“When it was published in 1927, Yuri Olesha’s Envy was celebrated by the Soviet establishment as a condemnation of the bourgeois psyche. But two years later Olesha came under suspicion when Communist officials realized that the novel was a satire. Marian Schwartz, who translated Envy for the New York Review Books imprint, tells us why Olesha’s forgotten masterpiece deserves a second look.”

Listen to the podcast here.

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.