[In the following essay, Croft draws parallels between Olesha's Envy and the films of Charlie Chaplin.]

In the history of literature and cinema it may easily be said that the usual course of influence proceeded from the former to the latter. That is, literary texts rapidly provided a source of material for the burgeoning cinema industry. But finding early instances where cinematic productions had a noticeable influence on literature is more difficult. In the Soviet Union, however, where cinema was taken very seriously as an artistic medium even in the embryonic stages of its development, such an instance does exist. A clearly demonstrable example of this influence is to be found in Yuri Olesha's Envy, one of the most significantly artistic novels of the 'twenties.¹ In theme, plot, and especially in characterization, this novel was influenced by the cinematic portrayals of Charlie Chaplin.

The external evidence for such an influence is all there. We know, for example, that Olesha had ample opportunity to view the films of Chaplin during the period in Moscow when he was writing his novel. These films, of course, were silent and thus transcend the language barrier solely by their profound visual impact. Gosfilmofond, the Soviet government's organization for cinematography, lists 34 Chaplin films which were shown in Moscow from 1917 until the 1927 publication of Envy.² These films were very popular not only with the masses, but with the literary intelligentsia and even with the governmental cultural authorities. Victor Shklovsky, the prominent formalist literary critic, frequently praised Chaplin's films in the press. He wrote a critical work on Chaplin which was published in Berlin in 1923 and maintained a correspondence with Chaplin himself.³ The very influential Soviet minister of culture, Anatoly Lunacharsky, in a 1927 Evening Moscow article termed Chaplin “one of the greatest artists of world cinema” in the course of upbraiding American women for their support of a campaign to anathematize Chaplin during a scandalous law-suit brought by his mother-in-law.⁴ Thus it was both intellectually and politically permissible for Olesha to draw upon Chaplin's comedy as a source of influence.

Olesha's fascination with Chaplin's comedy is also subsequently evident in his autobiographical work, Not a Day Without a Line (1965), in which he terms the “theme of the solitary man's fate” the “theme of Chaplin.”⁵ In one version of Olesha's play, A List of Assets (1931), there is a character described in the dramatis personae as “a little man looking like Charlie Chaplin.”⁶ And in 1936 Olesha wrote an article entitled “Thoughts about Chaplin,” in which he stated that the appeal of Chaplin's films is due to the “fascinating qualities of the soul of Chaplin himself.”⁷

The name of Charlie Chaplin has appeared with significant frequency in the previous scholarship on Olesha's work. Critics, both Soviet and Western, have long perceived that Chaplin was a source of Olesha's inspiration and a catalyst to his already fertile imagination. The Soviet constructivist critic, Korneli Zelinsky, in his Critical Writings (1932), wrote that “the main and, in fact, solitary theme of Olesha is the Chaplinesque.”⁸ Lev Levin, in his critical work, On Familiar Themes (1936), stated that “for Olesha the theme of the unemployed worker is tantamount to the theme of Chaplin.”⁹ Gleb Struve, in Soviet Russian Literature (1951), mentioned Olesha's interest in Chaplin, and Vyacheslav Zavalishin, in Early Soviet Writers (1958), wrote: “The hero of Envy, Nikolai Kavalerov is an odd mixture of the Chekhovian intellectual and the sad tramp of American movies. No wonder that Igor Ilinsky, the Russian counterpart of Chaplin, wanted to act the part of Kavalerov on the screen.”¹⁰ Marc Slonim, in Soviet Russian Literature: Writers and Problems (1964), noted Olesha's “evocations of Hamlet and Charlie Chaplin, symbols of inner dispute and of the common man's plight.”¹¹ In his book, The Russian Novel (1966), F. D. Reeve wrote: “Olesha admired Chaplin's films for the contrast they dramatized between the old values and the new requirements.”¹² William E. Harkins, in his insightful article, “The Theme of Sterility in Olesha's Envy” (1966), mentioned the obvious similarities of appearance between Chaplin's little tramp and Olesha's character, Ivan Babichev.¹³ Robert Payne (also the author of a critical study of Chaplin), in his Introduction to “Love” and Other Stories by Olesha (1967), wrote that Olesha “had a special reverence, amounting almost to adoration, for Charlie Chaplin.”¹⁴ These critics, however, have always mentioned Chaplin's influence as a matter peripheral to some other scholarly focus. The specific nature of this influence has never been examined.

