Writer Yuri Olesha: biography, photos and interesting facts. Yuri Olesha - biography, information, personal life Competition with Andersen: the tale "Three Fat Men"

Biography

Tale "Three Fat Men"

The novel "Envy"

There is no doubt that the writer saw himself in the image of the main character. It was he, the living and real Yuri Olesha, and not Nikolai Kavalerov, invented by him, envied the new society of sausages and butchers, who happily joined the construction of a new system, marching in step with the new government and did not want to understand and accept other people's sufferings, who did not join their marching system ...

"Superfluous person" - intellectual writer

The image of the main character of the play "List of Benefits" (1930), actress Elena Goncharova, is also autobiographical. In 1931, Vs. Meyerhold began to rehearse the play, reworked at the direction of the censorship, but the play was soon banned. The "List of Benefits" was actually a "list of crimes" of the Soviet regime, the play expressed the author's attitude to the reality around him - to executions, to the prohibition of privacy and the right to express one's opinion, to the senselessness of creativity in a country where society was destroyed. In his diary, Olesha wrote: "Everything has been refuted, and everything has become non-serial after the price of our youth and life has established the only truth: the revolution."

An important place in Olesha's legacy is occupied by the book “Not a day without a line. From notebooks ”(published in 1961, after the death of the writer). Revised edition "The Book of Farewell" (1999). This book is unusual. This is an autobiography, and the author's thoughts about himself and about what is happening around. 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 as 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 told 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 is not needed now, even hostile - not against the country, but against the gang that established another, vile, anti-artistic aesthetics." The fact that the artist's gift was not lost by him is evidenced by the numerous diary entries of Olesha, which have the qualities of truly fictional prose.

Last years

He could often be seen in the House of Writers, but not performing in the halls, but downstairs in the restaurant, where he sat with a glass of vodka. He had no money, successful Soviet writers considered it an honor to treat a true writer, perfectly aware of his enormous talent and the impossibility of realizing it. Once, having learned that there were different categories of funerals for Soviet writers, he asked in which category he would be buried. He would be buried in the highest, most expensive category - not for serving his native Communist Party, but for his true talent as a writer. Olesha asked this with a phrase that went down in the history of the House of Writers: is it possible to bury it in the lowest category, and return the difference now? It was impossible that way.

Yuri Karlovich Olesha was born on March 3 (19.02 st.s.) 1899 in Elisavetgrad (now - Kirovograd, Ukraine) in an impoverished noble family. Father, a ruined Polish nobleman, was an excise official. Thanks to the mother, the atmosphere in the family was imbued with the spirit of Catholicism.

In 1902 the family moved to Odessa. In his memoirs, Olesha wrote: “In Odessa, I learned to consider myself close to the West. As a child I lived in Europe, as it were. " The rich cultural life of the city contributed to the education of the future writer. While still in high school, Olesha began to write poetry. The poem "Clarimonda" (1915) was published in the newspaper "Yuzhny Vestnik". After graduating from high school in 1917 he entered the university, where he studied law for two years. In Odessa, twenty-year-old Olesha, together with V. Kataev, E. Bagritskiy, I. Ilf, formed the group "The Collective of Poets", and was also one of the most active employees of the "Bureau of Ukrainian Press".

During the Civil War, Olesha remained in Odessa, where in 1919 he survived the death of his beloved sister Wanda. In 1921 he left hungry Odessa for Kharkov, where he worked as a journalist and published poetry in periodicals. In 1922, Olesha's parents got the opportunity to emigrate to Poland, but Yuri himself stayed and moved to Moscow, where he worked for the railway newspaper "Gudok", with which M. Bulgakov, V. Kataev, I. Ilf, E. Petrov and other writers. Then his poetic feuilletons, published under the pseudonym "Chisel", were published almost every day in "Gudok". While working for a 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.

At the same time, Olesha began to write his first prose work - a fairy tale novel "Three Fat Men"spending the night in the editorial office, on sheets of newsprint. I wrote it in eight months. His muse was a 13-year-old girl Valya Grunzaid. He saw her on the balcony reading Andersen and fell in love. When she grows up, she will read my book and become my wife - the writer decided. But she did not marry Olesha, but Yevgeny Petrov. Olga Suok became Olesha's wife, to whom the author dedicated his tale.

