Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

YURI OLESHA'S ENVY: THE PROBLEM OF ENVY IN SOVIET SOCIETY 177
food specialist Commissar Andrei Petrovich Babichev. In view of the fact
that the feeling of envy derives originally from food-envy, and that
Olesha, like most others, must have suffered considerably from hunger
after the October Revolution, it seems hardly a coincidence that throughout
the whole novel the critical eye of envy fastens scornfully, again and
again, upon food and the processes of eating and digestion. The story
begins literally with the commissar's colon.
Kavalerov, the hero, is the narrator in the first part of the book. He is
an 'angry young man,' already in thrall to alcoholism, and he personifies
envy, as does the commissar's brother, Ivan, a romantic failure who hates
his brother, as representing not only success but also the new machine
age and mass organization, which Ivan tries to sabotage.
The novel closes with the utter defeat of the two envious men. But so
unmercifully are the commissar and his world laid bare and caricatured
through the eye of envy that Olesha, who became famous overnight as a
result of this, his fIrst novel, was allowed to enjoy his popularity for only
a short time. Soon he became the object of personal attack, no doubt
partly because he was seen in official Communist circles as a social
critic dangerous to the regime.
Olesha has several times admitted that the figure of Kavalerov is
autobiographical. He identified himself with that character, and the
attacks on his hero's trivial and vulgar nature inflicted a deep and
personal hurt. 27 The similarity between the author and the young man in
the novel is patent. Olesha's youth was spent in the secure ambience of a
middle-class family of officials in pre-Revolutionary Russia. He tells us
that he valued the world of private property, and this is also apparent
from some of the lovingly drawn pictures in his memoirs.28 The first ten
years of Communist Russia were the years of his early manhood, from
nineteen to twenty-eight. During that time he made his living as a
journalist. It is not difficult to imagine how the world of new-style Party
bosses in the Russia of 1925 appeared to him. His hatred and envy are set
down on paper, and he had the courage to choose the single word 'envy'
27 R. Mathewson, 'The First Writers' Congress. A Second Look,' in Literature and
Revolution in Soviet Russia 1917-1962. A Symposium, ed. M. Hayward and L.
Labedz, London, 1963,p.65.
28 Y. Olesha, 'Jottings of a Writer,' in Envy and Other Works, pp. 201 ff.