SOURCE: Borenstein, Eliot. “The Family Men of Yuri Olesha.” In Men Without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917-1929, pp. 125-61. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000.

[In the following essay, Borenstein deals with the complexities of the father-son relationship in Olesha's story “Legend” and his novel Envy.]

Yuri Olesha wrote about fathers, sons, and brothers, but never simply about men. No matter how hard they try, Olesha's male characters cannot escape the context of the family. Indeed, story after story portrays its protagonists' attempts to extricate themselves from filial ties, but every effort only highlights its own futility. Biology itself is against them: every man is born a son, and most are destined to become fathers. But Olesha wrote in an era when biology, like all nature, was a frontier to be conquered, an elemental force to be reined in. If ever it seemed possible that the hackneyed fathers-and-sons issue could be resolved, that time was the 1920s.

[H]owever, Olesha's protagonists are only too aware of the father's integral role in their lives. Both despising and needing a male parent, they typically escape from one father only to run straight into the arms of another.¹ If he cannot avoid fathers completely, Olesha's hero reserves the right, in the words of Elizabeth Beaujour, to “choose his ancestors” (“Imagination of Failure” 123). Thus the personal dramas of Olesha's characters find a common agenda with revolutionary ideology: affiliation, based on freely chosen alliances, is always preferred to filiation, bonds founded on blood relationships.

Nonetheless the revolution is far from a reliable ally in the generational struggle. Rather, the extent to which Olesha's characters can sympathize with the forces of revolution depends upon the time frame of the story at hand. If the work has a revolutionary or prerevolutionary context, then the communists function as destroyers of the old rather than builders of the new. Their struggle with the established order extends to the institution of the “bourgeois” family, and thus the rebellious son sees in them a natural partner. When the revolution is already a fait accompli, however, the balance of power shifts. Yesterday's rebels are today's orthodoxy, and the founders of the new world create institutions that are disturbingly reminiscent of the family structures they claim to abhor. It is one of Olesha's great accomplishments that his novel Envy (Zavist') puts the fathers-and-sons issue in an entirely new light. If the would-be revolutionaries of pre-Soviet Russia were the avowed enemies of the family, Olesha's postrevolutionary communists are forced to admit that the father-son relationship is integral to their new world. In essence, if both fathers and sons are committed to creating a new society, there is no longer any reason to fight. The alliance between father and son is assured, for in Envy this relationship is not based on anything as unreliable as ties of blood; the men in question are not even relatives in the strict sense of the word. Instead, they choose each other freely, unfettered by the demands of kinship.

The postrevolutionary society of Envy is thoroughly a man's world, one that has little use for traditional femininity. The domestic sphere is under attack by men such as Andrei Babichev, who wishes to subsume the customarily female world of the kitchen under a hyperrational, coldly masculine plan. The new world, like the old, has a feminine idol, but it is an entity that nonetheless represents relentless, masculine efficiency: the machine.

Kavalerov's dilemma in Envy consists of his complete inability to enter into the new world's complex network of male relationships. Frustrated in his search for a new father, he is equally discouraged by his failure to establish a connection with the new world's younger generation. For if the novel's postrevolutionary society is characterized by a renewed partnership between father and son, it is even more marked by its general emphasis on male comradeship. Like so many of Olesha's protagonists, Kavalerov can only admire such comradeship from a distance. Unable to join them, he alternately fetishizes these men as beautiful, inaccessible aesthetic objects and envies them the comradeship he can never experience. Both Kavalerov and Ivan are in at a disadvantage: like the representatives of the new world, they have abandoned filial ties, but unlike them, they have yet to find a satisfactory replacement. Their attempt (and similar attempts in Olesha's other works) to come to terms with the family in general, and with the father in particular, is the subject of this chapter.

Though the main focus of this discussion will be Olesha's short novel Envy, this chapter starts with a close reading of “Legend” (“Legenda,”). I will argue that “Legend,” published in the same year as Envy, provides the key to understanding the relationship between fathers and sons in Olesha's novel. “Legend” shows how a rather mundane family conflict comes to a head when political events intrude. The narrator displays a “father complex” that elevates interpersonal and sexual problems to the realms of language, philosophy, and politics.

When we turn our attention to Envy, it becomes clear that the adult Kavalerov suffers from the same complex as the young Kolya of “Legend.” There are, however, two important differences. Whereas Kolya is in silent rebellion against his biological father, Kavalerov both seeks out and resents a series of father figures. Perhaps more important, Kolya declares his intention to be different from his father while still a boy, but Kavalerov's memories of his own father, his interactions with Ivan and Andrei, and, finally, his humiliating sexual encounter with Anechka all serve to remind him that he is as much a failure as was his father. Such moments of realization happen when Kavalerov is looking in a mirror; all too often, the face that looks back at Kavalerov is disturbingly paternal.

The chapter closes with an analysis of the novel's only father-son relationship that can be considered “happy”: that of Andrei Babichev and Volodya Makarov. As much as Kavalerov resents Andrei's other “off-spring” (the sausage and the superkitchen), it is Volodya who has the truly “enviable” position in the Babichev household. Volodya and Andrei represent an important reevaluation of the very concept of fathers and sons: rather than being at odds with each other, both are united in their efforts to build a new world. At first Andrei finds himself hard pressed to defend his relationship with Volodya from Ivan's accusations of sentimentality, but ultimately Andrei manages to turn paternal feelings from a source of shame into an essential part of human relationships in the new society. That the “father” and “son” involved are not blood relatives makes their bond even more revolutionary: their feelings stem not from blind sentiment, but from ideological affiliation. This chapter will show that the new world of Envy is portrayed as an all-male “family” that is based on political choices rather than ties of blood.

“LEGEND”: THE POWER OF PASSIVE RESISTANCE

In 1927, the year in which Envy first came to print, Olesha published a critically neglected short story called “Legend.”² Along with “Human Material” (“Chelovecheskii material”) and “I Look into the Past” (“Ia smotriu v proshloe”), both of which appeared the following year, this story is part of a fathers-and-sons cycle that treats in a few brief pages the domestic conflict that is integral to Olesha's novel. In Envy, the issue of paternity and filial responsibility is complicated not only by the longer work's greater variety of events and characters, but also by the unclear familial status of most of the protagonists. Father figures, rather than fathers per se, populate Olesha's novel. The stories, however, are narrated by sons of conventional nuclear families consisting of a mother, a father, and one child. One is tempted to see these narrators as Olesha's representation of his own childhood; certainly some biographical facts do coincide, but not enough to consider the works purely autobiographical.³ While it is conceivable that Dosya and Kolya, the narrators of these stories, might grow up to be Yuri Olesha, their connection to Olesha's own life is obscured by the unreliability of Olesha's memoirs as biography.⁴ It is far more profitable to posit that, having reached physical, if not emotional, maturity, Kolya and Dosya became not Olesha, but Nikolai Kavalerov and Modest Zand (the protagonist of “From the Notebooks of Fellow-Traveler Zand” [“Koe-chto iz sekretnykh zapisei poputchika Zanda,” 1929]). The fact that they are namesakes (“Kolya” is a diminutive of “Nikolai” and “Dosya” is short for “Modest”) conveniently reinforces this link, although there is no evidence that Olesha was consciously creating anything remotely resembling a coherent biography of either character.⁵ Olesha's protagonists both function and perceive each other more as embodiments of worldviews than as actual personalities; whether he is named Dosya or Kolya, Zand or Kavalerov, the most commonly encountered Olesha hero is distinguished by his alienated, “underground” outlook and his persistent habit of “thinking in images.” Kavalerov and Zand show the Olesha hero in his Soviet context: an alienated adult who awkwardly straddles the line between two worlds. Kolya and Dosya provide the opportunity to “look into the past” of this Soviet artist manqué, exposing the childhood traumas that form the background of his adult life. Upon encountering Kavalerov's father fixation in Envy, one might wonder about his biological father, yet the reader is privy to precious little information about him. Instead, it must be inferred from the stories.

A scant three pages long, “Legend” is the first-person account of the raid of a bourgeois home by a group of presumably revolutionary soldiers. The noise of gunfire two floors above awakens the narrator, who runs into his parents' room. The bulk of the story is structured like an official report: the narrator calmly enumerates four events, each described first in one sentence, then elaborated in the course of one or more paragraphs. First, Kolya finds his parents naked in their bed, making no effort to hide themselves. Second, he internally rebels against his father, asserting silently that he has no desire to continue the family line. Third, he sees his domestic surroundings with new eyes, repulsed by the collection of household objects that hold inordinate power over him. Fourth, he betrays his father. Initially he sees his father pathetically “flying” around the room like a chicken, then is horrified by his father's sudden, final attempt at dignity. Rather than calmly walking to his death with his parents, Kolya throws open the door, telling the soldiers to shoot, to free him from the power of the “legend” that has oppressed him all his life. At this point, Kolya falls “completely submissively into someone's hands” (I 101), aware that such excitement could be “catastrophic” to him while he is still sick with typhus. On this somewhat jarring note, the story ends.

The structure of “Legend” reflects the basic problems of family relationships that underlie all of Olesha's work. The story's four-part “list” describes a veritable father complex that is not at all unique to Kolya. Each item describes a clash with paternity in four separate spheres: the interpersonal, the sexual, the philosophical, and the political. Each aspect of the problem applies to a significant number of Olesha's characters, of which Nikolai Kavalerov is the prime example.

The first event in the narrator's four-part schema is an almost programmatic depiction of the Freudian “primal scene”: Kolya finds himself in his parents' bedroom “at night, for the first time” (I 99): “Father appeared before me in a shameless state. Besides which, his actions caused Mother to be in a similar state. In order to get off the bed, Father, who had the place next to the wall, had to either roll or crawl over Mother. He crawled, dragging the blanket. Mother was left uncovered. She continued to lie there, making no attempt to hide, her consciousness eclipsed by fear” (I 99). Though the mother is presumably the object of desire in the oedipal triangle, here she, like most of Olesha's women, plays only a marginal role in the plot. Indeed, even the furniture in “Legend,” alternately cajoling and intimidating the narrator, is more active than Kolya's mother. It is the father who displays both himself and the mother; the latter meekly allows herself to be displayed. She is merely an object or place that the father must cross (perelezt') in order to be free of the bed, which, as readers of Envy know, is a particularly seductive and inescapable item of furniture in Olesha's world. The mother makes no attempt to hide her nudity, “her consciousness eclipsed by fear.”

The young narrator finds himself in a situation that is typical for Olesha's protagonists: his narrators are obsessive spectators who have honed their powers of observation to a fine art but are themselves incapable of action. Twice in rapid succession, Kolya states that he saw his parents' bedroom at night, thus shifting the emphasis to Olesha's favorite of the five senses: vision. In Olesha's work, the observer is the man who fails to act and is thus burdened with a sense of crushing inferiority when faced with a man of action. The soccer scene in Envy is perhaps the most famous example of the observer's plight: Kavalerov persistently watches not only the soccer match, but also Valya and Babichev as they, too, watch the game. But when the ball is, literally, in his court, he proves incapable of the slightest movement, let alone of picking up the ball and returning it to the playing field. As a spectator, Kavalerov is vne igry (“out of the game”), always observing but never acting.⁶

In “Legend,” Kolya is confronted with a similar problem, one that also threatens his sense of himself as a (growing) man. Though the soldiers are the initial cause of the story's events, it is the father who has put both the mother and the son in an awkward position from which they make no attempt to extricate themselves. In the introduction to his collection The Fictional Father, Robert Con Davis posits the “seduction of the son into relationship” as a part of a primal narrative process that exists before the onset of the oedipal triangle:

The son faces a crisis, for subsequent to this primal seduction is an inevitable betrayal in the staging of a primal scene. Here, without warning, what was a surrender to the father (in passivity) is turned around and becomes an act of aggression by the father (directed, perhaps, in fantasy toward the mother), one that prohibits desire out of relation to the father and the seeking of narcissistic, prepaternal (maternal) satisfactions: that is, having found the father as the route to the satisfaction the mother represents, the son may not abandon him.

