Envy
By Yuri Olesha
Introduction by Ken Kalfus
Translated by Marian Schwartz
New York Review Books, 2004
A classic of Soviet literature, Envy is a humorous look at the individual’s struggle with an industrialized society. Marian Schwartz’s new English translation captures the energy and strangeness of this Russian masterpiece.
A tour-de-force that has been compared to the best of Nabokov and Bulgakov, Olesha’s effervescent novella brings together cutting social satire, slapstick humor, and a wild visionary streak. Ivan Babichev is a model Soviet citizen, a swaggeringly self-satisfied mogul of the food industry who intends to revolutionize modern life with mass-produced sausage. Andrei Kavalerov is a loser and a liar. Finding him drunk in the gutter, Babichev gave him a bed for the night and a job as a gofer, but that doesn’t mean he’s grateful. To the contrary. Griping, sulking, groveling, always abject, Kavalerov despises everything Babichev believes in, even if he envies him his every breath.
Producer and sponger, insider and outcast, master and man, fight back in forth in the pages of Olesha’s anarchic comedy. It is a contest of will and passion in which nothing is sure except, perhaps, the incorrigible nature of the human heart.
Podcast
Listen to an interview with the translator about this book on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show, in his "Underappreciated" series.
The graphics used on this site were inspired by the work of Liubov Popova (1889-1924), a Russian artist and designer influenced by Constructivism and Futurism, as seen in her biography, by D.V. Sarabianov and N.L. Adaskina, Liubov Popova, translated by Marian Schwartz and published by Harry N. Abrams in 1990.