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Chapter Four Reinventing the Self: Valentin Kataev and Yury Olesha ALTHOUGH IT WAS Isaac Babel who, in his essay "Odessa" and the fictional works that followed it, defined the idea of an Odessa writer, his trajectory was actually not a typical one for writers of the Odessa or "South-West" school. Other Odessa writers of Babel's generation regularly foregathered in the poets' club "The Green Lamp" (Zelenaia lampa, modeled on the eponymous group to which Pushkin had belonged), where they read and criticized one another's works, held public readings and discussions, and sometimes hosted visiting scholars or literary luminaries such as Alexei Tolstoy. Members of the "Green Lamp" society included Eduard Bagritsky, Ilya Ilf, and Semyon Kirsanov, as well as the two writers on whom this chapter focuses, Valentin Kataev and Yury Olesha. The younger of the two, Yury Karlovich Olesha was born in 1899, making him two years younger than Kataev and five years younger than Babel. His family, middle-class Polish Catholic aristocrats, moved to Odessa from Elizavetgrad in 1902, when Yury was three years old. Here his father, a former landowner (who, according to "a dark family legend ... had lost all his money at cards"),l worked as a government inspector in a vodka distillery and indulged "his favorite pastimes of cards and alcohol."2 Yury began his education at home, studying Russian and arithmetic with his grandmothera point in common with Babel-and subsequently enrolled in Odessa's Rishelievsky GymnaSium and Novorossiisky University (from which Babel, as a Jew, was excluded). During his student years, he began writing poetry, most of which is now lost, and joined the "Green Lamp" SOCiety, where he met and formed a fast friendship with Valentin Kataev. Valentin Petrovich Kataev, born in 1897, enjoyed a more purely "Russian " childhood than any of the other Odessa writers, with the exception of his own brother Evgeny (born in 1903), who would later adopt a shortened version of his patronymic as his nom de plume and team up with the alsopseudonymed Ilya Fainzilberg to become the satirical literary double act Ilf 102 Reinventing the Self and Petrov. The Kataev brothers, both born in Odessa, received from their parents (a Russian schoolteacher and a Ukrainian woman from a military family) what would come to be seen as a politically correct literary education at home, reading the works ofcanonical authors such as Lermontov and Tolstoy.3 Young Valentin began writing poetry while still a child-his first published works were patriotic verses, printed in Odessa and St. Petersburg newspapers-and acquired an influential literary mentor in the person of Ivan Bunin in 1914.4 After Russia's entry into World War I, Kataev volunteered for the army, serving as an artillery officer from 1915 to 1917, when he was returned to Odessa for medical treatment. The Bolshevik Revolution found Kataev in the Odessa Military Hospital, and thus temporarily constrained from actively taking sides (an experience he would later use in chronicling the adventures-and ideological ambivalence-of his hero Petya Bachey in the Waves ofthe Black Sea tetralogy).5 Thereupon followed what his biographer Robert Russell has called "three of the most complicated years of Kataev 's life-the years of the Civil War." Having founded the "Green Lamp" in 1917, Kataev alternated his literary activities with service in the Volunteer White Army in Odessa; in 1919 he was imprisoned by the Cheka for eight months for counterrevolutionary activities. Only thereafter does Kataev's biography rejoin the collective path of the Odessa writers: like Olesha (who had to break with his monarchist parents to do it), he joined the Red Army in 1919. (Babel had joined up in 1917.) During the Civil War, Babel, Olesha, and Kataev all served as propagandists for one or another branch of ROSTA, the Russian Telegraph Agency of the period, whose "purpose was to travel around the Soviet Union to communicate Soviet ideology, educate people, and promote the Soviet way of life";6 it was in the context of their work for this organization that Babel accompanied the Red Cavalry and Olesha published his first story ("Angel," 1922). By 1923 all three writers were in Moscow (Kataev and Olesha having moved there in 1922, Babel in late 1923), working alongside fellow Odessans Ilya Ilf and Lev Slavin on the staff of The Siren and beginning to establish what would become their collective myth. The NEP years (1921-28) were ones of peak productivity for all the Odessa writers, and...

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