(Davis 9-10)

If the mother is the object of desire, she can be found only through the father and the law the father represents. In this light, Kolya's father's exposure of his and his wife's nudity does not at all undermine paternal authority. Instead, the father's power is reinforced by the revelation of his sexual relationship to the desired mother. In “Legend,” however, the nudity of Kolya's parents constitutes their demotion from the status of “legend” to mere flesh. Ultimately, the effect of this “primal scene” on the father's status is determined by the story's outcome. Had Kolya meekly accepted his father's primacy, the initial revelation of the parents in bed would, indeed, only serve to underscore the father's “possession” of the mother. But the effect on Kolya is quite different: unmoved by pity, he issues a mental challenge to his father and in the end betrays him to the forces that would destroy familial authority altogether.

It is the father's actions that result in the mother's nudity, but Kolya alone shoulders the responsibility for the resulting scene. The parents have failed to console one another, and the child feels that it is his responsibility to step in. Yet he feels no pity for his parents and thus does nothing to restore his mother's dignity or “bring back his [father's] composure” (samoobladanie). This last word is significant, for the father has lost control over himself and thus, as we shall see, has lost his authority. The child does not submissively try to return them to their former roles, and this constitutes Kolya's initial rebellion. Hence Kolya's passivity is not only a shortcoming and source of shame, but also a means of defiance. He has none of the weapons of the adult men in the story, lacking both his father's prestige as head of a noble family and the guns wielded by the soldiers who raid the house. His only armament is that of all Olesha's protagonists: his unrelenting, imaginative vision. Thus Kolya gives us the first feature of the father complex: a sense of helplessness and passivity before the father, a status of perpetual observer behind which hide defiance and hostility. Olesha's protagonists transform their observation of their father surrogates into the main weapon of the passive, inadequate son.

With his parents' authority crumbling before his very eyes, Kolya begins to give words to his rebellion. Naturally, he does not express himself aloud: Olesha's protagonists generally prefer interior monologue to serious dialogue. Such a monologue is an integral part of Olesha's presentation of the father-son conflict in all his works. Intimidated by the authority and physical presence of the father, Olesha's narrator instead vents his rage on an internalized addressee who serves as a substitute for the father figure. Olesha's work abounds with letters to fathers that never reach the person to whom they are supposedly addressed: Kavalerov's and Volodya's letters to Babichev in Envy,⁷ Dosya's monologue about his reading in “I Look into the Past,” and the entire text of “Human Material.” In “Legend,” Kolya rejects the hierarchy implicit in the family structure: “It never occurred to you that you might be more stupid than I. You could never have allowed for the possibility of even discussing the equality or inequality of parents and children” (I 99). Here we find the ideological justification of Kolya's final betrayal of his father. The soldiers who are raiding the building are eradicating the old order in favor of the new one; if we presume a revolutionary context, they are theoretically liberating the oppressed from their oppressors. Kolya, as the son in the family, is at the bottom of the domestic hierarchy from the moment of his birth. His father must be smarter than Kolya by virtue of his paternal role. Until Kolya reaches adulthood, their positions in the family are fixed, and any discussion of their possible equality is impossible. The only option available to, indeed demanded of, the son is to grow up and join the oppressors: “You thought that you were my ideal. You thought that I wanted to be just like you, you thought that I wanted to continue you, your features, mustache, gestures, thoughts, bedroom, that I must also lie with a woman like you lie with Mother. You thought that this was how it must be. I don't want to be an extension of you!” The power of the father is dependent on the cooperation of the son, who is expected to look upon his parent as the model for future development. All fathers were once sons and owe their paternal status only to the existence of offspring. Fatherhood exists only in relation. Eventually, the son will become an adult and will no longer be completely subject to his father's will. At this point, the father's power is defined in different terms: the adult son need no longer obey his father; rather, it is expected that he, too, become a parent and continue the line of paternal authority into which he was born. As the epigraph to this chapter asserts, the son's character is determined in relation to his father. Kolya is expected not only to obey his father, but to want to become his father and take on his father's role.⁸

It is this continuity from father to son that the revolution disrupts, not only in Olesha's work, but in that of [Isaac] Babel and [Andrei] Platonov as well. Babel's protagonists struggle to abandon the world of their fathers only to find it has a lingering attraction. Dvanov in Chevengur cannot accept that his biological father is dead and inaccessible and thus repeatedly returns to his father's grave even as he collects father surrogates throughout his travels. Reverence for biological fathers notwithstanding, Platonov's characters have much in common with Olesha's: both continually search for father figures while displaying no desire to become parents themselves. Platonov was influenced by Fyodorov, who saw the very act of reproduction as a sign of disrespect for the dead biological father, whom the son must strive to resurrect.⁹ Olesha's Kolya, however, views the continuation of the family line in the opposite light. The refusal to have children is a revolt against the father's power, for becoming a father requires that the son be coopted into the very hierarchy he despises. The physical father must eventually die, but he consoles himself with the survival of some of his characteristics in future generations. Olesha's passive protagonists are incapable of raising their hands against the father and thus can only attack through inaction. For Platonov, abstaining from reproduction is an expression of filial love; for Olesha, childlessness is tantamount to parricide.

Childlessness, however, is a crime that contains within itself the seeds of its own punishment. Total rejection of the father entails a denial of adult masculinity itself. Kolya wants nothing to do with the trappings of manhood, seeing in them a trick that would bind him once again to his father's power. Kolya does not want any of his father's features, including his mustache. More important, he denies that he “must also lie with a woman.” In not accepting his father as a model, Kolya rejects adult heterosexuality. For Kolya, becoming a father would require him to abandon his accustomed position as passive bystander and adopt an active role, both as head of the household and as a man in bed with his wife. Again, Kolya's very passivity is his greatest weapon against his father: engaging his father in conflict would require that Kolya become active and thereby adopt one of his father's defining traits. Whereas the oedipal child actively struggles against his father for possession of the mother, Kolya realizes that he can win his battle only by having nothing whatsoever to do with the mother. In Kolya's monologue, Oedipus meets Peter Pan: Kolya's greatest act of defiance against paternal supremacy is his unspoken refusal to grow up.

The second feature of the father complex, then, is the severing of ties with paternal authority through the refusal to continue the family line. In so doing, Olesha's protagonists are obliged to reject both adult masculinity and heterosexual relations, each of which amounts to an acceptance of the paternal role through its internalization and recapitulation. The result is what Harkins terms the “sterility” of Olesha's characters, their inability (or disinclination) to engage in adult heterosexual contact. In Envy, this is expressed in Kavalerov's horror at the idea of becoming a father even as he continually seeks the approval of paternal surrogates. Kavalerov, as we shall see, is both attracted and repulsed by father figures. His search for new fathers is part of his rejection of filiation in favor of affiliation, a bond that is freely chosen rather than imposed by birth. But when he attempts sexual relations with a woman, he is in danger of restoring the authority of the original father by continuing the family line. Kavalerov wants sex with women only if it can be an experience completely isolated from any familial or paternal context. Inevitably, a father figure either watches over his shoulder during the act (Anechka's dead husband) or takes his place in bed (Ivan), inhibiting his pleasure and reminding him of the ever-present threat of paternal authority.

Having issued a (silent) challenge to his father, Kolya is shocked by his new comprehension of his physical surroundings: “Every object forced kinship on me. Every object ascribed something to me” (I 100-101). Here Kolya expresses that familiar antagonism between people and objects found throughout Olesha's work, summed up in Kavalerov's famous assertion “Things don't like me” (Menia ne liubiat veshchi). In Envy, Kavalerov's fear and loathing of physical objects amounts to a character trait, an expression of his insecurity and paranoia. The text does contain an implicit connection between the animosity Kavalerov attributes to the physical world and the disdain he perceives in Andrei Babichev: as Kavalerov continues to describe Andrei's morning routine, he remarks parenthetically, “Things like him” (13). At this point in the novel, however, Andrei's role as father surrogate has yet to surface before the reader. In “Legend,” the world of objects is shown to be hostile precisely because it is allied with the rule of the father and the perpetuity of filial ties: “A round clock hung on the wall. ‘I was born to the sound of its chimes,’ said Mother on more than one occasion. ‘Grandma, too.’ The clock was a tradition, the clock was a legend. I don't need any legends. I don't want to die to the sound of this clock. I don't want to be a continuation. Suddenly I realized: a family council of furniture surrounded me. The furniture was advising me, telling me how to live” (I 100). Theoretically, objects such as the clock and the furniture belong to the family, but the older possessions predate the living family members. Things last longer than people, and the objects that surround Kolya are more precisely the property of the family rather than any particular family members: people are born and die to the chimes of the family clock, but the clock knows neither beginning nor end. The clock, like the rest of the furniture, symbolizes the continuity of the family, personifying it in a way that no single family member can. The father, mother, and son are merely points on the family line, but the furniture, which both predates and survives them, embodies the essence of the family, what Kolya calls the legend. Thus, when Kolya suddenly realizes that a “family council of furniture” is trying to run his life, he perceives himself as the victim not so much of the furniture itself, but of the furniture as an extension of the family. The buffet, the same household item that laughs at Kavalerov in Envy, makes explicit the role of objects in perpetuating the family legend: “two generations stored food in me. I'll be around … for your son, too, and your grandson. I will become a legend” (I 100). The tie between these family heirlooms and the past generations is in itself enough to be repulsive to Kolya, but their implicit connection with the future generations to be sired by Kolya himself is intolerable.

Throughout his work, Olesha tends to personify objects by endowing them with the traits of their owners, but “Legend” highlights a specific link between the world of things and familial authority. Such a connection is essential for any understanding of the tensions between the family and revolution in Olesha's work, since it provides a point of contact between Olesha's artistic concerns and revolutionary ideology. Following Marx and Engels, Soviet communist doctrine held that the bourgeois family unit, based on private property and domination by the father, was an exploitative entity that must be eradicated in the new world (see the introduction). The complex feelings Olesha's protagonists hold toward families are by no means a result of political ideology; rather, they are one of the emotional factors that lead to at least a limited sympathy to some parts of the revolutionary program. Kolya is more a fellow traveler than a revolutionary, cheering on the forces of change without actually pointing a gun.

Now Kolya comprehends his “dependence on all these things” (I 100). Just as the family legend dictates the future course of his life, the placement of the furniture obliges him to walk one way when he would rather walk another.¹⁰ More than once he considers rebellion, “[b]ut Father mediated [posrednichal] between me and the furniture.” The father receives “secret instructions” from the buffets and gramophones in order to keep Kolya from rebelling. At this point the father appears to be less the master than the emissary of the world of things, whose main purpose is to keep Kolya within the bounds of domestic order. If the father is only a middleman, then where is the locus of authority? In making his father the human representative of a more abstract order, Kolya turns his family conflict into a set of philosophical questions: Does the physical world have objective significance? If not, who determines what values are attributed to physical objects? These questions, so clearly on the surface of Olesha's short story “Liompa,”¹¹ are relevant to more than just the problem of physical objects in Olesha's work. They are tied to Olesha's portrayal of the world filtered through various layers of consciousness, to what R. Jones calls the “primacy of the subjective” in Olesha's literary world (3). Olesha's characters do not see the physical realm as an immutable given; or rather, if the material world is given, then it has been given by someone who has predetermined its meaning. Objects (and, by extension, people) are significant only to the extent to which they are attributed meaning. As a child, Kolya is given only a limited taste of this power of signification, and he clearly wants more: “Sometimes a curtain, terrified for the whole authority, would give me a bribe in the form of a velvet ball torn from a cord. I could swing it in all directions, breaking traditions and legends, I could give it any purpose I pleased, rudely breaking the family's conception of a curtain, and of the place [a curtain] should have in human life” (I 100). Kolya wants the power to interpret the world in his own manner, to have complete, unobstructed control over signification. In connecting his father and the family to the world of objects and their meanings, Kolya presents his family in a manner suggestive of Lacan's Symbolic Order. The father is important not merely for his concrete role as biological sire, but for what he represents: the ordered relations of signifiers and signifieds, the arbiter of all systems. The father is the symbol of signifying authority but is not authority itself. As noted above, sons grow up to take on the mantle of fatherhood, to continue the family line. The father is merely the physical representation of what Lacan terms the Name of the Father, an abstraction who is never completely embodied in any man and thus is always absent. Juliet Mitchell points out that, in Lacan's reformulation of the oedipal triangle,

[i]t is the place of the father, not the actual father, that is thus here significant … The little boy cannot be the father, but he can be summoned for his future role in the name-of-the-father. The symbolic father, for whose prehistoric death the boy pays the debt due, is the law that institutes and constitutes human society, culture in the fullest sense of the term, the law of order which is to be confounded with language and which structures all human societies, which makes them, in fact, human. This symbolic law of order defines society and determines the fate of every small human animal born into it.

