SOURCE: Borden, Richard C. “H. G. Wells' ‘Door in the Wall’ in Russian Literature.” Slavic and East European Journal, 36, no. 3 (fall 1992): 323-38.

In the following excerpt, Borden explores the influences of a short story by H. G. Wells on Olesha's work.

In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, Oliver Sacks describes the case of Mrs. O'C., who was born in Ireland and had lost both parents before the age of five (125-27). All alone she had been sent to America to live with a forbidding maiden aunt. She had no conscious memory of her parents, of Ireland, of what she considered “home,” of what she all her life called her “lost childhood.” Dr. Sacks notes that this loss of her “earliest, most precious years of life” had always caused Mrs. O'C. to feel a “keen and painful sadness”: “She had often...