LeBlanc, Ronald D

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Ronald D. LeBlanc

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&lt;i&gt;The Poetics of Yury Olesha&lt;/i&gt; (review)

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University of New HampshireUniversity of New Hampshire Scholars' RepositoryLanguages, Literatures, and Cultures Scholarship Languages, Literatures, and CulturesWinter 1990Review: The Poetics of Yury Olesha by VictorPeppardRonald D. LeBlancUniversity of New Hampshire - Main Campus, ronald.leblanc@unh.eduFollow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/lang_facpubThis Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at University of New Hampshire Scholars'Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Scholarship by an authorized administrator of University of NewHampshire Scholars' Repository. For more information, please contact nicole.hentz@unh.edu.Recommended CitationLeBlanc, Ronald D., The Poetics of Yury Olesha by Victor Peppard, (review) (Gainesville:University of Florida Press, 1989). ModernFiction Studies, 36, no. 4 (1990): 646-647.most intense male relationships). LesÃ©r has set herself a tremendous task here;chronology and Mann's words define the matrix of her laudable exploration, which,however, is somewhat at sea without a methodological compass in this wealthof words and information. The conventional biographical approach thatacknowledges neither recent Mann scholarship nor literary-theoretical discussionsof the past decades sets LesÃ©r's book apart from the others discussed; it adheresto the traditions of literary analysis that see literature as a reflection of life, theauthor's work as constitutive of "an intellectual biography."MARILYN SIBLEY FRIESUniversity of MichigannrfrVictor Peppard. The Poetics of Yury Olesha. Gainesville: U of Florida P, 1989. 175pp.  $19.95 cloth; pb.  $9.95.Despite all the critical attention that has been showered upon Yury Olesha(1899-1960) during the past twenty-five years, this Soviet writer remains a highlyenigmatic figure whose oeuvre continues to generate major interpretivedisagreements. Victor Peppard's monograph, whose purpose is "to demonstratethat there is in fact an identifiable set of interconnected poetic principles that governsOlesha's work and gives it artistic coherence," explores what he considers to bethe three dominant elements in his poetic system: 1) defamiliarization, 2) car-nival,  and 3) dialogicality.In the first chapter, "From Metafiction to Metaliterature," the author ex-amines the aesthetic innovations that Olesha introduced in his works. Basing hisanalysis on Shklovsky's notion of ostraneme ("defamiliarization" or "estrangement"),Peppard asserts that Olesha, in keeping with the spirit of artistic experimentationthat inspired the best Soviet writers of the 1920s, attempted to rewrite the rulesof writing in his texts, thereby forcing the reader to reevaluate and reformulatethe very processes by which literature is produced. Olesha emerges from Peppard'sanalysis as "a persistent recaster and reshaper of familiar forms and conventions."The most salient examples of this generic and structural defamiliarization, he argues,are provided by Envy (with its ornamentality), Three Fat Men (with its multi-textuality), and No Day without a Line (with its metaliterary nature). In ChapterTwo, "Variations on the Carnival," Peppard concentrates his attention mainlyon the text of Envy, which, he claims, is "so profoundly permeated with the spiritof the carnival" that it serves as "a special exemplar of carnivalistic fiction intwentieth-century Russian fiction." Bakhtin's theory provides the basis for hisexamination of the various carnivalistic features, such as eccentricity (scandal scenesand verbal haranguing), mÃ©salliances (parodie doubles), and the dynamics of crown-646 MODERN FICTION STUDIESing/discrowning (mock kings and jesters), that appear throughout Envy. Peppardalso connects two forms of popular entertainment from modern cultureÂ—sportsand circusÂ—with the carnival spirit underlying Olesha's literary works, a spiritthat culminates in Envy with that "great carnivalistic event," the soccer match.The author concludes his study with a chapter on "The Poetics of Dialogue,"where the theories of Shklovsky and Bakhtin are once again invoked, this timeto provide the framework for a discussion of the widespread ambivalence thatinforms Olesha's writings. Competing narrative voices and perspectival viewpoints(adult and child, artist and athlete, and so on), Peppard notes, combine to createa highly complex and dialogical literary structure.Peppard's monograph provides a number of illuminating observations aboutimportant (and, until now, largely unexplored) aspects of Olesha's poetics. Oneshortcoming, however, is the author's unfortunate tendency in his discussions torefrain from addressing broader implications raised by the notions of carnival,defamiliarization, and dialogicality. One wishes that Peppard, who is clearlyknowledgeable about his topic, would have strayed more often from his narrowrhetorical plan, thrown off his exceedingly reverent (and thus sometimes restric-tive) discipleship to Shklovsky, Bakhtin, and Morson, and speculated more freelyand expansively about Olesha's poetics. Nonetheless, his book does represent avaluable addition to the scholarship now available on this remarkable Soviet writer.RONALD D.  LcBLANCUniversity of New HampshirenrfrJoAnn Cannon. Postmodern Italian Fiction:  The Crisis of Reason in Calvino, Eco, Sciascia,Malerba.  Cranbury:  Fairleigh Dickinson UP,   1989.   139 pp.  $27.50.Postmodern Italian Fiction: The Crisis of Reason in Calvino, Eco, Sciascia, Malerba con-sists of a preface, a lengthy introduction, and four chapters. It is a worthwhilecollection of essays in English on four highly influential Italian writers, as JoAnnCannon adroitly examines certain works which, for her, formulate "a cognitiverole for the fictional work," because as she also states in her Preface, each ofthe works "discussed in this study is to varying degrees a self-conscious text, oc-cupied or preoccupied with its status as literary artifice." In a lengthy historicalintroduction, Cannon offers an overview of the artistic and intellectual milieu inwhich each of these works was conceived and written. The chapters that follow,instead, are dedicated to specific works of the writers in question. (There is, un-fortunately, an infelicitous editorial oversight: the book jacket refers to the In-troduction as Chapter One, and so on, as does the author herself in an endnote.)Chapter One deals with Leonardo Sciascia's historical essay The Death of theInquisitor (1964) and his historical novel The Council of Egypt (1963). Here Cannondemonstrates how Sciascia fuses both the historical and fictional modes in theRECENT BOOKSÂ—CONTINENTAL EUROPE 647

Review: The Poetics of Yury Olesha by Victor Peppard

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Review: The Poetics of Yury Olesha by Victor Peppard

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