SOURCE: Beaujour, Elizabeth Klosty. “Art as a Means of Knowing and Possessing the World.” In The Invisible Land: A Study of the Artistic Imagination of Iurii Olesha, pp. 15-37. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970.

In the following essay, Beaujour underscores the theme of the artist in society in Olesha's short fiction through an analysis of his short stories “The Cherry Stone” and “Liompa.”

Many of Olesha's works are concerned with the relationship of imaginative artistic creation to other human activities, and with the practice of art as a mode of dealing with the world. We can therefore approach these problems directly through an analysis of Olesha's story “The Cherry Stone,”¹ which is about an artist's effort to assert the interdependence of art and life.

On its simplest level, “The Cherry Stone” may be read as the story of a writer who tries to integrate the work of his...