SOURCE: Harkins, William E. “The Philosophical Stories of Jurij Oleša.” In Orbis Scriptus, edited by Dmitrij Tschižewskij, pp. 349-54. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1966.

In the following essay, Harkins explores a number of philosophical antitheses in Olesha's short stories.

The early stories of Jurij Oleša, such as “Liompa” (1928), “The Cherry Stone” (“Višnevaja kostočka,” 1929), “Love” (“Ljubov,” 1929), “Aldebaran” (1931) and others, form a cycle of philosophical tales concerned with questions of epistemology and metaphysics. These stories are constructed on a number of antitheses: idealism vs. materialism, vitalism vs. mechanism, romanticism vs. realism, traditionalism vs. futurism. To a considerable degree these antitheses are treated by Oleša as one and the same, but each may also appear separately in the context of a single story or passage. We shall approach these antitheses in terms of narrative situations or images which express them; indeed, it is images, along with...