In 1924 Olesha completed "Three Fat Men" (published in 1928, illustrations by M. Dobuzhinsky). The tale was imbued with the author's romantic attitude to the revolution. The perception of revolution as happiness is characteristic of all the goodies in "Three Fat Men" - the circus Suok, the gymnast Tibula, the gunsmith Prospero, and Dr. Gaspar Arneri. The tale aroused great reader interest and, at the same time, skeptical responses from official criticism (“the children of the Land of the 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, commissioned by the Moscow Art Theater, Olesha made a staging of Three Fat Men, which has been successfully performed to this day 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 (directed by A. Batalov) have been staged based on Olesha's fairy tale.

At the same time, the writer published his novel Envy (1927) in the Krasnaya Nov 'magazine, which caused controversy in the press. The protagonist of the novel, intellectual, dreamer and poet Nikolai Kavalerov, became a hero of the time, a kind of "superfluous person" of Soviet reality. In contrast to the purposeful and successful sausage maker Andrei Babichev, the loser Kavalerov did not look like a loser. The reluctance and inability to succeed in a world living according to antihuman 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 a sausage as a symbol of prosperity. In 1929 the author wrote the play Conspiracy of Feelings based on this novel.

The image of the main character of the play "List of Benefits" (1930) of the actress Elena Goncharova is also autobiographical. In 1931, the play, reworked at the direction of the censorship, began to rehearse Vs. Meyerhold, however, the performance was soon banned. The "List of Benefits" was actually a "list of crimes" of the Soviet regime, the play expressed the author's attitude to the reality around him - to executions, to the prohibition of privacy and the right to express one's opinion, to the senselessness of creativity in a country where society has been destroyed, etc. .P. In his diary, Olesha wrote: "Everything has been refuted, and everything has become non-serial after the price of our youth and life has established the only truth: the revolution."

In the 1930s, commissioned by the Moscow Art Theater, Olesha wrote a play based on the thought he possessed about the despair and poverty of a man from whom everything except the nickname "writer" was taken away. 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. On the basis of the surviving drafts, director M. Levitin staged the play The Beggar, or Death of Zand at the Moscow Hermitage Theater in 1986.

In 1931, the collection "Cherry Pit" was published, combining Olesha's stories from different years. The film story "Strict Young Man" was published in 1934, after which the name of Olesha was found in print only under articles, reviews, notes, sketch sketches, and sometimes stories. He wrote memoirs about his contemporaries (V. Mayakovsky, A. Tolstoy, I. Ilf, and others), sketches about Russian and foreign writers, whose work he especially appreciated (Stendhal, Chekhov, Mark Twain, etc.).

In the future, 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 is not needed now, even hostile - not against the country, but against the gang that established another, vile, anti-artistic aesthetics." The fact that the artist's gift was not lost by him is evidenced by the numerous diary entries of Olesha, which have the qualities of truly fictional prose.

During the years of Stalinist repressions, many of Olesha's friends were destroyed - V. Meyerhold, D. Svyatopolk-Mirsky, V. Stenich, I. Babel, V. Narbut and others; he himself narrowly escaped arrest. In 1936, a ban was imposed on the publication of Olesha's works and the mention of his name in print, which was lifted by the authorities only in 1956, when the book "Selected Works" was published, and "Three Fat Men" were republished.

During excommunication, Olesha works as a screenwriter. Viktor Shklovsky, sorting through the author's papers, found ties for more than three hundred plays. But only three films came out. One of them - "Strict Young Man" directed by Abram Rome - about music, female beauty and wealth. And also that music is more valuable than any wealth, and female beauty is more important than the most genius music. Of course, the film was banned and put on the shelf for forty years. Also, according to Olesha's scripts, the films "Swamp Soldiers" and "The Error of Engineer Kochin" were made; for the theater. E. Vakhtangova Olesha staged the novel "The Idiot".