A brief plot summary shows Kavalerov, the hero of Olesha's Envy, caught up in the rivalry of two brothers. Andrei Babichev, a Soviet bureaucrat prominent for his founding of the “two-bit” food institution, beneficently takes Kavalerov into his apartment after finding him lying in the street, but only as a temporary affection surrogate for Andrei's absent ward, the soccer player Volodya Makarov. Ivan Babichev is a dreamer who claims to have invented an anti-machine machine named “Ophelia” with which he will try to kindle in the world a “conspiracy of human feelings” against the impersonal technocracy represented by his brother. Andrei lays claim to the beautiful Valya, Ivan's daughter, through her involvement with Volodya. Ivan in turn enlists Kavalerov, who also falls in love with Valya, into his effort to win his daughter back to the personal values of a former world. The effort fails, however, as “Ophelia” turns on Ivan and both he and Kavalerov wind up sharing a bed with the gross widowed landlady, Annechka Prokopovich. The complex personal interrelationships in the plot suggest a variety of interpretational possibilities involving, as T. S. Berczynski points out, “both the psychology of Freud and the philosophy of Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground.”¹⁵

The plot of the novel, however, is all but subjugated in the reader's attention by the rich verbal texture and the stunning imagery which Olesha employs. This imagery is overwhelmingly visual and involves both rapid shifts of perspective and distortions of perception. In this sense, one might easily term the imagery “cinematic,” in that it isn't limited to the reader's actual “eye” and his particular esthetic distance, but instead captures his attention in its own right by forcing him to see things in ways he may not have been entirely prepared to see them. The most arresting shift of perspective is that of the narrative voice, which begins in the first person (Kavalerov saying “I am a jester … a comic”¹⁶), but switches to third person in Part Two (“Kavalerov turned around … Kavalerov recognizes the head … Kavalerov sees …”¹⁷). Nils Ake Nilsson, in discussing what he calls Olesha's “fantastic photography,” explains the distortion of perception thus: “[Olesha] seldom gives us a direct and straight-forward description, a simple full-face view of an object or a person. Instead, we usually see his world of objects and people reflected in buttons, mirrors, and metallic surfaces; we catch distorted glimpses of them through glass windows and bars; they appear enlarged or diminished through binoculars, telescopes, or microscopes.”¹⁸ In his article, “Objective in Yuri Olesha's Envy,” Wayne P. Wilson demonstrates the interdependency of this shift in perspective and the distortions of perception. Wilson may be paraphrased to state that the “shift in point of view is accompanied by altered perception as well, a change from two-dimensional to three-dimensional vision, from stereotype to stereoscopy. Stereoscopy requires not one but two related perceptions of an object. When Kavalerov's voice recedes into the background, Ivan and Andrei Babichev emerge as the defining limits of his potential. At the same time Andrei Babichev's image as the model Soviet man fades as attention is focused on the representatives of the future society, Volodya Makarow and Valya.”¹⁹ The mention here of “fantastic photography” and “stereoscopy” in relation to Olesha's imagery and narrative structure may be regarded as evidence of a general cinematic influence on Olesha's writing, especially in light of his avowed enthusiasm for the cinema. But if this discussion of inherent cinematic effects does not suffice to show this influence, then resort may be made to Olesha's description in Envy of the action at a soccer game wherein “Suddenly the ball, thrown out by someone's powerful and uncalculated kick, flew up high and sideways beyond the field, out of the game, in the direction of Kavalerov, whistled over the ducked heads of the lower rows, stopped for an instant and, all its laminae twirling, crashed down into the boards, towards Kavalerov's feet. The game stopped. The players froze, overcome by surprise. The picture of the field, green and variegated, moving all the time, now all of a sudden turned to stone. Thus a motion picture stops all of a sudden at the moment of a break in the film, when they are already turning the light on in the theater but the projectionist has not yet managed to turn out the light, and the audience sees the strangely whitening still and the contours of the hero, absolutely motionless in that pose, which speaks of vast rapid movement.”²⁰

