In what marks an exciting new critical direction, Rebecca Stanton contends that the city of Odessa—as a canonical literary image and as a kaleidoscopic cultural milieu—shaped the narrative strategies developed by Isaac Babel and his contemporaries of the Revolutionary generation. Modeling themselves on the tricksters and rogues of Odessa lore, Babel and his fellow Odessans Val­entin Kataev and Yury Olesha manipulated their literary personae through complex, playful, and often subversive negotiations of the boundary between autobiography and fiction. In so doing, they cannily took up a place prepared for them in the Russian canon and fostered modes of storytelling that both reflected and resisted the aesthetics of Socialist Realism. Stanton concludes with a rereading of Babel’s “autobiographical” stories and examines their leg­acy in post-Thaw works by Kataev, Olesha, and Konstantin Paustovsky.

First published in 1965 and reprinted many times in the U.S.S.R. and Russia, No Day without a Line is a series of thematically assembled journal entries which together form an unusual and engaging personal memoir. Ranging from Olsesha's prerevolutionary childhood, to notable cultural figures, to Russian and Western literature, the entries are a fundamental piece of the legacy of a major Russian writer and an important contribution to the literature of autobiography and memoir.

This book, part of the acclaimed AATSEEL Critical Companions series, is designed to guide readers through Envy, Yury Olesha's humorous look at the individual's struggle with an increasingly industrialized society. This companion acquaints the reader with the history, biographical context, critical reception, and interpretation problems related to the novel. It also helps the reader decipher the book's difficult features, including its shifting narrators and fluid boundaries between dream and reality.

In addition, this critical companion presents documents from the period pertaining to the novel, excerpts from Olesha's memoirs, and a listing of important criticism.