Iurii Olesha was a controversial writer whose most productive period was the late 1920s and early 1930s. He also enjoyed a period of posthumous fame in the 1960s with the publication in 1965 of his writer's diary, Ni dnia bez strochki. Iz zapisnykh knizhek (translated as No Day without a Line, 1979). Though a writer of considerable talent who never realized his full potential, Olesha nevertheless contributed important and stimulating works to the corpus of Russian literature, including his short novel Zavist' (1927; translated as Envy, 1936) and several short stories of enduring interest and quality that were written in the late 1920s. He wrote his best works in a laconic style, which featured compact sentences and striking visual imagery. He masterfully captured the atmosphere of the period in which he wrote, especially the late 1920s and early 1930s, and depicted the condition of the artistic intelligentsia of that time. A keen...