During the war, Olesha was evacuated to Ashgabat, then returned to Moscow. The writer bitterly called himself in the post-war years “the prince of the National”, referring to his way of life. The "neurosis of the era", which the writer felt keenly, was expressed 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 Utesov and Zoshchenko, about his own departed youth, about the “Comedie Française” tour in Moscow, etc. He considered the main business in the last period of his life to be the work he did day after day, having come up with the conventional name "Not a day without a line", suggesting later to write a novel.

Book “Not a day without a line. From notebooks "collected from the notes of Yuri Olesha by Viktor Shklovsky and published after the death of the writer in 1965. In 1999, an enlarged edition was published called "The Book of Farewell" (1999). This book is unusual. This is an autobiography, and the author's thoughts about himself and about what is happening around. 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.

The literary day laborers provided earnings, but not moral satisfaction. This became for the talented writer the cause of creative sterility and the development of alcoholism. He could often be seen in the House of Writers, but not performing in the halls, but downstairs in the restaurant, where he sat with a glass of vodka. He had no money, successful Soviet writers considered it an honor to treat a true writer, perfectly aware of his enormous talent and the impossibility of realizing it. Once, having learned that there were different categories of funerals for Soviet writers, he asked in which category he would be buried. He would be buried in the highest, most expensive category - not for serving his native Communist Party, but for his true talent as a writer. Olesha asked this with a phrase that went down in the history of the House of Writers: is it possible to bury it in the lowest category, and return the difference now? It was impossible that way.

Yuri Karlovich Olesha died of a heart attack on May 10, 1960, and was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery.

Yuri Karlovich Olesha. Born on February 19 (March 3) 1899 in Elisavetgrad (now Kropyvnitsky) - died on May 10, 1960 in Moscow. Russian Soviet writer and poet, playwright, journalist, screenwriter.

Yuri Olesha was born on February 19 (March 3 in a new style) in 1899 in Elisavetgrad (then Kirovograd, since 2016 - Kropyvnitsky).

His family were impoverished Belarusian nobles. The Olesha clan (originally Orthodox) originates from the boyar Olesha Petrovich, who in 1508 received the village of Berezhnoye in the Stolin region from Prince Fyodor Ivanovich Yaroslavich-Pinsky. Subsequently, the family was polonized and converted to Catholicism. In 1922, Olesha's parents emigrated to Poland.

Father - Karl Antonovich Olesha, an excise official. After the revolution he left for Poland, where he died in the 1940s.

Mother - Olympia Vladislavovna (1875-1963), who also lived in Poland after the revolution, survived her son.

The elder sister, Wanda (1897-1919), died of typhus in her youth.

Yuri's native language was Polish.

In 1902 the family moved to Odessa. There, Yuri entered the Richelieu gymnasium, played football for the gymnasium team. Even during his studies, he began to write poetry. The poem "Clarimonda" (1915) was published in the newspaper "Yuzhny Vestnik".

After graduating from the gymnasium, in 1917 Olesha entered the Odessa University, studied law for two years. In Odessa, he together with young writers, and formed the group "Collective of poets".

During the Civil War, Olesha remained in Odessa, in 1921 he moved at the invitation of V. Narbut to work in Kharkov. He worked as a journalist and published poetry in newspapers.

In 1922 Olesha moved to Moscow, wrote feuilletons and articles, signing them with the pseudonym Zubilo. These works were published in the branch newspaper of railway workers "Gudok" (it also published Mikhail Bulgakov, Valentin Kataev, Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov). "One of the most dear memories of my life for me is my work in Gudok. Everything was united here: my youth, and the youth of my Soviet homeland, and the youth, so to speak, of our press, our journalism," - later wrote Olesha in his diary.

In Moscow, Olesha lived in the famous "writer's house" in Kamergersky Lane, in which, as he wrote in his diary, everything "literally played, the Mozartian principle was merry."

In 1924, Olesha wrote his first large prose work - a fairy tale novel "Three Fat Men", which was published only four years later. The entire work is imbued with a romantic revolutionary spirit. This is a tale about the revolution, about how cheerfully and courageously poor and noble people fight against the domination of three greedy and insatiable fat rulers, how they save their adopted heir Tutti, who turned out to be the stolen brother of the main character, the circus girl Suok, and how the whole people of the enslaved country becomes free.