(Mitchell 391)

It is the Symbolic Order that Kolya calls the “legend” of family continuity. In rebelling against his biological father, Kolya fights against what the father represents: a way of life that is imposed from without rather than projected from within. Control of the curtain implies limited mastery over the world of things, and thus the possession of a small piece of curtain makes Kolya giddy with his newfound power. The rest of his family is firmly attached to things, never daring to change their significance. But Kolya is only too willing to go against the family's ideas of “what a curtain is” and “what place it must have in human life.” This earlier rebellion against the “legend” prefigures Kolya's eventual betrayal of his father.

This third part of the father complex in Olesha's work elevates the father-son conflict beyond dynastic struggles and issues of reproduction, reinterpreting it in philosophical terms. The material world and the father are inextricably linked: at certain times it seems that the world of objects belongs to the father, while at others it appears that he is only their representative. In either case, it is a world in which the father is at home, but the son is only a guest. Olesha's protagonists, sons all, repeatedly refuse to view the world in the “objective” manner expected of them. Rather, they reinterpret what they see, attaching new meanings to things and to people as an act of self-assertion. Much has been written about the “distorting” vision of Olesha's characters,¹² but here we see that their very tendency to “think in images” is a deliberate challenge to a symbolizing authority irrevocably linked with the father. It is the battle with the father that leads Olesha's heroes to their semiotic rebellion.

Kolya's betrayal of his father is preceded by a final conflict over the representation of paternal authority. On the first page, Kolya's father is stripped of his clothes; on the next, Kolya's gaze strips him of his humanity (“on perestal byt' chelovekom”). The father, according to the narrator, has turned into a chicken. The father's humiliation appears to be complete, for now all trappings of his authority have been removed, and his own son sees him as a panic-stricken, trapped, female animal.

But here the Symbolic Order reasserts itself, as the father reasserts control over his own image. His attempt to regain his composure (“vziat' sebia v ruki”) forces Kolya to concede that his father never really flew; it was only dizziness that led him to such an interpretation of his father's fear (“cherez golovokruzhenie ia tak vosprinimal vneshnie proiavleniia ego strakha”). Such an admission comes at a high cost to the pride of Olesha's narrator. If in Olesha's work the physical world belongs to the fathers, narration is the almost exclusive purview of the sons.¹³ Olesha's narrators use their powers of observation and description to defuse the paternal threat. When Kolya's father ceases to provide him fodder for his narrative mockery, his son loses his only weapon.

Before the Symbolic Order reestablishes itself, the events of the story take place outside language. Of course Kolya narrates the story, but all the actions occur without speech. Thus the only voice heard is that of Kolya's rebellion. Now that Kolya has admitted to himself that his perception is faulty, his father regains the power of speech. He puts his hand on Kolya's shoulder and tells him “to be proud,” saying they will die “like noblemen.” The father's very manner of speech connotes mastery; he addresses Kolya three times, each time starting with a command, followed by an assertion in the future perfective.¹⁴ Until the very end of the story, the father alone has the power of speech, and he exercises it only after he reclaims his role as master of the household. Mother and son, both passive, remain completely silent. Kolya is horrified at this sudden reversal: “In a word: the father is still in power, the council of furniture has not been disbanded, the legend exists. The father of the family, the continuation of the family line, the bearer of tradition, is performing his last trick. He will die historically. He will make himself a martyr” (I 100). Even in the face of death, the power of the father is not defeated. When his father walks toward the door, Kolya sees that “he already was a legend” (I 101). But Kolya refuses to take part in the continuation of the legend, and instead opens the door himself, shouting: “Open fire! Open fire! Shoot the bedroom! The mystery! The buffet, the legend, all the buttons! Cut me loose from him, from his mustache, from his thoughts. Free me” (I 101). Kolya's plea is pure Olesha: it makes no distinction between the ideological or thematic concerns of the story and the objects or people used to symbolize them. Kolya tells the soldiers to shoot the things that perpetuate the legend as well as the legend itself. He asks to be freed not only from his father, but from his father's thoughts and even his mustache. Legends and buttons are either equally concrete or equally abstract: either both are physical entities that can be harmed by bullets, or bullets are themselves abstract weapons in an ideological battle.

Whatever the case, Kolya perceives that he and the soldiers' bullets have a common cause and a common enemy. This conflation of the political and the domestic comprises the fourth part of the father complex. In “Legend” and the other short stories, the interests of the son and the goals of the revolution converge, a fact the narrator himself discovers during the course of the story. Kolya welcomes the invaders on impulse alone. In Envy, the forces of the revolution are at odds with the novel's central “son,” Nikolai Kavalerov. The difference can be partly accounted for by the time frames of the two works: if “Legend” does, indeed, have a revolutionary context, it concerns a revolution in progress. Envy, however, presents the revolution as a fait accompli. Any new affiliation can eventually ossify into an institution just as rigid as the one it replaced; the revolution is no exception.

But even if the boy Kolya and the adult Nikolai diverge in their attitudes toward revolution, they share a trait that plays a crucial role in the drama of family and revolution: each is willing to treat the issue metaphorically. Kolya welcomes the soldiers because he sees in their cause the political counterpart of his rebellion against his father. Kavalerov—indeed, all the characters of Envy—persists in interpreting his essentially familial conflicts as an ideological war between opposing philosophical camps. When politicized, these family tensions are only exacerbated.

“Legend” is also consistent with Olesha's other short stories in that the family and the revolution are shown to be completely at odds with one another. The father's rule is undermined by his unmasking before the son, but the ultimate cause of the loss of paternal authority is the soldier's raid of the family's building. In Envy, Ivan Babichev exhorts against the “elephants of the revolution” (slonami revoliutsii) that threaten to destroy the domestic hearth (91). Ivan's view, however, is only one of many featured in the novel. As we shall see, Envy reexamines the relationship between family and revolution, discovering alliances where one would expect only enmity.

THE UBIQUITOUS FATHER

Olesha's approach to the family and fatherhood in “Legend” is, compared to that in Envy, remarkably straightforward: the son wants nothing to do with his father or the filial burden of the “legend” that his father would impose on him. The fact that Kolya's disdain for his father extends even to heterosexuality and male secondary sex characteristics suggests that his path to adulthood may be complicated, but the story concludes long before we can see Kolya attain manhood. In Envy, Kolya's namesake, Nikolai Kavalerov, is without a doubt physically an adult, but, as has been often noted in the critical literature, he has the emotional maturity of a little boy.¹⁵ Kavalerov shares Kolya's distrust of father figures but nonetheless doggedly seeks new fathers among the ranks of all his male acquaintances who are even marginally older than he. The young Kolya wants nothing to do with fathers, but the older Kavalerov both fears and needs them. Kavalerov's contradictory impulses are symptomatic of a larger phenomenon in Olesha's novel. In Envy, two opposing forces continuously struggle for supremacy: the deep-seated urge to flee from fathers, reproduction, and family ties, and a contrary, inescapable pull toward the very institutions that Olesha's characters find so threatening.

In Envy, the only mention of Kavalerov's biological father occurs when Kavalerov suddenly notices a family resemblance: “Once, while changing my shirt, I saw myself in the mirror and suddenly discovered a striking resemblance to my father. In reality there is no such resemblance” (27).¹⁶ Like Kolya in “Legend,” Kavalerov would deny any connection to his father, preferring to be a self-contained entity rather than part of a family line. Kavalerov, however, feels pity rather than disgust for his father: “I remembered: my parents' bedroom, and I, a boy, am watching my father change his shirt. I felt sorry for him. He was never going to be handsome, to be famous, he was already finished, complete, and would never be anything other than what he already was. So I thought, pitying him, taking silent pride of my superiority. And now I had discovered my father in myself” (27).¹⁷ As in “Legend,” Kavalerov's sudden comprehension of his father's fate comes in his parents' bedroom when his father is partially unclothed. Kavalerov watches two other half-naked men in Envy, Andrei Babichev in the beginning of the novel and Volodya Makarov near the end, and in each case he is transfixed by what he sees. Such moments combine fascination, revelation, and shame: Kavalerov cannot take his eyes off these men, finding them sexually intimidating. He uses each of these incidents as opportunities to explore the character of the man he views. When he sees Volodya doing gymnastics “almost naked” he is “seized by a feeling of shame and fear” (97). The sight of Volodya's physical prowess exacerbates Kavalerov's sense of inadequacy. Volodya, unlike Kavalerov's father, is not a “daddy” (papasha); instead, his future is filled with limitless possibilities, compared with which Kavalerov's prospects look bleak. But Volodya is by no means a father figure; his role as Kavalerov's rival and sublimated object of desire will be explored in the next chapter. Andrei, however, is the first substitute father Kavalerov adopts, and thus the spectacle of his seminude body is a source of ridicule and contempt rather than of shame and fear. Kavalerov's vicious caricature of Andrei in the first pages of the novel parallels his childhood attitude toward his half-naked biological father: the pathetic limitations of the older man allow Kavalerov to “take quiet pride in his own superiority.”

Andrei, like Kavalerov's and Kolya's fathers, becomes the victim of the son's mocking, self-defensive gaze discussed in connection with “Legend.” But Kavalerov himself is not immune to the powers of his own vision, and it is his sight of himself in the mirror that forces him to realize he is no longer a little boy. The mirror scene begins with the admission, “I am twenty-seven years old.” From Kavalerov's point of view, his youth, which, like Olesha's, coincided with the “youth of the century” (25), is already part of the past. The fact that Kavalerov now recognizes his physical similarity to his father only heightens his sense of premature aging and wasted potential. He sees his resemblance to his father as the outer manifestation of a biological imperative: “It was not a resemblance of forms—no, something else: I would say, a sexual resemblance, as though I had suddenly sensed my father's seed within myself, within my substance. And it was as though someone had told me: you're finished. Complete. There will never be anything more. Go father a son” (27). By reducing his similarity to his father to a purely sexual resemblance, Kavalerov makes his plight appear all the more hopeless. Now he has reached the stage of life that Kolya found so hateful: having achieved physical maturity, he is supposed to take on the mantle of the father and become just one more link in the chain of generations. Like Dosya's father in “Human Material,” Kavalerov must now accept that his life has not lived up to his expectations. The “plan” Kavalerov had for his own life must then be passed on to his son. To become a father is to admit defeat. Kavalerov now realizes all the opportunities that have been lost to him: he will never be handsome or famous, will never be a general, a scientist, or an adventurer (27).

