Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

176 THE ENVIOUS MAN IN FICTION
into an incentive, and to try to emulate the marquis in those fields open to
him, expounds a philosophy of life that must be anathema to any social
revolutionary. Basically this is the much-maligned Horatio Alger myth
of America, the conviction that all is well with the status quo since the
glamour of the privileged and successful has the positive function of
providing an example, and of stimulating special mobility in the young
person at the bottom of the ladder. Everyone, it informs us, could make
something of himself and of his life if he really wanted to. And the mere
destruction or expropriation of the upper classes would help no one.
Thus it is not surprising to find Georg Lukacs recalling Karl Marx's
biting criticism of Eugene Sue, who, he alleges, 'cravenly adapted
himself to the surface of capitalist society . . . out of opportunism
distorting and falsifying reality. ,25
A novel which shows, if somewhat naively and superficially, how
social envy could be cured must indeed have been a vexation to the
socialists of the mid-nineteenth century. Yet this fact is remarkable in
itself.
While a hundred years ago it was a meaningful and rewarding task for
one of the most popular French novelists to depict the torment caused by
envy of the privileged and its possible cure, in the second half of the
twentieth century very few people would be interested in reading a
modern novel about a young man consumed with envy of the luxuries of
a multi-millionaire, and eventually cured by a psychoanalyst. To the
modern detective searching for a motive, it would seem as improbable
that someone should murder a millionaire out of envy as Frederick's
motive seemed to those around him.
Yuri Olesha's Envy: The problem of envy in Soviet society
In the very short novel Zavist (Envy), by the Russian Yuri Karlovich
Olesha (1899-1960), we have one of the few literary works in which the
envy of the hero, who is depicted somewhat unsympathetically by the
author as a miserable failure, reveals to us the whole spectrum of envy. 26
The object of envy is a successful, powerful, hustling technocrat, the
25 G. Lukacs, Schriften zur Literatursoziologie, 2nd ed., Neuwied, 1963, pp. 224 f.
26 Yuri 0lesha, 'Envy' in Envy and Other Works, Anchor Books, New York, 1967.