Yuri Olesha

(1899 - 1960)

Born in modern-day Ukraine in 1899, Yuri Olesha came from Polish nobility, served as a telephone operator in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, and then wrote verse under the pseudonym “The Chisel” for a railway workers’ journal to which Isaac Babel and Mikhail Bulgakov also contributed. Although his novel Envy earned him initial praise—a favorable review appeared in Pravda—he was by the 1930s deemed by Soviet critics to be ideologically suspect.