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 First English edition (cover by V. Kozlinsky, 1936) | |
| Author | Yury Olesha |
|---|---|
| Original title | Зависть |
| Country | Soviet Union |
| Language | Russian |
| Genre | Satirical novel |
| Publisher | Krasnaya Nov |
Publication date | 1927 |
Envy (Russian:Зависть, tr. Zavist') is a satirical novel by the Russian writer Yury Olesha, first published in 1927 .
The novel is about a pathetic young man named Nikolai Kavalerov, who refuses to accept Communist values and is consumed by loathing and envy for his benefactor Andrei Babichev, a model Soviet citizen who manages a successful sausage factory. With Andrei Babichev's brother Ivan, Kavalerov attempts to stage a comeback of all the old, petty feelings that were crushed under communism. In the end, Ivan and Kavalerov are crushed by their own iniquity.
Envy first appeared in Krasnaya Nov , a Soviet literary magazine, in late 1927. Olesha wrote the novel while working at the Gudok , a widely read newspaper of the Railway Workers' Union. Other authors of the newspaper were Mikhail Bulgakov, Isaac Babel, Ilya Ilf, and Yevgeny Petrov. [1]
Encyclopædia Britannica calls Envy "a satire in the tradition of Notes from the Underground ". [2]
The central social theme of Envy is the fate of the intelligentsia in Russia’s postrevolutionary society. The novel presents a clash between the rational industrial state and the creative aspirations of Nikolay Kavalerov, which results with Kavalerov throwing his potential away. Despite Olesha's enthusiasm for the new state of affairs, Envy is one of a number of 20th-century Russian novels in which the protagonists clash with Soviet reality and as a result find themselves marginalized. [3]
The cinema of the Soviet Union includes films produced by the constituent republics of the Soviet Union reflecting elements of their pre-Soviet culture, language and history, albeit they were all regulated by the central government in Moscow. Most prolific in their republican films, after the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, were Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine, and, to a lesser degree, Lithuania, Belarus and Moldavia. At the same time, the nation's film industry, which was fully nationalized throughout most of the country's history, was guided by philosophies and laws propounded by the monopoly Soviet Communist Party which introduced a new view on the cinema, socialist realism, which was different from the one before or after the existence of the Soviet Union.
Socialist realism is a style of idealized realistic art that was developed in the Soviet Union and was the official style in that country between 1932 and 1988, as well as in other socialist countries after World War II. Socialist realism is characterized by the depiction of communist values, such as the emancipation of the proletariat. Despite its name, the figures in the style are very often highly idealized, especially in sculpture, where it often leans heavily on the conventions of classical sculpture. Although related, it should not be confused with social realism, a type of art that realistically depicts subjects of social concern, or other forms of "realism" in the visual arts. Socialist realism was made with an extremely literal and obvious meaning, usually showing an idealized USSR. Socialist realism was usually devoid of complex artistic meaning or interpretation.
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Yury Karlovich Olesha was a Russian and Soviet novelist. He is considered one of the greatest Russian novelists of the 20th century, one of the few to have succeeded in writing works of lasting artistic value despite the stifling censorship of the era. His works are delicate balancing acts that superficially send pro-Communist messages but reveal far greater subtlety and richness upon a deeper reading. Sometimes, he is grouped with his friends Ilf and Petrov, Isaac Babel, and Sigismund Krzhizhanovsky into the Odessa School of Writers.
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