Nor will he ever find the true love of which he dreams. The only woman available to him is the widow Prokopovich, “the symbol of my masculine humiliation” (simvol moego muzkskogo unizheniia). In Kavalerov's imagination, Anechka knows perfectly well that his ambitions will never be realized and thus tries to disillusion him with one of the most threatening statements she could possibly make: “You're already a ‘daddy’” (28). Kavalerov's unvoiced response to Anechka's unspoken accusation is hostile and self-defensive: “I'm no ‘daddy’ … ! I'm not a match for you, reptile!” (28). At this point Anechka is exactly what Kavalerov has termed her: a symbol. Kavalerov manipulates her image, first making her offend him, then insulting her for the words he mentally puts in her mouth. In the critical literature, Anechka has been typically viewed as a mother figure.¹⁸ But if Anechka is a mother, she is implicitly connected to the father. Kavalerov uses her as the mouthpiece for his fear of fatherhood the very first time she is mentioned in the novel, suggesting that Kavalerov links the widow with the threat of paternity.

Rather than accept Anechka as a lover, Kavalerov prefers to imagine himself her little boy (84). He fantasizes the childish joy he would have exploring the expanses of her fantastic bed.¹⁹ It has been suggested that the bed symbolizes Kavalerov's “retreat from active sexual competition” (Harkins 451), but such an interpretation can be supported only by ignoring a salient detail found in the sentence immediately following the bed's initial description: the bed was won in a lottery by Anechka's husband (83). It is, without a doubt, connected with its owner, but Anechka is neither its initial nor its sole possessor. Kavalerov would like the bed to represent an asexual childhood, but this is merely another attempt to redefine a threatening object on his own terms. Later in the novel, however, Kavalerov is forced to see that the bed remains the father's territory. Kavalerov's sudden realization of his resemblance to his biological father was spurred by looking at a mirror; the discovery of the bed's original owner is also connected with a reflection. The morning after Kavalerov finally sleeps with Anechka, he is dumbfounded by a curious spectacle:

He saw a fantastic reflection of himself in the mirror, with his soles forward. He was lying there splendidly, one arm bent behind his head … He was lying on Anechka's bed.

“You remind me of him,” Anechka whispered hotly as she bent over him.

A portrait under glass hung above the bed. A man was hanging there, someone's young grandfather, solemnly dressed. … One could feel that the back of his head was strong and sinewy. A man of about fifty.

Kavalerov remembered: his father was changing his shirt.

(107-8)

Where before Kavalerov saw his father reflected back at him in the mirror, now he looks in a mirror and sees a portrait of a middle-aged man whom he is told he resembles. Kavalerov makes the connection between the two events instantly, again recalling his father putting on his shirt. As a child, Kavalerov considered his father a pathetic sight and thus reveled in his superiority even as he pitied him. The image of the man changing the shirt is that of the father defeated. The man in the portrait is another matter entirely: “solemnly dressed,” Anechka's husband seems the master of all he surveys. He is the father triumphant.

The portrait of Anechka's husband, like Volodya's picture in Andrei's apartment, reminds Kavalerov that he is only a replacement for an absent loved one. Like Volodya, Anechka's husband appears proud, self-confident, and masculine: “One could feel that the back of his head was sturdy and sinewy.” Though both Volodya and Prokopovich serve as rivals in Kavalerov's love triangles, the threat each presents is markedly different. Volodya is younger than Kavalerov, but the fifty-seven-year-old Prokopovich is just the right age to be Kavalerov's father. Indeed, he is more than a father, for he looks like “someone's young grandfather” (108), even more firmly grounded in the continuation of the family line. The father has turned into the grandfather at a particularly appropriate moment, for Kavalerov has consummated a sexual attraction for the first time in the novel. In “Legend,” Kolya rejects sexual ties with women precisely because he does not want to follow in his father's footsteps and perpetuate the family line. Kavalerov has fallen into the trap that Kolya resolved to avoid: by sleeping with Anechka, he allows the possibility that he, too, will become a father.²⁰ Kolya refused to be a “continuation” of his father and his father's features, but Kavalerov has allowed himself to be precisely that. When the young Kavalerov sees his father changing his shirt, he is given a glimpse of what the future has in store for him; at that time, Kavalerov's father was probably about the same age as Kavalerov is when the action of Envy takes place. Only when he sees himself in the mirror, years later, does Kavalerov understand that he and his father are cut from the same cloth, that he is just as “finished” and unsuccessful as his father. Now another “mirror” image affords Kavalerov one more look into his future, showing him a portrait of Kavalerov as an old man. Oedipus' horror came upon finding that he had unknowingly taken his father's place. Kavalerov, on the other hand, is appalled not only to find out that he has taken on the father's role, but also that he has fulfilled the father's will. Prokopovich's picture humiliates Kavalerov on two levels: first, it shows him that he is only a replacement, a usurper; second, it marks Kavalerov's surrender to the march of family generations.

Anechka makes matters worse by commenting on Kavalerov's resemblance to her dead husband. She does so twice, whereupon she tells him that the two men even make love in a similar fashion. It is at this point that Kavalerov beats Anechka, for he has found that he cannot escape the father even in bed. As a widow, Anechka already serves as a reminder that men are replaceable. By telling Kavalerov he looks like her husband, she only exacerbates his resentment at being a mere interchangeable part. Kavalerov lashes out at her because she is the sole target he is capable of beating, yet even here he cannot be an independent, isolated individual. Anechka smiles through her tears and tells Kavalerov, “He used to beat me, too” (108).

Kavalerov's feelings of replaceability are confirmed by the appearance of Ivan. First he sees Ivan standing over the bed during his fever dream, then again three days later. Ivan's second appearance is ideally timed to reinforce Kavalerov's fears that he is only one in an endless chain of men and generations.²¹ Upon awakening from his illness, Kavalerov notes that his suspenders have a new loop. He immediately decides that Anechka has taken it from her husband's old clothes, a thought that sends him into complete despair. He leaves the house, only to return later and put on the very suspenders that had disgusted him. He leaves again, and again comes back, this time deciding that he will be firm and “put the widow in her place” (112). But upon his return he finds Ivan lying in the bed that he himself had once occupied. Anechka tells him not to be jealous, since she is sorry for both of them, and they are both equally lonely. Now she has verbally confirmed that Kavalerov is only one of many.

The fact that it is Ivan who has taken Kavalerov's place in the bed only makes matters worse, for Ivan is the second father substitute Kavalerov turns to in the novel. Even more appalling, Ivan, lying in bed, looks like his brother (111), the inaccessible surrogate father from the novel's first half. In “Legend,” Kolya knew that sex with women means repeating the act that inaugurated the father's reign. In Envy, Kavalerov discovers that when he sleeps with Anechka, he is never alone with her. Every significant father figure in the novel is in bed with Kavalerov and Anechka, if only symbolically. First, two of the novel's absent fathers appear: Anechka's dead husband smiles down at Kavalerov from the ceiling, reminding Kavalerov of his own father. Then Kavalerov discovers Ivan in the bed, looking like his brother Andrei. Ivan's proposal to share Anechka equally could scarcely please Kavalerov, though the novel ends before he can respond. Kavalerov attempts to have a sexual encounter that is completely isolated from the surrogate family that has rejected him, only to hear his second substitute father suggest a ménage à trois. Kavalerov's miserable liaison with Anechka confirms what little Kolya in “Legend” seems to know instinctively: sexual contact with women only cements the bonds between fathers and sons, strengthening the power of the family over the individual.

Kavalerov's desire to escape from paternal authority is matched only by his need for a surrogate father. That the two “fathers” Kavalerov adopts in Envy are brothers renders all filial ties in the novel convoluted, if not incestuous, for the Babichevs' views on the family are no less paradoxical than those of Kavalerov. Though Ivan and Andrei are at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, they share a number of traits that would attract Kavalerov. Both are self-made men who have broken with the world of their fathers; both substitute projects and inventions for children (the sausage and the Quarter vs. Ophelia), at the same time replacing the family unit with ideologically determined affiliations (the toiling masses vs. the “vulgarians” [poshliaki]).²² As Victor Peppard notes, both are builders, and both are concerned with the family, which one wants to preserve and the other hopes to transform (Poetics 79). Despite Ivan's cult of womanhood, neither he nor his brother has any emotional ties to adult women. The novel contains not a single reference to Valya's mother, almost as though Valya, like Ophelia, had sprung forth asexually from Ivan's imagination. Indeed, each of them is the perfect father for a man who abhors filial bonds, since they have detached themselves from their own hereditary past. Finally, they share one characteristic without which the very plot of Envy would be impossible: both are willing to “adopt” stray young men whom they do not even know. When Kavalerov turns to Ivan for a mentor, he is deliberately choosing the path that opposes Andrei's. Yet it is the similarities of the two estranged brothers that make the transition possible.

Ivan in particular makes a paradoxical father figure. He espouses an ideology based on a cult of womanhood and reverence for the family, yet his own family life is in shambles. Kavalerov is fascinated by Ivan from the moment he first sees him, as he writes in his letter to Andrei. Despite this genuine interest in such a puzzling man, Kavalerov's original motive for crossing over to Ivan's camp is merely to ally himself with Andrei's enemies. He senses that Ivan has a weapon with which to defeat his brother, writing that Andrei is afraid of Ophelia. When Kavalerov claims that Andrei might try to put him in an insane asylum, he justifies his fear by noting that Andrei said his own brother should be shot (45). Kavalerov knows nothing of Ivan, yet he already identifies with him so much that he is willing to fight for him. Before he even meets Ivan, Kavalerov has already created him in his own mind, seeing a kindred spirit in this strange man with a bowler hat. At this point, however, there is no guarantee that Kavalerov and Ivan will be on the same side. In the same letter, Kavalerov sees Volodya as a fellow victim of Andrei's condescension and thus an ally. When this proves not to be the case, Kavalerov is deprived of all potential allies but one: Ivan Babichev.

The initial meeting between Ivan and Kavalerov has all the familiar hallmarks of Olesha's father-son recognition scenes. Kavalerov admits his resemblance to his father when glimpsing his own reflection in the mirror and later mistakes the portrait of Anechka's husband, another father figure, for his own reflection. Each case forces Kavalerov to admit some sort of resemblance to the father in question. Now Kavalerov identifies his newest father when Ivan appears before him in the mirror: “The man approached the mirror, appearing from somewhere to the side. I got in the way of his reflection. The smile he had prepared for himself came to me” (58). He appears as if from nowhere, as though he himself were a trick of the mirror. The mirror immediately forces the two men together, for Kavalerov becomes the receiver of a smile Ivan had directed at himself. For one moment, they serve as mirrors for one another.²³ Kavalerov has yet to identify Ivan; recognition comes only after Ivan's puzzling pronouncement, “I invented myself” (Ia sam sebia vydumal) (58). Only after Kavalerov looks at Ivan twice, first in the mirror, then when Ivan answers his question, does he understand the significance the other Babichev holds for him: “I realized immediately: here is my friend, and teacher, and comforter” (58). Now Kavalerov has completely shifted allegiances, and the next half of the novel will be dominated by Kavalerov's new father, Ivan, rather than by Ivan's unattainable brother Andrei.

Having accepted Ivan as his new guide, Kavalerov surrenders himself completely to Ivan's authority. On the textual level, Kavalerov even abdicates his privileged role as sarcastic narrator; for most of the second section, the (third-person) narrative focus is on Ivan. Thus the reader's access to Kavalerov's perceptions has been sharply limited, allowing a view of Ivan that is presumably undistorted by Kavalerov's perspective. The reader, like Kavalerov and the police interrogators, listens intently to Ivan's monologues. Kavalerov is remarkably silent as Ivan speaks, saying almost no words aloud and revealing few of his thoughts through the narrator. After four pages of invective that would do Kavalerov himself proud, Ivan urges his new disciple toward a revenge and subsequent downfall that will be colorful enough to shake the new world and ensure his everlasting fame. Kavalerov thinks: “He is reading my mind” (On chitaet moi mysli) (79). Though Kavalerov's observation refers to his personal situation, it can be applied to the narrative as well: Kavalerov no longer needs to express his feelings in histrionic monologues because Ivan is expressing them for him. Kavalerov has finally found a mentor who shares his ideals and his resentment and thus allows himself, for a time, to be almost completely under Ivan's spell. Where before Kavalerov despised Andrei for sending him on errands, now he willingly lets Ivan lead him from place to place.

