Envy

(Paperback, Main)

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Description

Yuri Olesha's novella combines social satire, effervescent humor, and a wild visionary streak to tell the story of a Soviet Babbitt, a hero of industry who presides over an unheard-of increase in the production of sausage. But beside this man with the unshakeable self-regard of a natural wonder or a public statue is the bitter sponger who, consumed with resentment, sees through him.

Reviews

In his best novel, all wry humor and narrowed eyes, Olesha presents two sides of the same coin: a self-satisfied sausage king and a drunken failure the former picks up in the street. Poetic and satiric and quite an achievement, it is a novel everyone should read. Flavorwire

Olesha wrote only one novel,Envy. The book was published in 1927, 10 years after the Bolshevik Revolution and a few years before the net of socialist realism fell on Russian writers.The narrative is driven by the narrators bitter, poetic commentary on the world. The characters represent, loosely, aspects of the new Soviet ethos. Vladimir Nabokov had a low opinion of almost everything produced in Russia after his departure, but he admired Oleshas writing.
Columbus Dispatch

In his best fiction, the short novelEnvy, Olesha writes about the clash of two worlds, but with a wry, half-defeated yet touchingly affectionate irony that seems entirely his own.
Irving Howe,Harpers

Oleshas stories are supreme and timeless cinema. To read his triumphant short novelEnvyis to see it, to find the pages transformed into a screen on which to behold mans heroic confrontation with the monsters of his own creationEvery page of Olesha demands to be read and seen again.
The New York Times

Author Bio

Yuri Olesha (1899-1960) participated in the heroic period of restless experimentation which took place in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and which produced the masterpieces of Malevich, Babel, and Platonov. Marian Schwartz has been translating fiction and non-fiction for over twenty-five years. Her work includes Edvard Radzinksy's The Last Tsar and the works of Nina Berberova.