"This is the most comprehensive collection in English of Olesha's work. It includes eight stories that have been translated especially for the Anchor edition."--Back cover.

The novel Envy provides a humorous look at the individual's struggle with an increasingly industrialized society. This critical companion, edited by Rimgailia Salys, aims to acquaint readers with the history, biographical context, critical reception and interpretation problems related to the novel. It also helps the first time reader decipher some of the text's more difficult features, including its shifting narrators and fluid boundaries between dream and reality.

"First published in 1965 and reprinted many times in the Soviet Union and Russia, Yury Olesha's No Day without a Line is a series of thematically assembled journal entries which together form an unusual and extremely engaging personal memoir." "Ranging from Olesha's prerevolutionary childhood, to notable cultural figures, to Russian and Western literature, the entries are artfully composed units in which an image is developed, a memory precisely delineated, or an apercu elaborated. Occasionally, the units coalesce in a chain of reflections on a common theme, such as Olesha's memories of the 1905 Potyomkin mutiny, his recollections of the poet Mayakovsky, or his discussion of the writings of Tolstoy or Hemingway." --Book Jacket.

All Future Plunges to the Past explores how Russian writers from the mid-1920s on have read and responded to Joyce's work. Through contextually rich close readings, José Vergara uncovers the many roles Joyce has occupied in Russia over the last century, demonstrating how the writers Yury Olesha, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Bitov, Sasha Sokolov, and Mikhail Shishkin draw from Joyce's texts, particularly Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, to address the volatile questions of lineages in their respective Soviet, émigré, and post-Soviet contexts. Interviews with contemporary Russian writers, critics, and readers of Joyce extend the conversation to the present day, showing how the debates regarding the Irish writer's place in the Russian pantheon are no less settled one hundred years after Ulysses. The creative reworkings, or "translations," of Joycean themes, ideas, characters, plots, and styles made by the five writers Vergara examines speak to shifting cultural norms, understandings of intertextuality, and the polarity between Russia and the West. Vergara illuminates how Russian writers have used Joyce's ideas as a critical lens to shape, prod, and constantly redefine their own place in literary history. All Future Plunges to the Past offers one overarching approach to the general narrative of Joyce's reception in Russian literature. While each of the writers examined responded to Joyce in an individual manner, the sum of their methods reveals common concerns. This subject raises the issue of cultural values and, more importantly, how they changed throughout the twentieth century in the Soviet Union, Russian emigration, and the post-Soviet Russian environment.

An analysis of the construction of masculinity in early Soviet culture that finds in the novels of Babel and others an utopian society composed exclusively of men.

Two outstanding examples of socialist-themed plays are combined in this remarkable volume. The Conspiracy of Feelings by Yurii Olesha (1899-1960) is based on his highly respected short novel Envy about the struggle between the old and new in Soviet society. The play, called The Conspiracy of Feelings, is not a simple adaptation, but an original work that reconceived the novel. The play explores the precarious position of the intelligentsia in the new collective state. The Little Theatre of The Green Goose was written by Konstanty Ildefons Galczynski (1905-53) who was one of Poland's most beloved poets. After World War II, he began work as a playwright, inventing a colorful theatre troupe of performers (animal and human) and contributing a new instalment of The Little Theatre of the Green Goose each week to Przekroj, the Cracow literary magazine. Intended for reading only, The Green Goose went unperformed in Galczynski's life and was finally staged in 1955 and gained a permanent place in the theatre and became a force for the creation of the new Polish drama that flourished in the 1960s.

In Wingless Desire in Modernist Russia, Yelena Zotova argues that the concept of envy underwent a peculiar transformation in the Russian Modernist prose of the 1920s due to a series of radical shifts in societal values, with each subsequent change thwarting Russia’s volatile axiological hierarchy. Industriousness and austerity, inferior to playful genius in Pushkin’s “Mozart and Salieri,” became virtues, while the intrinsic value of nonutilitarian art was officially nullified by the Bolshevik state.Consequently, a new literary type emerged, and envy, described as “wingless desire” by Russia’s chief poet Alexander Pushkin, obtained new ownership as the envied became the envier. Superimposing twentieth-century theories of envy onto Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Author and Hero in the Aesthetic Activity” (1923), Zotova proposes that Salieri’s envy could be the wingless embryo of the Bakhtinian authorship.

An NYRB Classics Original Winner of the 2014 PEN Translation Prize Winner of the 2014 Read Russia Prize The stakes are wildly high in Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s fantastic and blackly comic philosophical fables, which abound in nested narratives and wild paradoxes. This new collection of eleven mind-bending and spellbinding tales includes some of Krzhizhanovsky’s most dazzling conceits: a provincial journalist who moves to Moscow finds his existence consumed by the autobiography of his room’s previous occupant; the fingers of a celebrated pianist’s right hand run away to spend a night alone on the city streets; a man’s lifelong quest to bite his own elbow inspires both a hugely popular circus act and a new refutation of Kant. Ordinary reality cracks open before our eyes in the pages of Autobiography of a Corpse, and the extraordinary spills out.

Satire and the fantastic, vital literary genres in the 1920s, are often thought to have fallen victim to the official adoption of socialist realism. Eric Laursen contends that these subversive genres did not just vanish or move underground. Instead, key strategies of each survive to sustain the villain of socialist realism. Laursen argues that the judgment of satire and the hesitation associated with the fantastic produce a narrative obsession with controlling the villain’s influence. In identifying a crucial connection between the questioning, subversive literature of the 1920s and the socialist realists, Laursen produces an insightful revision of Soviet literary history.