The trick, however, certainly isn’t in the author’s self-assurance. As in the aforementioned video clip, it’s got more to do with the passing of time, the quality of distance. For my acquaintance’s husband, the clip has the force of a surprise epiphany. The man — the one sitting at the computer in his Zagreb apartment, bawling his eyes out over banal images — is no mental patient. Like the majority of people, he’s just a loser. And he might well have fallen straight out of Olesha’s novel.
Envy consists of two parts: The narrator of the first part is Nikolai Kavalerov, a twenty-seven-year-old “loser,” “poetic soul,” and “nothing man.” The second part is written in the third person, the novel’s backbone formed by two antagonist characters, the two brothers, Andrei and Ivan Babichev. Andrei is a successful businessman, a man of the time, the time being that of the Soviet New Economic Policy. Ivan is a representative of the old, a “dreamer,” “conjurer,” “inventor,” and a “drunk.” Ivan is convinced that his brother Andrei has stolen his daughter Valya away from him, and that he now controls her. Together with Andrei and Valya, Volodya Makarov, a talented soccer player and Andrei’s protégé, makes up the trio of representatives of the new time. Valya and Volodya are a successful young couple, the Soviet future. One night Andrei Babichev picks the drunk Nikolai Kavalerov up off the street and pityingly offers him a bed in his apartment until Volodya returns from a trip.
Kavalerov thinks his savior a monster: He is a man who “sings on the toilet” in the morning, a “glutton,” a sausage maker, and big shot (“He, Andrei Petrovich Babichev, is director of the Food Industry Trust. He’s a great sausage and pastry man and chef. . And I, Nikolai Kavalerov, am his jester”). Andrei Babichev is a man who “lacks imagination,” a man “in charge of everything that has to do with eating,” he is “heavy, noisy, and by fits and starts, like a wild boar,” and is both “greedy and jealous” (“He’d like to cook all the omelettes, pies, and cutlets, bake all the bread himself. He’d like to give birth to food. He did give birth to the Two Bits”). Kavalerov hates Andrei, and even when Andrei laughs, Kavalerov is fearful of him (“I listen, horrified. It’s the laughter of a heathen priest. I listen like a blind man listening to a rocket explode”). Enormous and strong, Babichev has a terrifying physical presence, his head “like a painted clay bank.”
Kavalerov (who, in spite of Olesha’s efforts to avoid detection, is the author’s alter ego) is characterized by his way of looking at the world. He sees the world from a bird’s-eye perspective (and thus a cutter on the river is like a “gigantic almond cut lengthwise”); in the fragmented perspective of street mirrors (“I’m very fond of street mirrors. They pop up along your path. Your path is ordinary, calm — the usual city path, promising neither miracles nor visions. You’re walking along, not assuming anything, you raise your eyes, and suddenly, for a moment, it’s all clear to you: The world and its rules have undergone unprecedented changes”); through various poetic lenses; through movement, color, scent, sound, and half-closed eyes; he sees the world in metaphors, seeing the things no one else sees (“that man is surrounded by tiny inscriptions, a sprawling anthill of tiny inscriptions: on forks, spoons, saucers, his pince-nez frames, his buttons, and his pencils? No one notices them. They’re waging a battle for survival”). Kavalerov observes the world through a “defamiliarized,” “deautomaticizing,” “deformed optic,” so that a truck looks like a beetle “bashing around, rearing up and nosing down,” cheeks like knees, a voice makes “the same sounds as an empty enema,” a pair of glasses have “two blind, mercurially gleaming pince-nez disks,” Anichka’s face looks like “a hanging lock,” her bed “like an organ.”