At first glance, Ivan would seem to be the perfect father for Kavalerov. Ivan's life story, like that of all the Babichev brothers, is one of resistance to paternal authority. The stories Ivan chooses to tell of his childhood recount his imaginative triumphs over his literal-minded father. Despite his rhetoric about the sanctity of the family as an idea, in reality Ivan is hostile to most filial bonds. The narrator relates a rumor that Ivan interrupted a wedding to harangue the bride and groom: “Don't love each other. Don't join together. Groom, abandon your bride! What kind of fruit will your love bear? You'll produce your own enemy. He'll gobble you up” (69). Though Ivan extols the virtue of the old-world family, he sees the appearance of the “new people” as the end of true filial ties. He speaks from his own experience, for his own daughter Valya leaves him for the representatives of the new world. Ivan's ideology is necessarily self-contradictory: he worships the family, but finds that the new world has made the family part of the problem. Any attempt to bear children under present conditions will only lead to the production of more enemies. Ivan is a father who sees an entire nation of children that have broken with the world of their parents and can only conclude that producing more offspring is self-defeating. Ivan's ideological rejection of reproduction echoes Kavalerov's more personal distaste for fatherhood: for Ivan, the new generation sounds the death knell for the world of its parents, while for Kavalerov, having children amounts to admitting that one's life is finished.

In moving away from the biological family, Ivan, like his brother and the protagonists of the other authors discussed in this book, searches for satisfaction in an ideological conglomeration of people who have no biological connection to him. He establishes himself as the “king of the vulgarians” (korol' poshliakov) (65), who will lead the representatives of the old world on their last crusade. His “conspiracy of feelings” (zagovor chustv) is just as fanciful as Gedali's “International of Good People” in Babel's Red Cavalry: each movement opposes the new revolutionary order with a conglomeration of romantics, and each movement exists only in its founder's imagination. Lacking a family, Ivan attempts to become the leader of a ragtag group of outcasts. But Kavalerov is the only “representative of the old world” to join Ivan's cause, and Ivan's extended family consists only of Kavalerov and his creation Ophelia.

Ivan, however, cannot be a satisfactory father for long. He is too much like Kavalerov to be a satisfactory substitute father (Harkins, “Theme of Sterility” 451). He also shares yet another trait with his brother Andrei that comes between him and his “children”: he treats all his offspring, both literal and figurative, as embodiments of ideas. Ivan comes close to seeing this failing in his brother, telling him that “symbolizing the new world in the image of an unremarkable youth [Volodya] … is nonsense” (68). Here Ivan argues with Andrei's choice of symbols, not with the action itself. Ivan has his own blind spot in that regard, having been sure that his daughter Valya was the embodiment of the old world's feminine grace (74-75). Valya wants no part of her father's fantasy; she leaves him, shedding her excess symbolism like an ill-fitting hand-me-down. Ivan substitutes for Valya a new daughter, his imaginary creation Ophelia, but she, too, is angry at her treatment by Ivan. As Ivan freely admits, he has “disgraced” (opozoril) the machine (86) and fears that Ophelia will not forgive him: “I'm afraid of her … She hates me … She's betrayed [izmenila] me … She'll kill me” (88). At one point Ivan may have been at the bottom of the familial hierarchy, but now that he has reached adulthood, he has proved the rule that little Kolya deduced in “Legend”: when boys grow up and have children, they turn into the enemy. Despite his personal rebellion against his own parents, Ivan is another in Olesha's long series of manipulative fathers.²⁴ His attitude toward Kavalerov reveals his tendency to see his children, both biological and spiritual, as instruments for his cause. Kavalerov has found a “teacher” (uchitel), a “friend” (drug) (58), while Ivan has found the bearer of a feeling (73).

Though Kavalerov calls Ivan his friend, the two were never friends in the sense that J. Glenn Gray defines the word (see the introduction and chapter 1). Instead, the two “coconspirators” were comrades, a relationship that, though often intense, is notoriously fragile. Ivan's and Kavalerov's relationship is grounded in a shared ideology and thus cannot last when one of the two forsakes his long-held beliefs. When Ivan renounces his conspiracy, Kavalerov abandons him, hurling an insult that is particularly appropriate to this novel of fathers and sons: “Ivan Petrovich, you son of a bitch!” (Sukin vy syn, Ivan Petrovich!) (99). Even as he attempts to carry out the mission Ivan originally assigned him, however, Kavalerov shows that he and Ivan are truly kindred spirits. Just as the vision of Valya induces Ivan to give up his dreams, the sight of the triumphant Volodya forces Kavalerov to realize that he will never succeed. Later, when Ophelia slaughters Ivan in Kavalerov's nightmare, Kavalerov shouts, “My place is with him!” (110). This turns out to be truer than he could know, for in the end he is left with nothing but parodies of his original goals (Peppard, Poetics 79): instead of Valya, he has Anechka, and in place of the successful, famous Andrei, he is left only with the defeated Ivan Babichev.

REVOLUTION AS MEN'S CLUB

It is fitting that the second half of the novel should be dominated by Ivan, for Ivan is only Kavalerov's second choice for an adoptive father; it is Andrei's function as surrogate father, both for Kavalerov and Volodya, that is the key to Olesha's treatment of masculinity in Envy. His brief mentorship of Kavalerov aside, Ivan is the father of daughters, not sons: both Ivan's motherless child Valya and his imaginary invention Ophelia are embodiments of femininity gone astray. Though they partake of the novel's pervasive androgyny, Andrei's children are all essentially masculine in nature. Volodya, the engineer and star athlete, is the most “manly” of the novel's characters. The “Quarter,” the superkitchen to which Andrei wants to “give birth,” is a masculine, industrial reorganization of feminine, domestic space. Andrei's prized creation, the perfect sausage, merits its own discussion.

Andrei's phallic sausage is one of the great clichés of Olesha criticism. Certainly, anyone even vaguely acquainted with Freudianism would tend to see a suspiciously male organ symbolized in this tube-shaped piece of meat. But like most of Olesha's symbols, the sausage is ambiguous, representing different things at different times. A number of objections can be raised to seeing the sausage as a culinary representation of male genitalia, not the least of which is the gender of the word “sausage” (kolbasa). In Russian, kolbasa is a feminine noun, the antecedent for repeated uses of the pronoun “she.” Indeed, the sausage is even said to be Babichev's bride: when Andrei first sees the fruits of his labors, he is shy, “like a groom, who sees how beautiful his young bride is and what a charming impression she makes on the guests” (34-35). Earlier, Andrei calls the sausage a kratsvitsa, or beautiful woman. In The Conspiracy of Feelings (Zagover chuvstv), the feminine side of the sausage is developed further in a phone conversation between Andrei and Shapiro, the butcher: “Andrei: Listen, Solomon Davidovich, how is my beauty? Under lock and key? I'm in love with her. What? There's nothing on earth dearer to me. What? Yes, yes. When do I get to see her? On Wednesday or Thursday? Send her my regards. Yes. I dreamed of her. So pink, so shiny, so tender” (P 46). Here Andrei actually confesses his love for an inanimate deli item of his own devising. The sausage is a bride who must be kept safe from other men before her wedding.²⁵ A culinary Pygmalion, Babichev is so taken with his creation that “she” even appears in his dreams.

What, however, makes “her” so beautiful? When Andrei calls the sausage of his dreams “pink” (rozovaia), “shiny” (siiaiushchaia), and “tender” (nezhnaia), he chooses epithets that by no means contradict its phallic nature. By the same token, these very words could easily be applied to Babichev himself: in the morning, Andrei is the color of an “egg” or an “opal,” he exercises in a room full of “sunshine” (siianie), and he inadvertently reveals to Kavalerov his “tender” (nezhnyi) groin (13). The sausage will bring Babichev glory, allowing him to shine (siiat') (35). Kavalerov's physical descriptions of Andrei and the sausage reveal a marked resemblance:

[The sausage's] sweaty [vspotevshaia] surface, the yellowish [zhelteiushchie] bubbles of subcutaneous fat [zhira]. Where it was cut that very lard looks like white dots.

(32; emphasis added)

His body's oil was a tender yellow [nezhno zheltelo] … Babichev's great-grandfather took care of his skin, rolls of fat [zhira] were situated on his great-grandfather's trunk. Babichev inherited this fine skin … on the small of his back I saw a birthmark—that very same blood-filled, transparent, tender [nezhnuiu] thing. (19; emphasis added)

Like Andrei, the sausage is “sweaty” (vspotevshaia). Both Babichev and his creation have a yellowish coloring (zhelteiushchuiu zheltelo). Each one has spots on his skin—Babichev his birthmarks and bullet wound, the sausage its “white dots.” The sausage is, indeed, flesh of Andrei's flesh. When the reader first sees the sausage, Babichev proudly displays his creation as it is lying in Babichev's pink palm “like a living thing” (kak nechto zhivoe). Babichev's love affair with his sausage is a displaced autoeroticism: he treasures his “beautiful” sausage as a sign of his own achievement.

As their physical similarity implies, the sausage is an extension of Andrei's own being. The androgyny of Babichev's offspring stems from both wordplay and family resemblance. One critic argues that the sausage is actually an excremental symbol, associated with images of birth and male envy of reproduction (Harkins, “Theme of Sterility” 447). While this interpretation does lead to cogent observations about production and reproduction in Olesha's novel, it does not preclude the possibility that, despite all evidence to the contrary, the sausage is stubbornly phallic.²⁶ The sausage's shape and mode of production do, indeed, suggest feces, but the ritual that follows its “birth” connotes something else entirely. Presented with his creation, the first thing the proud father of the new sausage does is to have Kavalerov take it to the butcher Solomon Davidovich Shapiro, an old man whose name could not possibly sound more Jewish to the Russian ear. Shapiro then “carefully cut[s] off a small slice with a penknife” (perochinym nozhom ostorozhno otrezal malen'kii lomtik). Babichev's new child has just been circumcised.²⁷

It is the tension between the sausage as a phallic symbol of achievement and the sausage as a piece of meat that confounds Kavalerov. At first glance, the threat posed by the sausage seems inordinate for a mere inanimate object. But Kavalerov makes clear from the novel's first chapter that he and the physical world are in a constant state of war. In “Legend,” physical objects conspire with the hated father against the hapless son. Making peace with the world of things is tantamount to accepting paternal supremacy: objects belong to the father, and the father belongs to the objects. Andrei Babichev is at home in the physical world and has even managed to create something materially useful. Besides Mr. Kovalevsky from “Human Material,” Andrei is the only father figure in all of Olesha's work who has a successful career; the parents of Dosya and Kolya, as well as of Olesha himself, are unhappy failures who place all their hopes on their sons. Olesha's other protagonists are unable to live up to the expectations of their frustrated fathers; all the more hopeless is Kavalerov's attempt to be “adopted” by a man who is an unqualified success.

