Yury Olesha: a miracle worker, a jealous soul and a beggar’s heart
The SPbU Representative Office in Spain invites you to the online lecture "Yury Olesha: a miracle worker, a jealous soul and a beggar’s heart". The lecture will be given by Nikolay Guskov, Associate Professor at the Department of History of Russian Literature, St. Petersburg University.
This year marks the 125th anniversary of the birth of Yury Karlovich Olesha, one of the outstanding Russian prose writers of the first half of the 20th century. His work is highly esteemed not only in Russia but also abroad, particularly in the USA and Japan, where he is one of the most well-known and studied Russian authors. His fairy tale novel "The Three Fat Men" enjoys particular popularity, but other works are regularly reprinted and studied.
Olesha only lived to the age of 61, leaving behind a rather modest literary legacy. In his youth, while living in Odessa and Kharkov, he concentrated mainly on poetry, and after moving to Moscow in 1923, he began publishing in the newspaper "Gudok" under the pseudonym Zubilo. His most famous works were published between 1927 and 1934: the novels "Envy" and "The Three Fat Men", the collection of stories "Cherry Stone", the play "List of Good Deeds", and the screenplay "The Strict Young Man".
After the period of active literary activity in the 1920s and early 1930s, Olesha entered a creative lull known as the "period of silence", the reasons for which remain unclear, The lecture will focus on the tragedy of a talented artist facing internal and external conflicts, his creative crisis, his pursuit of perfection, and the contradictory traits of his personality reflected in his works.
Lecturer
Nikolay Guskov graduated from the Russian Department of the Philology Faculty of SPbU in 1995 and defended his doctoral thesis in 1999. Since 2003, he has been working at the Department of the History of Russian Literature at St Petersburg University, and since 2010, he has held the academic title of Associate Professor. He has taught literature at secondary schools and in international projects at universities in Florence, Hamburg, Jena and Wroclaw. He regularly participates in academic conferences and is the author of 87 published works, including a monograph and a textbook.
Guskov’s research interests include Russian literature from the mid-18th to the mid-20th centuries, the history of drama, theatre and cinema, literary life, literary regional studies, children’s literature and Italian-Russian literary relations. The lecture will be streamed online in Russian with simultaneous translation into Spanish as part of the celebration of the 300th anniversary of SPbU — Russia’s oldest university.