Olesya (Russian: Олеся) is a novelette by Alexander Kuprin written in late 1897 – early 1898 and serialized in Kievlyanin newspaper from October 30 to November 17, 1898.
Olesya, the most acclaimed piece of his Polesye cycle, did much to build Kuprin's literary reputation and warranted his move to Saint Petersburg.
Though meant at first to be only part of the Volhynia and Polesye cycle, this poetic story of the love between an urban intellectual and a beautiful country girl expanded into a full novelette of a significance far surpassing that of the other regional tales.
This original version of the work, subtitled "From the Memories of Volhynia," came out with an introduction alleging that this was the story told to the author by an Ivan Timofeevich Poroshin, now an old man, as he recalled his youthful love for the "real Polesye sorceress" Olesya.
Wolf's Publishing house in Saint Peterburg, as part of the Library of Russian and Foreign Authors series (Issues 18 and 19).
Here Kuprin removed footnotes explaining details of the local dialect and changed several foreign words for their Russian analogues.
Depicting the rural people as an ignorant, aggressive and cruel mob totally contradicted the Narodnik ideas which Russkoye Bogatstvo was at the time propagating," biographer I.Pitlyar suggested.
[1] Ivan Timofeevich seeks restorative peace in Polesye, but gets only intolerable boredom, from which the prospect of meeting a real witch offers a welcome diversion.
Horrified with the news brought by his servant, Ivan hurries to the forest hut only to see it abandoned, with cheap red beads hanging on a window as a token for him.