Though a product of the previous century, Babichev firmly establishes a place for himself in the new order by contributing to its development. For his part, Kavalerov can offer no such accomplishment as a ticket into the coming world. Kavalerov envies Babichev's accomplishment at the same time that he admits his incomprehension of its significance. The sausage, both an extension of Babichev and an artificial “son,” exerts a tremendous power over Kavalerov, controlling his very movements (“Kusochek parshivoi kolbasy upravliaet moimi dvizheniiami, moei volei”) (36). When he considers tossing the sausage away, he involuntarily imagines the huge bulk of Babichev heading menacingly toward him. The sausage, both as symbol of access to the new world and as icon of virility, is a challenge that Kavalerov simply cannot meet. As Babichev's “son,” the sausage is the perfect child of an ambitious father: it fulfills its proud parent's design simply by its very existence. As Harkins tells us, Andrei, like his brother Ivan, prefers artificial children to flesh-and-blood offspring. Unlike Dosya and Kolya (or, for that matter, Valya), the sausage cannot suddenly announce that its goals are different from those of its creator. Kavalerov has achieved nothing and, in himself, does not represent a father's accomplishments. He can neither be nor produce a better “child” than the sausage. In comparison, Kavalerov is hopelessly weak and impotent.

If Kavalerov is rendered powerless by an inanimate object that functions as Andrei's son, he is all the more threatened by the young man who fulfills the same role on a more personal level. In the literal sense of the word, Volodya Makarov is no more Andrei's son than the sausage or the Quarter. In his excellent schema of the “family” relationships in Envy, Andrew Barrat observes that “in each case the relationship is one of adoptive, rather than natural parentage, and one which, moreover, displaces that natural, fraternal bond between the Babichevs” (Yurii Olesha's Envy 41). The new world of Envy values freely chosen affiliations over the filial ties forced upon the individual through an accident of birth. In Olesha's novel, such biological mistakes are corrected. Because she cannot share her father's vision, Valya, in a Shklovskian “knight's move,” chooses the protection of her uncle over her father. Volodya apparently has no need to completely deny his natural father; indeed, Volodya's absence, indispensable for the novel's plot, is necessitated by a visit to his hometown.²⁸

Andrei is at pains to describe his relationship with Volodya in sufficiently revolutionary terms. As noted above, Babichev's unconventional living arrangements have raised a number of critics' eyebrows. It has been suggested that Andrei, in denying that he and Volodya form a family unit, is inventing a “rationalization to hide from himself the homosexual implications of their relationship” (Harkins, “Theme of Sterility” 447-48). It would be far more logical, however, to assume the contrary: if Andrei were truly concerned that his ties to Volodya are homosexual, claiming a paternal bond would help defuse this anxiety and deflect any veiled accusations. Instead, Andrei is deeply disturbed when Ivan accuses him of harboring a fatherly affection for young Volodya. Paternity is a stigma that Olesha's characters fear but cannot escape. Homosexuality does have a role in the novel, but its place is elsewhere. Fatherhood, not homosexuality, is the love that dare not speak its name.

In Envy, as in the other works discussed in this study, filial bonds have been weakened and condemned by the new Soviet order. Thus Andrei's “fatherhood” of Volodya must be ideologically justified in order to be acceptable. Andrei claims that his attachment to Volodya is based on irreproachably revolutionary grounds. The only apparently direct glimpse into Andrei's thought processes is a response to Ivan's accusation that Andrei keeps Volodya not because the latter is a “new man,” but out of a typically bourgeois desire for a son.²⁹ Ivan takes this opportunity to attack his brother's hypocrisy and argue the case for his own ideology simultaneously: “You're just getting old, Andryusha! And you just need a son. It's just fatherly feelings. The family is eternal, Andrei! And symbolizing the new world in the form of an unremarkable youth who is famous only as a soccer player is nonsense” (68). As so often occurs in the novel's philosophical debates, this “insult” could just as easily be applied to the accuser as to the accused. In a different context, Ivan's allegation would be of little consequence, but in Olesha's novel it challenges Andrei's basic assumptions about himself. Since Ivan sees himself as both the champion of the family and the standard-bearer for outmoded romantic abstractions, his words would cause him little harm even if he saw that they were applicable to himself as well as to his brother. For Andrei, however, accepting the truth of Ivan's accusation is tantamount to joining the enemy: “Maybe Ivan is right? Maybe I'm just an ordinary philistine and family feeling lives in me as well? Is he dear to me because he has lived with me since he was a child. … Have I just grown accustomed to him, to love him like a son?” (80). Even pseudo-familial bonds are unacceptable to a true revolutionary: if Andrei's love for Volodya is “nothing more” than paternal affection, he is just a “philistine” (obyvatel'). Andrei, who is technically too old to be a “new man,” is painfully aware of his tenuous connection to the new world: “What I live for is concentrated in him. I've been lucky. The new humanity's life is still far off. I believe in it. And I've been lucky. He's fallen asleep right near me, this wonderful new world. The new world lives in my house” (80). Here Andrei reveals the cardinal mistake to which his generation of Babichevs is prone: like Ivan, he treats those he loves as embodiments of abstract ideals rather than individuals. Young Volodya embodies what Andrei, because of his more advanced age, can never hope to represent: the spirit of the new world. Andrei makes this perfectly clear in his monologue: “he is dear to me, like the embodiment of a dream” (81). Volodya is not Andrei's son, he is the personification of Andrei's most cherished ideals. Andrei is not cohabiting with an “unremarkable youth,” but rather sharing his house with the new world itself. Such ideological self-deception protects Andrei from both his brother's accusations of bourgeois inclinations and any unspoken fears of homosexual tendencies.

Andrei renounces fatherhood in terms reminiscent of Kolya's rebellion in “Legend”: he rejects any continuity between generations. He does not need someone to “close his eyes,” nor does he want to die “on pillows,” as Ivan fantasizes in his “fairy tale.” He replaces the family unit with an affiliative bond that is too large and amorphous to resemble a family: “I know: the masses, not the family, will take my last breath.”³⁰ In lofty words, Andrei denies the nature of his connection to Volodya by replacing individuals with more abstract groupings: “We are not a family, we are humanity” (81).

At this point Andrei is forced to bring his antifamily values to their harsh, logical conclusion, giving voice to a revolutionary mentality that puts ideology above any emotional tie. Andrei will not allow any bourgeois emotions to govern his conduct and thus claims that Volodya's place in his life is guaranteed only as long as the “young Edison” fulfills Babichev's expectations: “I'll throw him out if I'm wrong about him, if he is not new, not utterly different from me, because I'm still up to my belly in the old and will never get out” (81). Despite his claims that “I don't need a son, I'm not a father, he's not a son, we're not a family,” readers familiar with Olesha's other works will note that Andrei protests too much. Though Andrei disdains any desire for a son or heir, his expectations of Volodya are no different from those of Dosya's father in “Human Material” and “I Look into the Past”: the son must make up for the shortcomings of the father. No matter what his achievements may be, Andrei's roots are still in the old world. He can, as Barratt would have it, cut himself off from the family tree, but he will never be reborn as a young man in the new world.³¹ Both Kavalerov and Ivan rejoice at any visible traces of Andrei's prerevolutionary upbringing, and here we see that Andrei, too, is aware that he cannot escape from his past. Thus Andrei, like any other of Olesha's dissatisfied fathers, looks to the next generation to forge ahead where he can only watch. Albeit voluntarily, Volodya bears the same sort of paternal burden as Kolya and Dosya. Nowhere else, however, is this paternal attitude expressed so baldly: “I am the one who believed in him, and he is the one who justified that belief” (Ia tot, chto veril v nego, a on tot, chto opravdal veru). Andrei's monologue highlights the substantive difference between a father and a father figure: no matter how much a son may disappoint his father, the filial tie remains. But the affiliation of Volodya and Andrei, at best an imitation of the filial bond, is based on choice rather than blood and can presumably be annulled at any time by either party. Thus the threat of rejection by the father can become all too real in a pseudo-familial relationship, thereby enhancing the pressure on the “son” to achieve.

Since the reader follows the thought processes of Kavalerov rather than Volodya, the latter gives the overall impression of a self-assured young man who is secure in his position. It is Kavalerov who constantly frets that he will always be an outsider, yet the one glimpse we have of Volodya's consciousness belies his confident manner. Kavalerov's and Volodya's letters are remarkably similar, enough perhaps to raise the point that the letter comes to the reader through the perceptions of Kavalerov. Whether or not the entire action of the novel is, as one scholar asserts, nothing more than the delineation of the progressive breakdown of Kavalerov's personality is beyond the scope of this study.³² Kavalerov's and Volodya's letters reveal that they suffer from the same basic anxiety to varying degrees. Their insecurities are not identical, but rather mirror each other. Kavalerov, the envier (zavistnik), covets an unattainable bond with Andrei, while Volodya, who admits, “Yes, I'm jealous” (Da, ia revnuiu) (52), possessively protects that very tie that he fears to lose.

Given Andrei's insistence that love be justified ideologically rather than bestowed unconditionally, it should come as no surprise that Volodya is so protective of his privileged position. Before seeing Volodya's letter, the reader could assume that Kavalerov has built up a purely onesided rivalry with this “new man.” But by the time Kavalerov has written his letter, he has come to identify with Volodya as a fellow victim of Andrei's oppression. For his part, Volodya reveals a fierce antagonism toward Kavalerov, while the latter has only begun to see Volodya as an enemy. What begins in a half-joking tone ends with threats of violence: “And what if, when I arrive, it turns out that Kavalerov is your best friend, I've been forgotten, he's replaced me … Maybe he's actually a wonderful guy, much nicer than I am … Has that Kavalerov of yours married Valya? … Then I'll kill you, Andrei Petrovich … For betraying our conversations, our plans” (53). Volodya, like Kavalerov, fears that he is replaceable. If Andrei's love is based only upon a dispassionate appraisal of Volodya's personal qualities, there is always the threat that Andrei will find someone even more spectacular than Volodya. Particularly noteworthy is the way Valya plays a role in Volodya's insecurity. Just one paragraph earlier, Volodya appeared to take Valya completely for granted: “What about Valka? Of course we'll get married! In four years” (53). Now he sets up Kavalerov as a potential rival for Valya's hand, albeit in a humorous tone. If Kavalerov really does turn out to be a better “new man” than Volodya, the latter might stand to lose his place with both his fiancée and his “father.”

In his letter Volodya walks a fine line between insecure son and jealous lover. His anxiety is perhaps based on more than the fears of inadequacy of a son before his father, and the novel's ubiquitous homoeroticism will be treated in due course. Here, however, Andrei's androgyny once again becomes an issue. Every time Volodya writes about Andrei as a parent figure, the latter appears to be more mother than father. Volodya mocks Babichev's “tenderness” and his all-encompassing pity, yet it is these qualities that he finds so endearing. He recalls when he was injured on the soccer field and brought home to lie on the couch under the watchful eye of Andrei: “I look at you—suddenly you look at me; I immediately close my eyes—like with mama” (53). Yet at the same time, he declares that Andrei is his role model, much like a father is for a son: “I imitate you in all things” (52). For Volodya, Andrei plays any number of roles: mother, father, object of desire. None of these ties, however, is based on bonds of blood. Instead Volodya must always rationalize his feelings in the same materialistic terms that Babichev himself prefers: he thanks Andrei for giving him such a good life, then immediately mocks himself for appearing to write a love letter. He continually brags about his glorious future as the “Edison of the new age” (Edison novogo veka) (53), always following his claims with the nervous, self-mocking assertion that Andrei must be laughing at him. Volodya's letter, for all the insecurity it reveals, is an extended self-advertisement aimed at an audience of one. At all costs Volodya must prove that he is not only intrinsically worthy of Andrei's affection and admiration, but better than any challenger who could possibly threaten his station.

