The present article represents the results of the textual analysis of Yuri Olesha’s A Strict Young Man four lifetime editions. The introduction is dedicated to the methodology of the analysis description, the problem of a variant readings’ classification in particular. The main part describes various readings of A Strict Young Man. We divide them into two traditional groups: the typos and the variants that appeared because of the author’s rewrite or compositors’, content editors’ and proof-readers’ work. The analysis of all the various readings demonstrates that Olesha was losing the interest to his text with the passage of time, just as the level of proof- readers’ inadvertence was growing. In conclusion, the fact that the text of the last lifetime edition should be cleared of the typos and collated with Olesha’s manuscripts becomes apparent.