SOURCE: Niemczyk, Barbara A. Review of The Complete Plays, by Yuri Olesha.Theatre Journal 37 (March 1985): 121-22.

In the following review of Green and Katsell's translation of The Complete Plays, Niemczyk presents an overview of the works in the collection.

Although his promising literary career was interrupted by the Stalinist era, Yury Olesha remains one of the most original writers of the early Soviet period. Best known in the West for his novel Envy, published in 1927, he also wrote short stories, essays, and scripts for the stage and screen. He was clearly more comfortable with the short story and novel, but his dramatic pieces nevertheless present interesting examples of the kind of experimentation with form and genre that characterized Russian literature of the 1920s. The activity in Olesha's plays frequently borders on the surreal, with touches of finely tuned irony and comic absurdity. Olesha's dramatic works have been collected...