SOURCE: Barratt, Andrew. “Yury Olesha's Three Ages of Man: A Close Reading of ‘Liompa’.” The Modern Language Review 75 (1980): 597-614.

In the following essay, Barratt provides a stylistic and thematic analysis of “Liompa.”

In Yury Olesha's small corpus of literary works “Liompa” occupies a special place. Not only was it the first of the writer's mature stories to see publication, but it has also been acknowledged, by Western critics at least, as one of his finest achievements in the genre.¹ Existing studies of “Liompa” have tended to concentrate almost exclusively on thematic elements, indicating in particular the central importance to Olesha's overall world-view of the problem of perception as articulated in the story.² My purpose in this article is to attempt a more detailed and comprehensive reading of “Liompa”. By examining the formal and stylistic elements of what is possibly Olesha's most complex and elusive story I hope to...