[In the following excerpt from his chapter on Soviet romantics, Slonim presents an overview of Olesha's works, emphasizing Envy and a few plays and short stories.]

Perhaps the label of romantic does not do justice to the complexity of Yury Olesha, [a] representative of the Southern group, a novelist whose work and fate have a special place in Soviet literature. Born in 1899 into a middle-class family and brought up in Odessa, he served in the Red Army and then became a fellow-traveler and a journalist. His humoristic verse and sharp articles were published mainly in the Steam Whistle, the paper of the railroad workers' union. He suddenly came to the fore in 1927 when his Envy was hailed as a remarkable novel by both Soviet and émigré critics; Olesha's high reputation was established almost overnight. His other books—The Three Fat Men, a fantastic novel for children, Love (1928) and Cherry Stone (1929-30), two collections of short stories, The List of Benefits (1931), a play, Excerpts from the Intimate Notes of Fellow Traveler Sand (1932), and A Strict Youth, a scenario—were merely variations on the main themes of Envy: basically Olesha remains a man of one book.

Envy is a short novel about substantial issues that other writers often sought to formulate in a roundabout way; Olesha expressed them bluntly in a compact style, blending symbolism and psychological analysis. The issues all centered around the conflict between the individual and the collective. All Russian stories and novels of this period show evidence of an unending dialogue between man and the epoch. The epoch commands man to become an active part of the gigantic process of social renovation and construction, and demands from him the sacrifice of his feelings and personal happiness. It also exacts obedience and rationality, it imposes upon him the discipline of Communist doctrine, it prescribes his behavior and morality, and it condemns frivolity, daydreaming, and the yearning for transcendental values. But man continues to defend his right to irrational impulses, impetuous love, disarming tenderness, unaccountable passions. He has vagaries of mind and heart, he dreams of freedom, he rebels against the shackles of dogma, duty, social usefulness, and political conformity. This conflict assumes tragic form because of the necessity of adaptation to new conditions created by the Revolution. The lonely fate of the individual becomes a fate of suffering and failure.

Envy is divided into two parts, each of which has its own hero: both are rebels against the Soviet age. Kavalerov, the narrator of the first part, a drunkard and a good-for-nothing, is given shelter by Andrey Babichev, a prominent Communist and the director of a food trust. Andrey is strong, healthy, and rationalistic, even though he allows himself to be moved by the dejection of the intoxicated young stranger he has found in a ditch. Kavalerov despises this self-confident man who has reached a high echelon in the Soviet hierarchy simply because he knows how to handle pork sausages and bacon; Kavalerov cannot accept the fact that his own unique individuality is not appreciated by the new masters of Russian life, and dreams of winning glory some day through his hidden talents. Yet he is assailed by doubts. “It is possible that the nature of glory has changed? And if so, has it changed throughout the world, or only here, in Russia?” Kavalerov is a lonely man, in some way a modernized version of Dostoevsky's “man from the underground”; he does not fit into the society being built up around him, and he envies and hates those who know what to do and stand on their own feet. The trouble is that everybody is concerned with collective efforts, whereas he wants to live as he wishes, “as an individual.” Sometimes he feels he would like to hang himself just to prove that he can do whatever he pleases with himself, that he is his own master. At the age of twenty-seven he is a superfluous man, a lump of human refuse; despite his extensive education he has no calling—he has only daydreams, envy, and hatred.

Andrey, his benefactor, has a bitter enemy in his own brother Ivan—a fantastic liar and a tosspot, who leads a precarious existence and makes a living by performing card tricks, sketching portraits, and playing the spontaneous wit for the entertainment of tavern habitués. Kavalerov is simply a prey to his own feelings, a victim of his lonely destiny; Ivan is a noisy and eloquent theoretician of anarchical freedom and an unbridled imagination. He believes that the new age has doomed “all sorts of feelings—such as pity, tenderness, pride, jealousy, love; almost all feelings, in short, which had been part of man's soul during the dying-out era. In place of all these former feelings the epoch of socialism is going to create a new series of states of the human soul.” But Ivan has nothing to do with this new series and he refuses to surrender: he dreams of organizing a “conspiracy of feelings,” a phrase which was used as the title of the very successful stage adaptation of Envy. He appeals to those who are still holding on to the proscribed emotions and makes speeches in which fantasy, rancor, and echoes of Nietzsche and Rozanov merge in an odd amalgam. He calls himself “the king of trivial men” and rallies “play-actors who dream of glory, unhappy lovers, old maids, accountants, ambitious males, imbeciles, knights-errant, and cowards.” He even promises them the destruction of the new order, pretending to have invented and constructed a miraculous and mysterious machine which he has dubbed Ophelia. Lies and whims are his weapons—and naturally he is not sure of ultimate victory. He understands that the emotions he appeals to are “decay, mold, phosphorescent fungi in a ditch”; and he is envious of the future which has no place for him: “The doomed epoch is envious of its successor.” There is but one choice left to him: either to admit defeat or to disappear with a bang. The latter alternative appeals to him, he loves the old order so much that he would like to avenge its destruction: “If perish we must, let us at least stab the present and rend it to pieces … My pains and my offense,” proclaims Ivan, “are those of the age itself.”