In 1927 a novel was published in the magazine "Krasnaya Nov" "Envy", one of the best works of Soviet literature on the place of the intelligentsia in post-revolutionary Russia. The romanticism of the revolution and the hopes associated with it inherent in the fairy tale "Three Fat Men" were abruptly drowned in the new conditions. Many literary critics call "Envy" the pinnacle of Olesha's creativity and, undoubtedly, one of the pinnacles of Russian literature of the 20th century. In 1929, the author wrote the play Conspiracy of Feelings based on this novel.

In the 1930s and subsequent years, no major works of art came out from under his pen. The writer turned out to be unclaimed. At the First Congress of the Writers' Union, Olesha made a speech of repentance, where he likened himself to the protagonist of the novel "Envy" Nikolai Kavalerov: "Kavalerov is me myself. Yes, Kavalerov looked at the world with my eyes: Kavalerov's colors, colors, images and conclusions belong to me. And these were the brightest colors that I have seen. Many of them came from childhood or flew out of the most cherished corner, from a box of inimitable observations. As an artist, I showed in Kavalerovo the purest power, the power of the first thing, the power of retelling the first impressions. They said that Kavalerov was a vulgar and insignificant. Knowing that there is a lot of my personal in Kavalerov, I took upon myself this accusation of vulgarity, and it shocked me. "

Literary critic A. Gladkov called Olesha's speech, debunking the Kavalerovs as a relic of the old regime, “an autobiographical self-incrimination”: “Having forbidden himself to be himself in the art, Olesha became nothing. This is the harsh and just law of creativity. Either you are you, or nobody. " Olesha himself explained his creative crisis in a letter to his wife: "It's just that the aesthetics that are the essence of my art is not needed now, even hostile - not against the country, but against the gang that established a different, vile, anti-artistic aesthetics."

In the 1930s, by order of the Moscow Art Theater, Olesha worked on a play about a beggar, "which was based on the thought that he possessed of the despair and poverty of a man from whom everything except the nickname" writer "was taken away."

A critical attitude to Soviet reality is also evident in the play "List of Benefits" (1930), which, under pressure from the censorship, had to be rewritten. The staged performance was given full fees for three seasons, after which it was filmed (not for censorship reasons).

In the 1930s, many of the writer's friends and acquaintances were repressed, the main works of Olesha himself from 1936 to 1956 were not reprinted.

During the war, Olesha lived in evacuation in Ashgabat, then returned to Moscow. The atmosphere of that time, which he did not perceive, had a noticeable depressing effect on Olesha. He did not want to write according to the canons of socialist realism and could not. "Everything has been refuted, and everything has become frivolous after the only truth has been established at the cost of our youth and life: revolution," he wrote in his diary.

However, the fact that the artist's gift was not lost by him is evidenced by the numerous diary entries of Olesha, which have the qualities of truly fictional prose. After the death of the writer, in 1961, the first excerpts from his diary were published under the title "Not a day without a line". Viktor Shklovsky took part in the selection and compilation of the book. A separate edition was published in 1965. Olesha's book whimsically mixes autobiographical plots, the author's reflections on art and what is happening around. A substantially revised edition of Olesha's diaries was published in 1999 under the title “The Book of Farewell” (editor V. Gudkov).

"I firmly know about myself that I have the gift of calling things differently. Sometimes I succeed better, sometimes worse. Why this gift - I don't know. For some reason people need it. A child, having heard a metaphor, even in passing, even with the edge of an ear , leaves the game for a moment, listens and then laughs approvingly. So this is necessary ", - he wrote about himself.

After returning from evacuation, Olesha, who had lost the right to Moscow living space, lived in Em's apartment. Kazakevich. In the last years of his life, he could often be seen in the House of Writers, but not performing in the halls, but downstairs in the restaurant, where he sat with a glass of vodka. He had no money; successful Soviet writers considered it an honor to treat a true writer, perfectly realizing his enormous talent. Once, having learned that there were different categories of funerals for Soviet writers, he asked in which category he would be buried. It was explained to him that he would be buried in the highest, most expensive category. Olesha answered: is it possible to bury him in the lowest category, and return the difference now?