Kavalerov is convinced that his life is a “dog’s life.” He scribbles “repertoire for showmen: monologues and couplets about tax inspectors, Soviet princesses, nepmen, and alimony,” he’d like to be famous (somewhere in France), but knows that this is not his fate. Even “things don’t like me. I’m hurting the street”; furniture “purposely sticks out its leg for me”; he even has a “complicated relationship” with his blanket—“a polished corner once literally bit me.” Kavalerov is an envier, a Chaplinesque figure, a klutz, a coward, a doubting Thomas, a human “zero.” Between the two opposites — the future embodied by his temporary “savior,” Andrei Babichev, a successful NEP industrialist and sausage maker getting ready to feed the socialist world with a fast food chain named the Two Bits — and Ivan Babichev, a mad man, a fantasist, a trickster, the inventor of the Ophelia supper machine, a fabricator, and a prophet (“Who is he — Ivan. Who? A lazybones, a harmful, infectious man. He should be shot”), Kavalerov chooses the latter: “‘My place is with him,’ said Kavalerov. ‘Teacher! I shall die with you!’”
This organizing typology is not new in Russian literature, there being clear antecedents in Russian Romanticism, in the figure of the educated, sensitive, and socially excluded hero (the so-called “superfluous man”), in the work of Pushkin and Lermontov, or in the heroes from the underground (Dostoevsky) who collide with the social apparatus. Goncharov’s Oblomov provides the most direct antecedent of Envy’s oppositional pairing, its eponymous anti-hero a dreamer, a layabout, a loser who fears life itself. Oblomov’s antagonistic other is Andrei Stoltz (the son of a Russian mother and German father), a practical, pragmatic, conscientious representative of the new time, a man of the future, and a man for the future. With Goncharov’s novel, the term Oblomovism (oblomovshchina) entered the Russian lexicon of ideas as a synonym for slothfulness, for the sensitive “Russian soul” who rejects rationalism, pragmatism, progress, and “the European West,” whatever that was supposed to mean. Yet there is a further parallel between Olesha’s and Goncharov’s novels: Having retreated from life, Oblomov lives with the widow Pshenitsina, while Kavalerov, it seems, will end his days sheltering in the bed of the widow Anichka Prokopovich. The yellow pillow that the false prophet Ivan Babichev carries about everywhere links him with Oblomov, too. (“Tell him: Each of us wants to sleep on his own pillow. Don’t touch our pillows! Our still unfledged heads, as rusty as chicken feathers, lay on these pillows, our kisses fell on them in a night of love, we died on these — and the people we killed died on them. . Here is a pillow. Our coat of arms. Our banner.”) The figure of the tragi-comic anti-hero, the weakling, the “poetic soul” reappeared in the literature of the Russian avant-garde (e.g. Ivan Bezdomny in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita), even smuggling itself into the literature of the seventies, as with Venichka, the alcoholic in Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow to the End of the Line, the emblematic figure. The pillow, like all symbols in Olesha’s Envy, also has a contrary meaning as a symbol of physical and moral fall (“and the pillow sat there next to him, like a pig”; “I would have hurled myself into the terrible abyss, into the pillow’s icy abyss”).
It is as if the widow Prokopovich, with her impressive bed (which her late husband won in the lottery), stands before the gates of hell. She’s “old, fat, and podgy” (“You could squeeze her out like liverwurst”), cooks for “a collective of hairdressers,” and “goes around entangled in animal guts and sinew” (“A knife flashes in her hand. She tears through the guts with her elbows, like a princess tearing through a spider’s web”). Kavalerov’s fall seems steeper still if we remember his dream of wooing Valya, who “whooshed by. . like a branch full of leaves and flowers,” who “will be washing up at the basin, shimmering like a carp, splashing, tickling the ivories of the water.” (The description of Valya calls to mind Nabokov’s Lolita.) Ivan Babichev is the opposite of his brother, their mutual hatred fierce. Andrei threatens Ivan with jail, and Ivan tells Andrei that he’ll send his invention, the machine Ophelia, to kill him. Nothing of the sort actually happens: Andrei remains in the world of industrial fat cats (surrounded by his “adopted” children, Volodya and the beautiful Valya), and Ivan remains the self-declared “king of lowlifes.” The successful remain on top; the people of the bottom, on bottom.