Volodya, however, has little to fear from Kavalerov or from any other rival for Andrei's attention. Though Babichev professes to base his love for Volodya on idealism and gratitude, he reveals his true fatherly feelings when caught off guard. When Kavalerov first asks Andrei about Volodya, the sausage maker immediately lauds his protégé as a “wonderful young man” (zamechatel'nyi chelovek). Kavalerov refuses to take such a general statement at face value (“Chem zhe on zamechatelen?”), in effect requiring Andrei to justify his appraisal of Volodya much as Volodya himself has to constantly prove his worthiness to himself and Babichev. Andrei beats a hasty retreat, admitting that Volodya is “simply a young man” (“Da net. Prosto molodoi chelovek”). Failing to sense any sort of ideological challenge (Kavalerov says that Andrei does not notice the spite in his voice), Andrei provides a simple, unadulterated explanation of his connection to Volodya: “The thing is that he is like a son to me” (Delo v tom, chto eto kak by syn moi) (22-23). Soon after he proceeds to explain how Volodya once saved his life, giving yet another rational justification for his affection. But even this fact, he claims, is not essential. The important thing, according to Babichev, is that Volodya is a “new man” (sovershenno novyi chelovek), like no one else in the world (“Eto sovershenno ni na kogo ne pokhozhii iunosha”). Such a statement is consistent with a worldview that denies the continuity of generations. Andrei, however, does not retract his claim to fatherhood; he merely embellishes it with an ideological gloss. Andrei himself has tacitly admitted that fatherly love and admiration of the new world can coexist, establishing in the novel's first pages a connection between the new world and male relationships.

Only when challenged to provide a full accounting of his bond with Volodya does Andrei at last land upon the proper rhetoric to explain the dual nature of his feelings. Returning to Andrei's monologue, we see that he actually goes beyond the call of duty, redefining the new world specifically in terms of fathers and sons: “Does this mean the human feeling of fatherly love doesn't have to be destroyed? But why does he love me, this new one? Does this mean that there, in the new world, the human feeling of love between father and son will flourish? Then I have the right to rejoice; then I have the right to love him like a son and like a new man. Ivan, Ivan, your conspiracy is worthless. Not all feelings will die” (81). Having first rejected fatherhood as such, Andrei reverses himself, turning paternity from vice to virtue. He was able to rationalize his paternal feelings away but incapable of devising a comparable explanation for Volodya's loyalty to him. Volodya is a new man, and he displays filial affection for Babichev. The new man cannot be wrong; therefore, the father-son bond lives on in the new world. In an impressive feat of circular logic, Andrei has beaten Ivan on the latter's terms. That this conquest takes place only in the mind of one of the struggle's participants is consistent with a novel where most arguments and battles occur only in the realm of the imagination.

Andrei sees the ideological rehabilitation of paternal ties as a satisfactory rebuttal to Ivan's charge that all feelings are dead in the new world. Andrei's conclusion that “not all” feelings have been destroyed does not deny that some feelings have indeed been eradicated. The only emotion that earns a revolutionary seal of approval is the bond between father and son. Here Olesha turns a decades-old Russian literary cliché on its head: from Turgenev's Bazarov to Bely's Ableukhovs, the revolution has been depicted as a force that sets fathers and sons against each other. Much of Olesha's novel, replete with broken families and new pseudo-familial structures, fits this well-established pattern. But now, in a masterful stroke of irony, Olesha puts forth the proposition that, despite the ubiquitous generational conflicts of the 1920s, it is the loyalty of father and son that survives the upheaval of revolution. The substance of the father-son bond is not subject to change; rather, the nature of fathers and sons themselves is different. Babichev speaks of fathers and sons, but he is referring to a relationship that has nothing to do with biology. Andrei does not retreat from the antifamily stance implicit in his plans to revolutionize the kitchen; rather, he wants to replace these filial ties with freely chosen, affiliative substitutes that, once established essentially recapitulate the “bourgeois” relationships the revolution has rendered obsolete. Babichev, who “gives birth” to kitchens and sausages, who provides shelter to young men, repeatedly demonstrates a desire to free biological relationships from nature. As Harkins notes, he creates asexually, adopting his children rather than creating them naturally.³³ He embodies both the early Soviet rhetoric of “conquering” nature and the male “quarrel with nature” that Camille Paglia sees as the basis of Western art and culture (Paglia 28). When Babichev does without the natural, he does without women. Birth and creation become the solitary act of a solitary male. When he finds that his postrevolutionary utopia has room for emotion, it is a bond of a purely masculine sort. His father and son choose each other, love each other, and establish a connection that needs neither mother nor wife. Hence Andrei's joy at his findings: he has proven Ivan wrong without having to accept his brother's woman-centered rhetoric. The old world's Eternal Feminine, it would seem, has been replaced by the Eternal Masculine.

Notes

1. William Harkins's 1966 article “The Theme of Sterility in Olesha's Envy” was the first to analyze the role of fathers in Olesha's work, though Robert A. Maguire arrived at similar conclusions independently in his 1968 study Red Virgin Soil. Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour's 1970 The Invisible Land continues Harkins's argument. Andrew Barrat examines the ideological implications of the father-son conflict in his 1981 monograph Yurii Olesha's “Envy.” Their approaches to the problem will be discussed later in this chapter.

2. “Legend” first appeared in Oktiabr'skaia gazeta on 8 Nov. 1927, a month after its completion (Badikov 438). Although it has been reprinted several times since its original publication, it was left out of the 1956 Povesti i rasskazy edition of Olesha's work and is thus absent from the Ardis Complete Short Stories. Perhaps its omission from the more standard collections explains why this remarkable story, so rich in psychological implications and so Kafkaesque in theme and structure, has drawn little attention from either Western or Soviet critics. The most detailed analysis of “Legend” was made by Burdin (“Chelovek i mir”), whose work with drafts of the story is invaluable. In the present book, all references to the text use the 1988 Izbrannoe edition (99-101), abbreviated “I.”

3. Olesha, unlike his narrators, had a sister, though she died when he was still young (Olesha, Zavist', Tri tolstiaka, Ni dnia bez strochki [Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1989], 330. All subsequent references to either Envy or No Day without a Line will use this edition.).

4. For a discussion of Olesha as autobiographer, see Beaujour's “Imagination of Failure.” As Beaujour demonstrates, Olesha fictionalizes his autobiography. One can argue that his representation of his own childhood in No Day without a Line was influenced by his earlier semi-autobiographical stories such as “Human Material.”

5. All the same, the names Olesha gives his protagonists are often significant; certainly, the root of “Babichev” has been noted repeatedly, as has “Kavalerov.” Examination of drafts of his work shows that he often went through several different names before settling upon the one by which his characters would be called. Valya, for example, was originally to be named Lelya Tatarnikova (Shitareva 83). The fact that he gave essentially the same name to two characters in two different stories could be purely coincidental, but given Olesha's preoccupation with both the semantic and acoustic properties of his character's names, some kind of connection might well have been intended.

6. This emphasis on vision is one of the many features Olesha shares with Babel. Both authors create protagonists whose reliance on vision and observation underscores their passivity and emphasizes their distance from the objects of their gaze.

7. Volodya's letter is intercepted by Kavalerov, who thinks he has retrieved his own message to Babichev. Kavalerov's letter is thus left behind at Babichev's apartment, but at no point in the narrative is there any indication that anyone has actually read it. Kavalerov's letter is not a means of communication, but a function of the novel's narrative and Kavalerov's own psychological needs. The letter advances the plot by explicitly laying out Kavalerov's challenge to authority, at the same time satisfying Kavalerov's own desire to verbally abuse Babichev on paper. The novel's narration creates the illusion of communication between Kavalerov and Babichev, but most of Kavalerov's “speeches” to Babichev are left unspoken. If the story were told from Andrei's point of view, the reader would hear no more than a few words from Kavalerov.

8. This issue is developed in more detail in Olesha's other stories of childhood. The very title “Human Material” refers in part to the son's relation to the paternal model. Dosya is expected to live according to his father's “plan,” which consists of the father's own unachieved goals that must be fulfilled by the son. Fathers, grandfathers, and older brothers form a “gallery of examples” (galereia-primerov) that Dosya and his fellow schoolboys must imitate. If Dosya does not want to be like these “model men” (liudiobraztsy), his opinion has no value, for “Papa knows exactly how I must live in order to be happy … This plan is considered the best, and I have no right to discuss it” (PR 242). It is the father's ambitions that Dosya must fulfill. Dosya must succeed where his father has failed, continuing the work of his father's plan.

   The narrator of Olesha's autobiographical novel was equally constrained by his father's ambitions. No Day without a Line describes a time in Olesha's boyhood when his father brings him to the barber, saying “Give the heir a haircut!” (Postrigite naslenika!). This lighthearted phrase, which was apparently not even original with Olesha's father, leaves a lasting impression on the boy: “This was oppressive to hear. And, for some reason, shameful. And for some reason I still remember this burden. What kind of heir am I? Heir to what? I knew that Papa was poor. Heir to what? To Papa himself, a repetition of Papa?” (111).

9. For a discussion of the links between Fyodorov and Platonov, see Bethea, Seifrid, Semenova (Nikolai Fedorov), Teskey, and Tolstaia-Segal.

10. The furniture in Kavalerov's life is more hostile, actively tripping him rather than merely forcing him in a particular direction.

11. In his article “Yuri Olesha's Three Ages of Man: A Close Reading of ‘Liompa,’” Andrew Barrat finds that the central theme of “Liompa” is “the problem of how man assigns meaning to the phenomena of the physical world” (599). Barrat's article is perhaps the most complete and original treatment of Olesha's short story. Further relevant discussion of the story can be found in Harkins (“The Philosophical Stories of Iurii Olesha,” 1966) and Ingdahl (“The Life/Death Dichotomy in Jurij Olesha's Short Story ‘Liompa,’” 1982).

12. Nils Ake Nilsson's 1965 “Through the Wrong End of Binoculars” was the first in-depth study of vision and perspective in Olesha's work. Nilsson remarks that Olesha's world is never straightforward, but instead always caught in “distorted glimpses … through glass windows and bars” or “enlarged or diminished through binoculars, telescopes, or microscopes” (40). Other critics since Nilsson, Beaujour included, have expanded on his observations. The most provocative work is that of Neil Cornwell, who finds that distortion in Envy is a “formula” in which the exterior world or memories of the past become transformed by the artist, “colliding with reality and emerging invariably in a distorted, grotesque, or parodistic version of the original idea” (“Principle of Distortion” 29). The result for the artist is usually disillusionment.

13. Thus, when Envy begins to follow the perspective of Ivan Babichev, one of the novel's primary father figures, the narration moves from first person to third. This is consistent with the rest of Olesha's work: every one of his first-person stories is told from the point of view of either a child or a childlike adult. Kolya and Dosya, who narrate three stories between them, are both literally sons. The narrator of “The Chain” (“Tsep'”) is a little boy. Kavalerov is the figurative son of both Babichev brothers. Fedya, the narrator of “The Cherry Pit” (“Vishnevaia kostochka”), is the young, defeated rival of the older Boris Mikhailovich. The fellow traveler Zand is a childless adult who is strongly attached to his mother. Olesha does have some older protagonists, even fathers (the professor in “Natasha,” for example), but none of them serves as narrator.

14. All of the three statements concern death: “—Kolia, bud' gordym. My umrem, kak dvoriane.” “—Pododi,—prodolzhal otets,—seichas ia vyidu. My umrem vmeste.” (I 100). “—Zastegnist' na vse pugovitsy,—prikazal on mne. …—Vstretim smert' dostoino” (I 101).

15. Kavalerov's emotional backwardness has been treated by a wide range of scholars. Harkins finds that Kavalerov's love of beds and sleep is indicative of a desire to “return to childhood” (“Theme of Sterility” 451). Beaujour discusses childishness throughout her study, especially in reference to Fedya of “The Cherry Pit” (Invisible Land 18). The predominance of a child's-eye view is part of the focus of Victor Peppard's study of Olesha's “poetics of dialogue” (Poetics 98), while Richard Borden asserts that childhood and a child's perspective are at the heart of the greater part of Olesha's metaphors, often providing “a means of ‘escape’ to childhood from threatening adult situations” (“Magic and Politics” 168). Borden also finds that the conflict between Olesha's protagonists and a “threatening adult world” reflect “the awkward relationship of an entire generation of intellectuals with the new social order.”

