SOURCE: Borden, Richard C. “Iurii Olesha: The Child Behind the Metaphor.” Modern Language Review 93, no. 2 (April 1998): 441-54.

In the following essay, Borden explores the importance of the childhood experience to the formation of metaphor in Olesha's narratives.

Iurii Olesha (1899-1960), like many of his generation, believed that the poet's singular gift was an ability to see the world ‘as if for the first time’, ‘as would a child’, as, in fact, he himself had seen the world in childhood.¹ Poets were they who preserved the child's capacity for unmediated perception. Olesha also believed, however, that childhood experience was itself the source of art, that ‘artistic intellect […] comes after all from childhood, when a man really does see the world for the first time’.² Poets, moreover, do not merely see like children, they restore to others childhood's actual images, sensations, and those modes of perception normally lost to adults...