensely popular with readers for his novel Envy, his short stories, plays and the famous book for children The Three Fat Men, which is really one of his masterpieces." "Yuri Olesha?s book The Three Fat Men is fantastic, fabulous, abounding in extraordinary transformation and fascinating happenings." -- Literaturnaya Gazeta "There was something Beethovenian in Yuri Olesha, even in his voice. His eyes discovered many marvelous, impressive things around him, and he wrote about them briefly, precisely and excellently." -- Konstantin Paustovsky

The Three Fat Men

الحسد

Andrei Babichev is a paragon of Soviet values, an innovative and practical man, Director of the Food Industry Trust, a man whose vision encompasses such future advances for mankind as the 35-kopeck sausage and the self-peeling potato. Out of kindness, he rescues from the gutter Nikolai Karalerov, violently tossed from a bar after a drunken and self-destructive tirade. But instead of gratitude, Babichev finds himself the subject of an endlessly malignant jealousy, as Kavaelrov sees in him a representative of the new breed of man who has prevented him from realizing his true greatness. A scathing social satire, Envy is a concise and incisive exploration of the paradigmatic conflicts of the early Soviet age: old versus new, imagination versus pragmatism, and the alienation of the romantic artist in the age of technology. Critics as far apart as Gleb Struve (“One of the most interesting and original works in the whole of Soviet literature†?) and Pravda (“Olesha's style is masterful, his psychological analysis infinitely subtle, his portrayal of negative characters truly striking†?) have praised the novel, and one of the signs of its universality is the fact that it has been claimed by nearly every school of critics and interpreted as everything from a submerged homosexual story to a 20th-century Notes from the Underground.

Envy

I︠U︡riĭ Karlovich Olesha

"First published in 1965 and reprinted many times in the Soviet Union and Russia, Yury Olesha's No Day without a Line is a series of thematically assembled journal entries which together form an unusual and extremely engaging personal memoir." "Ranging from Olesha's prerevolutionary childhood, to notable cultural figures, to Russian and Western literature, the entries are artfully composed units in which an image is developed, a memory precisely delineated, or an apercu elaborated. Occasionally, the units coalesce in a chain of reflections on a common theme, such as Olesha's memories of the 1905 Potyomkin mutiny, his recollections of the poet Mayakovsky, or his discussion of the writings of Tolstoy or Hemingway." --Book Jacket.

Yury Olesha

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