Addiction to alcohol undermined the good health of the writer. Olesha died in Moscow on May 10, 1960. He was buried in Moscow, at the Novodevichy cemetery (1st class, 1st row).

"In the end, it doesn't matter what I have achieved in life, it is important that I lived every minute.", - said Olesha.

Yuri Olesha (documentary)

Personal life of Yuri Olesha:

He looked after Valentina Leontyevna Grunzaid, to whom he even dedicated the book "Three Fat Men". However, Grunzaid preferred another to him - she became the wife of the writer Yevgeny Petrovich Petrov (Kataev).

He lived in a civil marriage with Serafima Suok.

Serafima Suok - common-law wife of Yuri Olesha

Wife - Olga Suok (1899-1978), the sister of his former common-law wife Serafima Suok. Raised her son from his first marriage, who committed suicide at the age of 17.

Bibliography of Yuri Olesha:

Novels:

Three Fat Men (1924);
Envy (1927);
"Beggar" (sketches, 1929)

Plays:

Little Heart (1918, text lost);
"The blockhouse game" (1920);
Conspiracy of Feelings (1929, staging of the novel Envy);
Three Fat Men (1929, adaptation of the novel of the same name);
List of Benefits (1930);
Death of Zanda (unfinished play about the communist Zanda in 6 scenes, 1929-1930);
"Death of Zanda" (another name - "Black Man", sketches for a play about the writer Zanda, 1931-1934);
Bilbao (sketches, 1937-1938);
"Black Bottle" (sketches for staging the novel "Children of Captain Grant" by J. Verne, 1946);
The Idiot (adaptation of the novel by FM Dostoevsky, 1958);
"Flowers are Belated" (adaptation of the story by AP Chekhov, 1959);
"Garnet Bracelet" (sketches for the adaptation of the story by A. N. Kuprin, 1959)

Screenplays:

A Story of a Kiss (1918; the fate of the film is unknown);
"Strict Youth" (1934, for the film "Strict Youth");
"Cardinal Questions" (1935, not removed);
Soldiers of the Swamps (Walter, for the film Swamp Soldiers, 1938);
"The Engineer Cochin's Mistake" (for the film "The Engineer Cochin's Mistake", with A. Macheret, 1939);
“Twenty Years of Soviet Cinematography” (for the documentary “Cinema in 20 Years”, jointly with A. Macheret, V. Pudovkin, E. Shub, 1940);
"Lighthouse" (dialogues for a short story from "Combat Collection No. 9", 1942);
"Girl and the Circus" (for the cartoon "Girl in the Circus", 1949);
"Fire" ("Mouse and Time", 1950, not filmed; later the script was revised by M. Volpin and O. Suok for the cartoon "Fire", 1971);
"The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Heroes" (for the cartoon "The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Bogatyrs", 1951);
“The Sea is Calling” (dialogues for the film “The Sea is Calling”, screenplay by V. Morozov, N. Morozova, 1959);
"Three Fat Men" (based on the novel of the same name, 1959, not filmed)

Poems:

Agasfer (1920);
"Beatrice" (1920)

Diaries:

"Not a day without a line" (selected excerpts, divided by topic);
The Book of Farewell (complete edition, excluding some repetitions, in chronological order)

Screen adaptations of the works of Yuri Olesha:

1963 - Three Fat Men (cartoon);
1966 - Three Fat Men (film);
1967 - Envy (teleplay);
1967 - Angel (film almanac "The Beginning of an Unknown Age", first story);
1969 - Belated Flowers (staging of Chekhov's story, made by Yuri Olesha);
1971 - Fire (cartoon);
1980 - Separated (cartoon).

stills from the movie "Three Fat Men"

Scripts by Yuri Olesha for films:

1936 - "Strict youth";
1938 - Swamp Soldiers;
1939 - "Engineer Cochin's Mistake";
1940 - "Cinema in 20 Years" (documentary);
1942 - "Fighting Film Collection No. 9" (short story "The Lighthouse", dialogues);
1950 - "Girl in the Circus";
1951 - "The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Bogatyrs";
1959 - The Sea is Calling (dialogues)

Yuri Karlovich Olesha - Russian Soviet prose writer, poet, playwright, satirist.

