Yuri Olesha

Born in 1899 in Elisavetgrad to an impoverished Polish noble family, Olesha grew up in Odessa within the same literary circle as Isaac Babel and the satirists Ilf and Petrov, starting out as a journalist and writer of topical verse for a railway workers' newspaper.

Envy, published in 1927, made him one of the most celebrated young writers in the Soviet Union almost overnight, its old-world dreamer set against a gleaming new Soviet man. But the tightening demands of Socialist Realism proved impossible to reconcile with a sensibility built around private, unheroic perception, and he never completed another novel.

He spent his remaining three decades largely silent as a novelist, scraping by on screenwriting, translation, and café life in Moscow while drinking heavily. No Day Without a Line, his notebooks of fragments and aphorisms, appeared only after his death in 1960 and revealed he had kept writing all along, just never for publication.