SOURCE: Ingdahl, Kazmiera. “The Life/Death Dichotomy in Jurij Oleša's Short Story ‘Liompa’.” In Studies in 20th Century Russian Prose, edited by Nils Åke Nilsson, pp. 156-85. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1982.

In the following essay, Ingdahl perceives the dichotomy of life and death as a major thematic concern in “Liompa.”

I

Man's relationship to reality is a constantly recurring theme in Oleša's works. In Oleša's opinion, the way we perceive what is going on around us becomes increasingly automatized as we grow older. The world that surrounds us successively shrinks and withers. Since we no longer see it, it ceases to exist for us. Our language atrophies in a similar fashion; words lose all their connotations and are used purely denotatively, as abstract terms.

The automatization vs the regeneration of language was an important question to both the Symbolists (Andrej Belyj) and the Avant-gardists (e...