Aliases: Chisel.

Born into a family of impoverished Belarusian nobles. The Olesha clan (originally Orthodox) originates from the boyar Olesha Petrovich, who in 1508 received the village of Berezhnoye in the Stolin region from Prince Fyodor Ivanovich Yaroslavich-Pinsky. Subsequently, the family was polonized and converted to Catholicism.
In 1902, his family moved to Odessa. Here Yuri entered the Richelieu gymnasium; even during his studies he began to write poetry. The poem "Clarimonda" (1915) was published in the newspaper "Yuzhny Vestnik".
After graduating from the gymnasium, in 1917 Olesha entered the Odessa University, studied law for two years. In Odessa, he, together with young writers Valentin Kataev, Eduard Bagritsky and Ilya Ilf, formed the group "The Collective of Poets".
During the Civil War, Olesha remained in Odessa, in 1921 he moved at the invitation of V. Narbut to work in Kharkov. He worked as a journalist and published poetry in newspapers. In 1922, Olesha's parents emigrated to Poland. But he did not go with them.
In 1922 Olesha moved to Moscow, wrote feuilletons and articles, signing them with the pseudonym Zubilo. These works were published in the branch newspaper of railway workers "Gudok" (it also published Mikhail Bulgakov, Valentin Kataev, Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov). In Moscow, Olesha lived in the famous "Writers' House" in Kamergersky Lane. Olesha could often be seen in the House of Writers, but not performing in the halls, but downstairs in a restaurant where he sat with a glass of vodka. He had no money, successful Soviet writers considered it an honor to treat a true writer, perfectly aware of his enormous talent and the impossibility of realizing it. Once, having learned that there were different categories of funerals for Soviet writers, he asked in which category he would be buried. He would be buried in the highest, most expensive category. Olesha asked this with a phrase that went down in the history of the House of Writers: is it possible to bury it in the lowest category, and return the difference now?
Wife: Olga Gustavova Suok
Olesha died in Moscow on May 10, 1960. Buried in Moscow, at the Novodevichy cemetery.

The Russian Soviet writer and poet, playwright, satirist and screenwriter Yuri Olesha presented the world with the fairy tale novel Three Fat Men and dozens of other amazingly talented works staged on the theater stage and forming the basis of feature films and cartoons.

Childhood and youth

The writer loved by millions was born in 1899 in Elisavetgrad (now Kropyvnytskyi). The Olesha family is ancient, its roots can be traced back to the 15th century, from the boyar Olesha Petrovich, to whom the appanage prince Fedor Borovsky transferred the village of Berezhnoe, which was then part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland (today Belarus). The Orthodox Olesha Petrovich became Polonized and converted to Catholicism.

Two centuries after the division of the Commonwealth, the lands passed to the Russian Empire, and the Oleshi became Belarusian nobles, leaving Polish as the language of communication. The father of the future writer - Karl Olesha - was an excise official and landowner: he owned a forest estate called "Unische". Karl and his brother - avid gamblers - sold the estate for debts.

In scraps of childhood memories of Yuri Olesha, trotting, life in a luxurious apartment and scandals due to his 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 beauty Olga, who was called.

Yuri Olesha as a child 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 family of Olesha took the revolutionary events with caution. The arrival of the rebellious battleship Potemkin to Odessa caused horror and anticipation of the inevitable end of a prosperous former life.

At the age of 11, Yuri became a student at the Richelieu gymnasium. They were afraid of the young ironic nobleman in the class: to get into the attention of the stinging Olesha meant for a long time to become the laughing stock of the entire gymnasium. Even then, the boy had incredible imagination and was aptly expressed.

Yuri Olesha wrote the first rhymed lines in high school. The young man's literary debut took place in the Odessa "Southern Vestnik": the editors took the poem "Clarimonda" for publication. In 1917, Yuri Olesha received a matriculation certificate and entered Odessa University, choosing the Faculty of Law.

Literature

The relatives of Yuri, 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. On Thursdays, creative evenings of talented citizens of Odessa were held in the 8th auditorium of the university. The youth called idols,.