As we have seen above, Olesha's hero, Kavalerov, characterizes himself as a “jester” and a “comic,” and yet we see him also as a man who, at twenty-seven, realizes that he “… won't ever be either handsome or famous … won't come walking from the small town to the capital … won't be either a military leader or a people's commissar, or a scholar, or an adventurer.” He dreams his “whole life of an extraordinary love,” but returns instead to his “old apartment, to the room with the frightful bed” where there are “dismal surroundings” and the widow Prokopovich waits.²¹ We laugh at his inadequacies, and yet we feel distinctly the pathos of his situation. We sympathize with his plight. This is comedy in the “laughter through tears” tradition which could be traced back in Russian literature to the works of Nikolai Gogol. The similarity of this form of comedy, however, to the particular cinematic comedy of Chaplin is too obvious to miss … he also was a clown who could make his audience cry.²² It would seem then that Chaplin, the creator of the tragic clown, the “little tramp,” and Olesha, the creator of Kavalerov's pathetic comedy, shared a certain aspect of their world-view. For this reason we aren't surprised to find that Olesha's general interest in the cinema as a source of inspiration focused itself on the comedy of Charlie Chaplin.

One of the primary themes of Chaplin's early films is that of the representative of old-order sensibilities stranded in a new world. This is the dramatization of old values and new requirements of which F. D. Reeve wrote (above). Chaplin often evoked an empathetic reaction from his audience by exhibiting maudlin sentimentality in contrast to the indifferent, mechanized, hustle-bustle environment of the big city. In City Lights (1931), for example, Charlie discovers that his tenement-dwelling sweetheart is blind by holding a flower up to her eyes. “There are,” wrote Olesha in his 1936 article, “few such scenes in the art of cinema.”²³ Furthermore, Charlie often sought and found companions of similar plight. Thus, he exhibits sympathy for the lot of a homeless dog in A Dog's Life (1918). The dog is depicted as Charlie's equal and, needing each other, they form a sort of camaraderie of poverty. One still sees pictures of Charlie, cast out by his human counterparts for his inability to cope with their world, sitting arm and paw with a kindred soul, the dog. In Envy, Kavalerov imagines that he'll get Valya “—as a prize—for everything: for the humiliations, for the youth which I didn't have time to see, for my dog's life.”²⁴

Another companion in alienation is The Kid (1921), played by young Jackie Coogan. What a pathetic pair they make, little orphan Coogan in his shabby out-sized clothes and Charlie, the dejected glazier, each needing the other for consolation and support. Unable to survive, or, at least, unable to succeed separately in a milieu of contemporary social mores, they resort to extra-societal and picaresque means of mutual survival. Thus they devise a glass-breaking and repair scheme for livelihood.

Olesha's characters, too, represent a polarization of old values and new requirements. Nikolai Kavalerov and Ivan Babichev find themselves alienated in an impersonal culture. Helpless Kavalerov clings like the orphaned kid to Ivan Babichev, who hopes to lead a resurgence of personal feelings. Ivan Babichev confides in Kavalerov, telling him that their “fates are similar,” because he sees Kavalerov as another last vestige of past values. Andrei Babichev and Volodya Makarov, on the other hand, represent the new values. This is clearly shown when Ivan Babichev, after calling Volodya the “new man” and blaming his brother Andrei for the alienation of his daughter's affections, says: “We are dying, Kavalerov … Millenniums stand like a sewer hole. In the hole wallow machines, pieces of cast iron, of tin, screws, springs … a dark gloomy hole. And in the hole shine pieces of rotten wood, phosphorescent fungi-mold. There are our feelings! This is all that is left of our feelings, of the flowering of our souls. The new man comes to the hole, rummages, climbs into it, chooses what he needs—some part of machine proves useful, a little nut—and the pieces of rotten wood he tramples, extinguishes … And so, the last dreamer on earth, I wander along the edge of the hole like a wounded bat …”²⁵ Thereafter, Ivan implicates Kavalerov in his plot to ridicule his respected and authoritarian brother. Squalidly attired, Kavalerov follows the buffoon and dreamer, Ivan Babichev, down the street. Ivan closely resembles Charlie Chaplin's little tramp in appearance. He is a “little man in a derby” and has a “hurried walk with the heaving of the whole torso”²⁶ just like Charlie's. Kavalerov, as does Jackie Coogan, walks a step behind his mentor, who frequently turns around to talk to him.²⁷ The similarity here to Chaplin's film, The Kid, is too close to be entirely coincidental. Even the warning of Ivan Babichev by the police bears, in its ominous tone and implications despite only passing plot significance, a resemblance to Charlie's occasional warnings by his mustached policeman foil.