But his Ophelia, which would blow sky-high Andrey's food trusts and all the Communist enterprises and sports stadiums, is nothing but sheer hallucination. Ivan and Kavalerov, who have met by chance and have become friends, spend their time in impotent rage. Kavalerov is struck by the beauty of Valya, Ivan's young daughter, but she takes no notice of him—her heart belongs to one Makarov, a new and revised edition of Andrey. Makarov finds “too petty and restricted” all the feelings that Ivan makes so much fuss about. For this young man the basic emotion is the feeling of the times—it helps one to establish a division between the transitional and the essential, between the impermanent and the lasting. And the times demand engineers, inventors, teachers, workmen; the dreams are bound to come true and the strong healthy man is going to inherit the earth.

Kavalerov's attempt to assassinate Andrey ends in pitiful failure, and in this Ivan realizes his own defeat. He watches Makarov and Valya at a football match in the full triumph of youth and strength, and he exclaims to himself: “I ought to be struck blind. I made a mistake. I assumed that all feelings had perished—love, and devotion, and tenderness—but they are still there, though not for us: all that is left us is envy. Let's drink to our youth which is gone, to the conspiracy of feelings which miscarried, to the infernal machine which does not exist and never will.” Frustration and loneliness overcome the two friends—and they share, by turns, the embraces of their ugly, old, and fat landlady.

The symbolic pattern of Envy and the expressionistic devices employed by Olesha made his work, despite its deceiving clarity of style, a complex and at times puzzling novel. It reflected not only Olesha's meditations on the changing values in a revolutionary era but also his own ambivalence which he was vainly trying to overcome by an act of faith. He felt strongly the line of demarcation between the old and the new, he did not hesitate to reject the past, but he was not sure whether the present was maintaining and affirming the humanistic values he was so fond of. And he could not hide his doubts about the new hero who was supposed to embody all the Communist virtues. The importance of Envy in Soviet literature depends precisely on the originality and vigor with which it formulated these fundamental problems.

The majority of Soviet critics interpreted Envy as an out-and-out condemnation of “bourgeois mentality” and hailed Olesha for his explicit attitude. There were some others, however, who felt uneasy: in their opinion, the author was too much concerned with the problem of the “isolated human destiny” and, despite the ending of the novel, did not seem fully convinced of what he said. The impression was due in some degree to the structure of Envy. The “positive” characters are presented directly through the eyes and words of their enemies; in the first part we have Kavalerov's confession written in the first person, and in the second part the description of Ivan is interpersed with ample quotations from his speeches. The ironic tone of the novel also contributes to a feeling of ambiguity. But even without these devices, Kavalerov and Ivan are much more alive than are the pork-butcher Andrey, the mechanically minded football player Makarov, or the shadowy, unreal Valya.

All these figures were only remotely related to Communism and are treated ironically: Andrey who whistles happily in the bathroom, resembles a Babbitt; Makarov is simple of heart and mind; and Valya is little more than a healthy bobby-soxer. Did this mean that they actually incarnated the practical, rational, and industrial spirit of the twentieth century, and that the conflict between the dreamers and the Communist managers and sportsmen was devoid of any specific social content, and could happen in capitalist America as easily as in Soviet Russia? As models of humanity neither Andrey nor Makarov are particularly attractive. Olesha had apparently paid but little attention to the strictly social and political implications of the Revolution. What had interested him most was the new soul, the new ethics, and the new pattern of behavior. His particular merit was that while taking for granted the social and economic changes brought about by the Bolshevik regime and not even discussing them, he did give real consideration to the new humanity and the new morality that were bound to emerge from a transformed environment. It can even be said that long before Silone, Malraux, Koestler, and other ex-Communists, Olesha had envisaged and interpreted Communism as a moral problem. What species of human beings was it trying to create? What new elements was it substituting for the old ethical norms of humanism and Christianity? Why was a rational business man such as Andrey Babichev a higher type of man than a Kavalerov? Only because he was a doer? These and other questions naturally arise in Envy, and its readers could not help sharing its author's perplexity and anxiety.

