Yury Olesha: a miracle worker, a jealous soul and a beggar’s heart, continued
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 is dedicated to the 125th anniversary of Yury Olesha and 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.
Recording of the first lecture available at the VK platform
During the lecture, we will continue our discussion of the writer’s erratic behaviour, his method of living a life by consciously applying the carefully crafted behavioural models and enacting different roles. This will help us identify the main psychological factors that helped or hindered his creativity.
We will pay attention to how love influenced Olesha’s personality, as well as his relationships with Valentina Grunzaid and the Suok sisters. He loved the younger sister, Seraphima, for many years, while the middle sister, Olga, became his wife. The lecture will show how the writer’s egocentrism determined his feelings and actions, fuelled his creativity, but also led him into a dead end. The lecture will also discuss his attempts to overcome this condition, which ultimately proved unsuccessful.
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.