One key scene in Envy finds Kavalerov trying to “rescue” a woman in a bar from some of her rowdy companions. This woman, of course, doesn't wish to be rescued and Kavalerov is made a fool of and then thrown out of the bar into the gutter. This scene is similar to a scene from Chaplin's The Face on the Bar-room Floor (1914), in which Charlie winds up studying the bar-room floor at nose length, just as Kavalerov lies in the gutter looking down a drain grate. Charlie had troubles with all manner of mechanical contrivances. He couldn't manage a mop or a fan in a clean-up job in The Bank (1915), ladders were a constant nemesis in The Pawnshop (1916), and flower pots had a habit of falling on his head as in Easy Street (1917). Many later comedians have imitated Chaplin's classic scenes of trouble with folding chairs, as in A Day of Pleasure (1919). Kavalerov, analogously, tells us more than once that “Things don't like me.”²⁸ “Furniture,” he says, “tries to trip me. Once some sort of lacquered corner literally bit me. With my blanket I always have complex interrelations. Soup which is served me never cools. If some kind of trinket—a coin or a cuff link—falls off the table, it usually rolls under some piece of almost immovable furniture. I crawl along the floor and, raising my head, I see how the sideboard is laughing.”²⁹

Ivan Babichev is also, like Kavalerov, imbued with many chaplinesque traits. These traits go significantly beyond the matter of his physical similarity to Chaplin's screen character. Ivan Babichev's reaction to the new order of things is epitomized by his phobia for machines. Perhaps Olesha's view of Chaplin's machine-oppressed toiler in Work (1915) prompted his depiction of Ivan Babichev's antimechanical panacea, Ophelia. In Behind the Screen (1917), as well as in the later film, Modern Times (1936), Charlie tries to “throw a monkey wrench” into the mechanical world. The curious emotive quality of Charlie's expressions and gestures in Behind the Screen tells us that he knows just one pull of the machine's control lever will “foul up the works.” At first he revels in this power, but, at last, he succumbs to the temptation with, of course, disastrous results for himself. Ivan Babichev, too, can't resist the temptation of trying to “foul up the works.” He tells Kavalerov to “… make a scandal … leave with a bang. Slam the door as they say. There's the main thing: to leave with a bang. So that a scar remains on the mug of history—show off, devil take you! They won't let you in there anyway. Don't give in without a fight!”³⁰ And, like Charlie, Ivan's attempt to actualize his philosophy by creating Ophelia fails when Ophelia, who is also, after all, a machine, turns on Ivan and pins him to the wall with its “sparkling needle.”³¹

Another similarity between Chaplin's portrayals and Olesha's characterizations is found in Charlie's relations with women. In short, Charlie was a failure. He often sentimentally regarded the object of his affections from afar, idealizing her, placing her on an unattainable pedestal in his mind. In his dreams, she floats above the ground in airy costumes, is even given wings. In Sunnyside (1919), Charlie dances in a dream with his love in the Elysian Fields surrounded by scantily clad wood nymphs. In reality, however, he brings flowers to her door, serenades her with his violin, but when she comes out he is abashed, tongue-tied, and suddenly very vulnerable and helpless. Tragically, he watches her leave with some brutish character. Deep down, we all know that Charlie is the better man, but he is unable to communicate this strange sort of superiority, this greater sensibility, to his love. We are torn inside by the tragedy of the situation, having, perhaps, had similar experiences ourselves.