Sand, the fellow-traveler writer in Olesha's later story, wonders how he can “fuse with the masses,” which is the remedy offered to him by a Communist, and how he can write on prescribed themes instead of those that come again and again to his mind. As long as all literary creation is based on personal experience, the “old feelings” can easily creep into a writer's work and provoke “untimely or reactionary themes” that are frowned upon. Here Olesha confessed his own inability to deal in his writing with industrialization, class struggle in the village, and other main topics of Communist novels. It was not that he did not want to devote his attention to them. He believed in the possibility of individual re-education, but he also emphasized to what extent such a process was difficult for men like himself, and other “heirs of the old order of things.” Goncharova, the actress in his play The List of Benefits, evaluates the various measures of Soviet government and at the end draws up a favorable balance sheet: the benefits brought about by the new regime outweigh its evils. Yet not until she goes abroad does she reach this conclusion, which was that of many non-Communist intellectuals in the 'thirties. The comparison between Europe and Russia makes her reject the capitalist West. In Paris she is horrified by the corruption of the arts and the venality of the artists; she finally sees Communism as the great hope of the world, and dies in a demonstration, killed accidentally by a rightist Russian émigré.

Olesha's political stand in this play is unmistakable, despite all the inner dialogue his heroine is going through—with evocations of Hamlet and Charlie Chaplin, symbols of inner dispute and of the common man's plight. Yet he never has the courage to make the last step, or to conquer his incertitude. He is far removed from the official optimism of Communist literature, and he claims that man cannot exist without tragedies, suffering, and romantic aspirations. He also speaks of modesty, truth, altruism, sentimentality, and mercy. His doubts are as strong as his hopes. Sometimes he feels that a cherry stone tossed away on the site of an industrial building will grow into a magnificent tree in the center of the courtyard for the enjoyment of future generations; yet he often despairs of integrating higher values into the new world of Babichev and Makarov. In such moments he feels that “old themes” are his blood and breath, that they remain in his system, and he resents his own social futility, his incapacity to sing with the chorus. At the Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 he spoke publicly of this inner strife and pointed out that impressions of life must be strong and genuine before they can be transmuted into images of art. And here again he called himself a beggar, an unwanted man, a failure, because his dreams and emotions were so far away from his epoch. He made, however, several attempts at depicting a new hero as an idealized model of beauty, gracefulness, and nobility; but he did not go further than A Strict Youth, a scenario of questionable literary quality. Apparently he simply could not write “in accordance with the times.” This was his cross and the reason for his undoing. We do not know what he left in the drawers of his desk, but as a novelist he ceased publishing after 1934 on. He fell victim to his own ideological and psychological complexes and died in 1960. Until the end he kept his humor, his gift for brilliant similes and unusual poetic images, and his capacity for living in a reality created by his imagination. His friend Paustovsky wrote about him: “It always seemed to me (or maybe it was the truth) that all his life Olesha talked inaudibly with geniuses and children, merry women and nice eccentrics.”

A writer of great distinction, he was as subtle—and sometimes as elusive—as the best representatives of that Western psychological school with which he had so many affinities. A consummate dialectician and a poet, he expressed his psychological and intellectual anxiety, his doubts, and his queries in a clear, compact, polished prose that flashed with striking metaphors; he was extremely economical, almost laconic, in his use of words, and argued that when something can be said in one sentence, it is a crime to expand it into two. His own lines had a resilient, nervous quality; they were short, expressive, and reverberated with symbolic meaning. The ironic whimsicality and wistful romantic nostalgia of his style were slightly akin to expressionism and perhaps to surrealism. What gave it charm was its purity, a perfection in simplicity which filled each phrase with almost material energy.

Olesha wrote comparatively little (except for the journalistic work he continued after his rehabilitation), and when the volume of his collected works was published in 1934, it contained all his fiction. Yet his one novel and the several short stories and plays are a more remarkable and lasting phenomenon of modern Russian literature than the many bulky tomes of more fortunate and more popular Soviet writers.