Chaplin in Yuri Olesha’s narrative

This paper deals with the role of the “Chaplin code” in Yuri Olesha’s narrative. Olesha’s journal entries, essays, and literary works are analyzed regarding his personal “cinematic poetics.” This work suggests that Olesha views the relationships between the languages of cinema and literature as a form of synthesis and, at the same time, as a conflicting communication. His works show visual phantasmata not only as being universal in different forms of art but also as being essentially antithetic to one another. Olesha’s journal entries refer to Chaplin’s method as a mixture between poetic sentiment and buffoonery. Moreover, Olesha regards Chaplin as a self-referential figure who contaminates the traits of a poet and a trickster and represents a part of a larger personal myth of an artist who (metaphysically) becomes a beggar in the “new world.” In Olesha’s literary works, the presence of characters who refer to “the Tramp” or share some of his attributes can influence the intrigue (adding the motifs of circus, theatre, and cinema) as well as the structure of the narrative (changing narrative tense and narrative voice). For example, in “Zavist’ (Envy),” Kavalerov and Ivan Babichev both share some of “the Tramp’s” features (appearance, clothing, stagey behavior, lack of money). In addition, the text sometimes refers to both of them as “comedians.” The paper concludes with the claim that the “Chaplin code” plays several metanarrative roles: it indexes the “balagan-type” worldview, serves as a key element of cinematic poetics, and, overall, becomes the essential part of Olesha’s ideas regarding the nature of artistic creation.

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