Not a Day Without a Line. Stories, Memories, Articles

Yuri Karlovich Olesha (1899-1960) - Russian Soviet writer, poet, playwright - was the first to speak in his novel "Envy" about a generation of intellectuals who found themselves in a new world as "superfluous people". He wrote "in a completely new way", managing to "intertwine drama and irony, pain and joy".
"Words, words, words..." - this was how Olesha wanted to name his "story about himself", for words... lines, meanings - are the most precious for a poet. He worked on it in the late 1980s-1950s, at a time when the thoughts of the writer-intellectual were not close to society. The text, conceived by Olesha as fragments, "shards" of lived experience, was fully published under the title "Not a Day Without a Line" in 1965 - already after the author's death. In these fragments, Olesha, feeling his belonging to two eras, writes through the prism of personal memories the image of a new world - with its revolutions, wars, technology - and contemplates his place in it.
"Not a Day Without a Line" is not a diary in the conventional sense of the word; it is an exposure of the thoughts arising in the consciousness of a genius writer, "an attempt to restore life", to see the images unfolding around: "How rarely do we stop to pay attention to the world!". Reading Olesha's prose, you feel the smell of grass, sense the air soaked with light, and notice, along with the writer, the multicoloredness of life.
The book also includes autobiographical stories, memories of I. Ilf, A. Tolstoy, E. Bagritsky, and articles-reflections on K. Stanislavsky, V. Mayakovsky, C. Chaplin, and H. Wells.