This paper deals with the role Alexander Pushkin’s motifs play
in Yuri Olesha’s works, including both his personal memoir No Day Without
a Line and works of fiction which belong to various genres.
The article describes four different receptive strategies that together form
Olesha’s own ‘myth of Pushkin’. The strategy of canonization is characteristic
of Olesha’s childhood memories. Pushkin is depicted as an embodiment of the
eidos of art (e.g. Mention of ‘a book named Pushkin’, descriptions of a monument
to Pushkin). The strategy of identification is typical for young Olesha’s poetry (e.g. poems
Mozart and Salieri, The Stone Guest, Eugene Onegin’s Latest Odessa Trip)
where Pushkin’s works form an invariant motif.
The strategy of deconstruction is manifested in Olesha’s most well-known
prose and drama. Pushkin’s principle of ‘harmonious’, balanced storytelling is
disrupted. For example, in The Envy Nikolai Kavalerov becomes an envier similar
to Salieri despite possessing an imagination of ‘Mozartian’ type. The refiguration
of Pushkin’s motifs is made possible due to the emphasis on the ‘destructive’
characters and their ‘doubles’ in the plot (e.g. the envier, the ‘man in
black’, the deadly statue, the ghost).
The strategy of synthesis is evident as in later Olesha’s works Pushkin becomes
a part of a larger authoreflective semantic structure. References to the
motifs of ‘genius and villainy’, ‘deadly statue’, ‘the monument not made by
human hands’ form a basis to Olesha’s own primal opposition between ‘the
pauper’ and ‘the author’, between the loss of the artistic gift and the creator’s
immortality. To late Olesha, Pushkin’s works manifest the category of artistic
wholeness while his own creations are regarded as unfinished pieces, fragments.
Olesha’s search for harmony becomes evident in his notes devoted to the
analysis of the peculiar sounds and letters of Pushkin’s verses. The fragmentary
nature of Olesha’s writing has its emblem in the figure of the legendary artist
Apelles. Olesha uses a quote by Pliny the Elder, \Nulla dies sine linea’ – ‘Not a
day without a line’. (In Russian language, the word строчка specifially means
the line in the text, therefore a reference to the legend of Apelles is more subtle).
The image of a ‘single line’ has an ambivalent value. Being a sign of an incompleteness
of a work, it can also become as a symbol of a perfect creation, an
‘Apelles line’.
The paper concludes with the statement that various forms of dialogue with
Pushkin should be interpreted not only as a way of interaction with the literary
tradition but also as a starting point of the writer’s own personal myth.
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