Yuri Olesha in Odessa

Olesha's dramatic debut took place in Odessa - a play called "Little Heart". It was put on by members of literary circles. The text of the work was lost, but the play played a role in the writer's creative biography: Yuri heard the first enthusiastic responses.

In 1920, the pearl by the sea, which repeatedly passed from hand to hand, was occupied by the Red Army. Waves of refugees brought in highly talented people from all over the ruined empire. The poet and prose writer Vladimir Narbut arrived in the city, influencing the life of Yuri Olesha.

Now Odessa writers composed propaganda texts for posters and leaflets, staged performances in canteens, which had opened in previously fashionable restaurants and cafes. Olesha's new one-act play "The Blockblock Game" was seen on the stage of the Theater of Revolutionary Satire.

In the spring of 1921, Olesha and Kataev moved to Kharkov for Narbut, where the writer was entrusted with managing 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 Odessa resident settled in a writer's house and got a job at the newspaper "Gudok", on the pages of which were published, Ilya Ilf and. The writer called the “Gudkovo” period the best in his life.

Yuri Olesha in the office of the newspaper "Gudok"

Yuri served in the information department, where he sealed envelopes with editorial letters: in Moscow, after provincial Odessa, Olesha started 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 whom to sign, he advised the pseudonym "Chisel".

The debut was a success. In "Gudok", one after another, new feuilletons appeared, signed by "Chisel". Olesha's materials were supplied by worker correspondents who wrote about theft, nepotism, bureaucracy and other ulcers of society in the regions. The readers liked Yuri Olesha's biting poetic opuses, they received hundreds of responses.

In 1924, the writer presented the readers with the first voluminous prose essay - the fairy tale novel Three Fat Men. It was published 4 years later. The idea to write a fairy tale came to Yuri Olesha in the hostel "Gudok" (this is his room without furniture behind a flimsy partition Ilf and Petrov described in "12 chairs"). In the window opposite, the writer saw a young beauty, enthusiastically reading a book. The girl's name was Valentina Grunzaid. 4 years later, she became the wife of Evgeny Petrov.

And then, enchanted by 15-year-old Valya Olesha, who was immersed in reading fairy tales, vowed to compose a fairy tale better than that of a Dane. In the printing house he took a roll of paper and, having rolled it on the floor, wrote a novel at night. The first edition is dedicated to Valentina Grunzaid.

In the city of Tolstyakov, warm Odessa was guessed. 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 performance has been translated into 17 languages \u200b\u200band is now staged on world stages. In 1966, the picture Three Fat Men was shot with Joseph Shapiro.

The fairy 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 Nikolai Kavalerov's Envy, in which the author's features are guessed, was called by his contemporaries a hero of the time. In the mid-1930s, Abram Room directed the drama "Strict Youth" based on the novel.

The resounding success of the novel opened the way for The Three Fat Men: previously, the “revolutionary” fairy tale was not published because of 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 the censorship saw it as criticism of the system and banned it. The writer remade the work, calling it "List of Benefits." In 1931 he took the play into the theatrical repertoire. The production went on 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 the Great Patriotic War in evacuation in Turkmenistan.

The ban on books was lifted in the mid-1950s, but Olesha wrote little. Basically, these were performances on the novels of the classics -,. Yuri Karlovich sat over a glass in the restaurant of the House of Writers, where his colleagues considered it an honor to treat him. The unspent gift of the writer is evidenced by the diary entries collected and published after his death in the early 1960s.

Personal life

The prototypes of the girls Suok from "Three Fat Men" were sisters Lydia, Olga and Seraphima, who bore the same surname. Yuri met the girls in Odessa, where the family of the former Austrian attaché settled.

Yuri Olesha fell in love with the youngest of them, Sima. They lived in a civil marriage for three years, but Seraphim's windy muse twice ran away from Olesha. For the second time - to my 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 did not have common children, and Yuri Karlovich raised Olga's son from his first marriage.

Death

The life of Yuri Olesha reduced his addiction to drinking. Shortly before his death, the writer, in whose pockets the wind was blowing, asked his colleagues what kind of funeral he would receive. He was told that the last journey was carried out in the highest category. With bitter irony, Olesha asked if it was possible to rank in the lower category, and give 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.