16. Olesha himself resented the suggestion that he looked like his father. In No Day without a Line, he writes: “When I was a child, everyone said I looked like my father. But when I had already, as it were, learned to look in a mirror—I, on the contrary, saw a resemblance to my mother, and not my father. When I told people about my discovery, they laughed at me … All the same, little by little others started to exclaim, ‘He looks like his mother!’” (117). He claims that this resemblance grew more pronounced as he matured and came nearer to the age of first love. From then on, “I could only imagine myself looking like my mother” (118). Though physical resemblance to the father is usually threatening in Olesha's work, there is one exception to the rule. In “From the Notebooks of Fellow Traveler Zand,” the title character laments that he looks so much like his mother: “How can one be a strong man and look like one's mother?” (I 170). Zand, unlike Kolya in “Legend,” worries that he is effeminate. Zand is by no means the only Olesha character to feel inadequate as a man, but he is the only one to assert that he looks like his mother. When Kolya and Kavalerov distance themselves from their fathers, neither one claims a resemblance to his mother.

17. Milton Ehre finds that this passage signifies not only a “biological pessimism” about aging and paternity, but also Kavalerov's desire to “become a man and enter the world of the parents, to partake of their power” (“Olesha's Zavist'” 604-5). Certainly Kavalerov's narration is marked by an ambivalent attitude toward adulthood and parents, but the passage about Kavalerov's father is unequivocally negative.

18. Again, Harkins's “Theme of Sterility” was the first article to explore this aspect of Anechka's character. Barrat (Yurii Olesha's “Envy”), Beaujour (Invisible Land), and Maguire all continue this approach in their respective studies.

19. This bed, according to William Harkins, “is at once the goal of Kavalerov's yearnings and the symbol of his fears of and disgust at sexuality,” serving as a “vaginal symbol” due to its “implicit connection with its owner and its function in the sexual act” (451).

20. Though Anechka's widowhood might lead one to believe she is an old woman, she is only forty-five years old (21).

21. Kavalerov's frustration has its parallel in the great twentieth-century novel of paternity, Joyce's Ulysses. Whereas the cuckolded Bloom learns to accept his place as one in a long line of men in Molly's bed, neither the first nor the last, Kavalerov is inconsolable. Ivan's toast to indifference and his suggestion that they share Anechka has more in common with the spirit of Bloom's resignation with his lot, though Ivan's defeat is far more total than Bloom's. Both Bloom and Ivan have lost their children before the action of their respective novels, one to death, the other to ideological enemies. Bloom ends his day by bringing home his newfound “son” Stephen Daedalus and finds himself more at ease both as father and as husband. Ivan's surrogate son rejects him, but they still find themselves in the same apartment at the novel's close. Both have come to stay with Anechka, just as Stephen and Bloom come home to the moonlike gravitational pull of Molly.

22. According to Beaujour, “[i]t is really Andrei, not Ivan, who has invented himself,” despite Ivan's assertion to the contrary (“Ia sam sebia vydumal”). This is why Volodya and Valya choose him as a father and “reduce their natural parents to the status of mere ‘relatives’” (Beaujour, “On Choosing One's Ancestors” 26). I would add that the qualities that draw Volodya and Valya to Andrei hold an equal fascination for Kavalerov.

23. Andrei, by contrast, is connected with glass that blinds, rather than reflects. When Andrei turns toward Kavalerov in the airport, the latter is horrified to see that, instead of eyes, Babichev has only “the two dull, mercurially shining badges of his pince-nez” (32). Andrei's eyes are hidden from Ivan as well. When Ivan asks his brother how he can allow Volodya to insult him, Ivan only sees the sheen of Andrei's glasses (60). In each case, Andrei denies familial and pseudo-familial bonds, rejecting both his brother and the man he took in from the street.

24. This trait of Ivan's has its parallel in The Three Fat Men (Tri tolstiaka), in which the mythical kingdom's rulers completely control the life of their adopted heir Tutti. They determine what Tutti may and may not see and forbid him to play with other children. In attempting to remake the boy in their own image, they go to the grotesque extreme of convincing him that his natural heart has been replaced by one made of iron. This in turn is reminiscent of Volodya's desire to stamp out “petty feelings” by becoming a human machine, and of Ivan's attribution of his imaginary machine with human emotions.

25. Olesha's characterization of the sausage as a “bride” is one of the novel's many elements that clearly allude to the works of Nikolai Gogol. Akaky Akakievich's overcoat is cherished and desired much like a bride, while the scene in which Kavalerov considers throwing away the sausage while carrying it across Moscow is reminiscent of Ivan Yakovlevich's attempt to dispose of the human nose that has mysteriously appeared in one of his wife's pies. I am grateful to Thomas Seifrid for pointing out this connection.

26. One might argue that the sausage is both phallic and excremental; Zholkovsky notes its anal and phallic imagery without seeing the two terms as mutually exclusive (Zholkovsky 197).

27. Of course, this formulation breaks down when Shapiro and Babichev cook the sausage on the grill and eat it, but so too (one hopes) does the excremental reading. Such a collapse of symbolism is inevitable to any psychoanalytic treatment of a literary text, since a good author's symbols doggedly refuse to be tied to just one interpretation. Whatever other associations the sausage might suggest, for the purpose of the novel's narration it still has to function as food. To paraphrase a statement often attributed to Freud, sometimes a sausage is just a sausage.

28. The elder Makarov merits only occasional brief mentions in Envy: Andrei mentions that Volodya is visiting his father in Murom (17), where the latter works in locomotive construction (73). Apparently Volodya's father knows and approves of his son's living arrangements, for Volodya writes in his letter to Andrei, “Papasha klianiaetsia tebe” (44). His words are a standard greeting, but more formal than necessary. Volodya's father is disposed of in one short sentence, using a phrase that connotes respect and literally means, “Dad bows down to you.” This brief reference establishes that although Volodya's father is still among the living (Olesha does not share Platonov's predilection for orphans), Andrei Babichev is above him in the paternal hierarchy.

29. Because of the complexities of Olesha's narrative, it would be a mistake to accept Andrei's monologue as completely unmediated. Though the second half of the novel is related by a third-person narrator, the reader is nonetheless presented with a series of subjective viewpoints filtered through a supposedly objective narrator.

30. “A znaiu: massa, a ne sem'ia, primet moi poslednii vdokh.” Cf. Lyutov's consolation of Ilya, the rebbe's son, in Babel's Red Cavalry: “ia prinial poslednii vzdokh moego brata” (“I took the last breath of my brother”) (2: 129). Andrei wants only the abstract masses at his deathbed, but Ilya and Lyutov cannot completely abandon a familial context.

31. Thompson, as quoted in Barrat (Yurii Olesha's “Envy” 44), notes that Andrei's scar shows that he has been cut off from the past. Barrat takes this idea further, noting that the scar resembles a lopped-off branch. Joining this simile to the branch imagery surrounding Valya and the resemblance between Ivan's hand and a tree, Barrat sees Andrei's scar as a symbol of his rejection of the romanticism of the past that provides the impetus for Ivan's conspiracy of feelings.

32. See Matt F. Oja, “Iurii Olesha's Zavist': Fantasy, Reality, and Split Personality” (1986). Though Oja's thesis is provocative, his assertion that Kavalerov actually goes mad in the course of the novel is not supported by the evidence of the text. The general predominance of subjective viewpoints in Zavist' has been explored by Beaujour (Invisible Land) and R. Jones (passim), but the best analysis of the novel's various narrative voices is found in Cornwell's 1980 essay on the subject. Cornwell notes that even when Kavalerov's perspective is supposedly absent, the narrative point of view is basically constant.

33. In this Andrei is like Olesha's Three Fat Men, who adopt a young heir rather than conceiving one with a woman.

Works Cited

Barrat, Andrew. Yurii Olesha's “Envy.”

Birmingham Sylvanite Monographs 12. Birmingham, 1981.

———. “Yury Olesha's Three Ages of Man: A Close Reading of ‘Liompa.’” Modern Language Review 75.3 (1980): 597-614.

Beaujour, Elizabeth Klosty. “The Imagination of Failure: Fiction and Autobiography in the Work of Yury Olesha.” Autobiographical Statements in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature. Ed. Jane Gary Harris. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. 123-32.

———. The Invisible Land: A Study of the Artistic Imagination of Iurii Olesha. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970.

———. “On Choosing One's Ancestors: Some Afterthoughts on Envy.” Ulbandus Review: A Journal of Slavic Languages and Literatures 2 (1979). 24-36.

Bethea, David M. The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Borden, Richard C. “The Magic and Politics of Childhood: The Childhood Theme in the Works of Iurii Olesha, Valentin Kataev, and Vladimir Nabokov.” Diss. Columbia U, 1987.

Cornwell, Neil. “The Principle of Distortion in Olesha's Envy.” Essays in Poetics 5.1 (1980): 15-35.

Davis, Robert Con. “Critical Introduction: The Discourse of the Father.” The Fictional Father: Lacanian Readings of the Text. Ed. Robert Con Davis. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981. 1-26.

Ehre, Milton. “Olesha's Zavist': Utopia and Dystopia.” Slavic Review 50.3 (1991): 601-11.

Gray, J. Glenn. The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle. New York: Harper and Rowe, 1959.

Harkins, William E. “The Philosophical Stories of Iurii Olesha.” Orbis Scriptus Dmitrii Tschizewski, zum 70. Geburtstag. Ed. Dietrich Gerhardt et al. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1966. 349-54.

———. “The Theme of Sterility in Olesha's Envy.” Major Soviet Writers: Essays in Criticism. Ed. Edward Brown. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. 281-94.

Ingdahl, Kazimiera. “The Life/Death Dichotomy in Iurii Olesha's Short Story ‘Liompa.’” Studies in Twentieth-Century Russian Prose. Ed. Nils Ake Nilsson. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1982. 156-85.

Jones, R. “The Primacy of the Subjective in the Work of Jurij Olesha.” Melbourne Sylvanite Studies 3 (1969): 3-11.

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977.

Maguire, Robert A. Red Virgin Soil: Soviet Literature in the 1920s. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968.

Mitchell, Juliet. Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing, and Women. New York: Vintage, 1975.

Nilsson, Nils Ake. “Through the Wrong End of Binoculars: An Introduction to Iurii Olesha.” Major Soviet Writers: Essays in Criticism. Ed. Edward Brown. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. 254-279.

Oja, Matt F. “Iurii Olesha's Zavist': Fantasy, Reality, and Split Personality.” Canadian Sylvanite Papers: An Inter-Disciplinary Quarterly Devoted to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe 28.1 (1986): 52-63.

Olesha, Iurii. Povesti i rasskazy. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1965.

———. Zavist': Tri tolstiaka; Ni dnia bez strochki. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1989.

Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.

Peppard, Victor. The Poetics of Yury Olesha. University of Florida Humanities Monograph 63. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1989.

Seifrid, Thomas. Andrei Platonov: Uncertainties of Spirit. Cambridge Studies in Russian Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Semenova, Svetlana. Nikolai Fedorov: Tvorchestvo zhizni. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1990. 363-73.

Shitareva, O. G. “Tvorcheskaia istoriia sozdaniia romana Zavist' Ju. Oleshi.” Filologicheskie nauki 4 (1969): 82-92.

Teskey, Ayleen. Platonov and Fyodorov: The Influence of Christian Philosophy on a Soviet Writer. Trowbridge-Wiltshire: Avebury, 1982.

Tolstaia-Segal, Elena. “Ideologicheskie konteksty Platonova.” Russian Literature 9.3 (1981): 231-80.

Zholkovsky, Alexander. Text Counter Text: Rereadings in Russian Literary History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.