SOURCE: Naydan, Michael M. “Intimations of Biblical Myth and the Creative Process in Jurij Olesa's ‘Visnevaja Kostocka’.” Slavic and East European Journal 33, no. 3 (fall 1989): 373-85.

In the following essay, Naydan presents a semiotic analysis of Olesha short story “The Cherry Pit,” emphasizing the concepts of Biblical myth, regeneration, and time.

Oleša's contemporary Jurij Tynjanov succinctly expresses the polysemantic nature of the word in his classic study Problema stixotvornogo jazyka (The Problem of Verse Language): “Slovo ne imeet odnogo opredelennogo značenija. Ono—xameleon, v kotorom každyj raz voznikajut ne tol'ko raznye ottenki, no inogda i raznye kraski” [A word does not have one definite meaning. It is a chameleon, in which not only various shades, but even various colors arise with each usage] (48, 64).¹ In the Russian wordconscious tradition of Gogol' and Leskov, the lexicon of Oleša's short story “Višnevaja kostočka” (“The Cherry Pit...