Olesha was fascinated by this kind of relationship with women. He had, in fact, had an experience very similar to those expressed by Chaplin in his youth. In Not a Day Without a Line, Olesha tells us that he once witnessed a performance of “three acrobats, two men and a girl.” He fell in love with the girl, with the way her hair flew in the breeze. Several days later he saw the same two men on the street. With them, however, was no girl, but a young unattractive boy of bad complexion who spat, and whom Olesha at first took for an assistant. Suddenly he realized that this was the “girl” with whom he had fallen in love. And, Olesha adds, he remained in love with her all his life”³² In Envy, we find this same type of relationship. Harkins has made a good case for the contention that “Olesha's male characters in Envy are all sterile.”³³ Aspiring to Valya, Kavalerov is forced to accept the gross Annechka Prokopovich, who, he says, is “a symbol of my humbled masculinity.”³⁴ Furthermore, from Kavalerov's point of view, Valya is romantically idealized in the extreme. His love for her is, of course, never realized, and, in fact, despite his being almost crazy with love for her, he never even manages a decent attempt at winning her. In the end, she goes off with Volodya Makarov, unaware of Kavalerov's existence. This is just the sort of love frustration that Charlie Chaplin so often depicted. Ivan Babichev encounters similar frustration also in his attempts to get back into his daughter's good graces. Just as Charlie so often tried, Ivan Babichev approaches his daughter from the street outside her apartment. But she doesn't come out, despite Ivan's having brought her childhood pillow. And he also fails in his attempt to discredit his brother, her fiancé Volodya's benefactor. Valya herself, like the heroines in Chaplin's films, is seen, especially by Kavalerov, as an ethereal character. Kavalerov says: “She was lighter than a shadow, the very lightest of shadows—the shadow of falling snow could envy her …”³⁵ At the soccer game he approaches her and blurts out his feelings. “Valya,” he says, “I've been waiting for you my whole life. Take pity on me. …” “But she didn't hear. She ran, undercut by the wind.”³⁶

There are, in summation, many chaplinesque themes in Olesha's Envy. The masking of serious problems by humor based on empathy, and the resorting to fantasy and the absurd can be viewed as examples of Chaplin's influence, through the cinematic medium, on Olesha's writing. The fate of the “little man,” sensitivity in an insensitive world, old values versus new requirements, man versus machine, and romantic love frustrated in asexual characters are all themes in Envy whose similarities to Chaplin's portrayals are reinforced by the physical similarities of Olesha's characters to Chaplin's film characters. In light of this evidence, then, it is easy to view Olesha's Envy as an early instance of profound cinematic influence with Charlie Chaplin as the primary source of inspiration.

Notes

1. There have been several English translations of Envy: Anthony Wolfe (London: Hogarth, 1936), P. Ross (London: John Westhouse, 1947), Andrew R. MacAndrew (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967), and T. S. Berczynski (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1975) which is the translation used here.

2. A personal communication from O. Yakubovich, vice-director of Gosfilmofond (October 1973), lists these Chaplin films by the date of their showings in the Soviet Union: (1917) The Champ; (1918) Between Showers; (1920) The Bank; (1923) Woman, Mabel at the Wheel, The Tramp; (1924) Making a Living, His Favorite Pastime, The New Janitor, The Fatal Mallet, His New Profession, Her Friend the Bandit, His Trysting Place, Tango Tangles, Knockout, Dough and Dynamite, Property Man, Those Love Pangs, His Prehistoric Past, Triple Trouble, The Masquerader, Caught in the Rain, Face on the Bar-room Floor, The Kid, Carmen, Mabel's Busy Day, Cruel, Cruel Love, Twenty Minutes of Love; (1925) Laughing Gas, The Rounders, Mabel's Predicament, A Woman of Paris, Tillie's Punctured Romance; (1926) Sunnyside. The dates in the article proper, however, refer to the initial production dates of the films mentioned.

3. Victor Shklovsky, Chaplin, (Berlin: Izdatel'stvo Zhurnala “Kino,” 1923). The correspondence, as one might guess, caused Chaplin some trouble later when his politics came under suspicion in the anti-communist-conscious United States in the 'fifties.

4. Lunacharsky o kino, (Moskva: Izdatel'stvo Iskusstvo, 1965), pp. 73-4.

5. Lev Levin, Na znakomye temy, (Leningrad: Goslitizdat, 1936), pp. 78.

6. Yuri Olesha, Izbrannye proizvedeniya, (Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo xudozhestvennoi literatury, 1956).

7. ibid, p. 436.

8. Korneli Zelinsky, Kriticheskie pis'ma, (Moskva: 1932), pp. 88.

9. Lev Levin, op. cit., p. 82

10. Vyacheslav Zavalishin, Early Soviet Writers, (New York: Frederick Praeger and Co., 1958), pp. 299. See also Gleb Struve, Soviet Russian Literature, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951), p. 106.

11. Marc Slonim, Soviet Russian Literature: Writers and Problems, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 275.

12. F. D. Reeve, The Russian Novel, (New York: McGraw Hill Co., 1966), p. 347.

13. William E. Harkins, “The Theme of Sterility in Olesha's Envy,” Slavic Review, XXV, No. 3 (1966), pp. 443-57, and reprinted in Edward J. Brown (ed.), Major Soviet Writers: Essays in Criticism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), see p. 290.

14. Yuri Olesha, “Love” and Other Stories, (trans. and with foreword by Robert Payne), (New York: Washington Square Press, 1967), p. xx. See also Robert Payne, The Great God Pan: A Biography of the Tramp Played by Charles Chaplin, (New York: Hermitage House, 1964), which includes plot summaries of Chaplin's films.

15. Yuri Olesha, Envy, (trans. and foreword by T. S. Berczynski), (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1975), p. ix.

16. ibid. pp. 6 and 51.

17. ibid. pp. 98-9.

18. Nils Ake Nilsson, “Through the Wrong End of the Binoculars: An Introduction to Yuri Olesha,” Scando-Slavica, XI (1965), pp. 40-68 and reprinted in Edward J. Brown, Major Soviet Writers, op. cit., see pp. 254. In citing these other scholarly works there is sometimes necessitated a change in transliteration of the Russian.

19. Wayne P. Wilson, “Objective in Yuri Olesha's Envy,” Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring 1974), pp. 35.

20. Yuri Olesha, Envy, (T. S. Berczynski trans.), p. 106.

21. ibid, pp. 19.

22. see Serge Eisenstein, Charlie Chaplin, (Zurich: Sanssoucí Verlag, 1961) for a Soviet film director's view of Chaplin's comedy. Also A. Kukarkin, Charlie Chaplin, (Moskva, 1960) which has a catalogue of the films in Russian with plots, actors and a collection of photographic stills from the films.

23. Yuri Olesha, Izbrannye proizvedeniya from “Mysli o Chapline,” p. 437.

24. Yuri Olesha, Envy p. 40. The italics are the author's.

25. ibid, pp. 74-5.

26. ibid, p. 22.

27. ibid, p. 73.

28. ibid, p. 22. This quote is very often cited from its earlier occurrence in the novel (see next note).

29. ibid, p. 4.

30. ibid, p. 77.

31. ibid, p. 113.

32. This anecdote from Olesha's Ni dnya bez strochki (Izbrannye proizvedeniya, pp. 106) is retold by William E. Harkins, op. cit., p. 293.

33. William E. Harkins, ibid, p. 294.

34. Yuri Olesha, Envy, (Andrew R. MacAndrew, trans.) (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967), pp. 20. This translation is preferred here.

35. Yuri Olesha, Envy, (T. S. Berczynski, trans.), p. 39.

36. ibid, p. 109.