SOURCE: LeBlanc, Ronald D. “Gluttony and Power in Iurii Olesha's Envy.” Russian Review 60, no. 2 (April 2001): 220-37.

[In the following essay, LeBlanc uses a semiotic approach to discuss the ways in which Olesha's novel uses gastronomic and alimentary motifs in a playful way and also suggests that these motifs relate to the story's central power struggle between individual imagination and the new Soviet ideas of science, progress, and collectivism.]

Given the highly carnivalized view of the world that informs the narrative structure of Envy (Zavist', 1927), one should not be terribly surprised to find that Iurii Olesha's controversial novella contains gastronomic and alimentary motifs that function in a highly Rabelaisian way, with food imagery being called upon to celebrate what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the “material bodily principle” (“images of the human body itself, food, drink, defecation, and sexual life”) and thus to express a joyful sense of satiety, abundance, and excess.¹ Indeed, Olesha's story fairly reverberates with images of gluttonous overeating, heavy drinking, and physical corpulence, all of which Bakhtin identifies with the “grotesque body” portrayed in works of carnivalized literature.² From the tubby “aristocratic” torso of Andrei Babichev, the Soviet salami king, to the flaccid figure of Anechka Prokopovich, the cook for the barbers' artel (who goes about entangled in the entrails of animals), Envy quite deliberately foregrounds the essential corporeality of the human body and emphasizes many of its basic physiological functions: among them, mastication, ingestion, digestion, and elimination. The novella opens, appropriately enough, within the very “bowels” (nedra) of Andrei Babichev's apartment, his bathroom, where the effervescent food commissar can be heard singing a song while he is sitting on the toilet defecating (although it is Kavalerov, of course, who provides the joyful anatomical lyrics about kidneys and bodily fluids).³ And it ends on the baroque bed at Anechka's apartment, where Ivan Babichev invites Kavalerov to join him and the fat old widow in a grotesque sexual ménage à trois.

Another significant aspect of the food imagery used in Envy, beyond its obviously Rabelaisian earthiness, grotesquerie, and carnivalistic spirit, involves how Olesha manages to organize these gastronomic and alimentary motifs in such a way as to help advance the story's central power struggle: namely, the conflict between the romantic old world values of heroic individualism, free imagination, and personal glory championed by Ivan Babichev and his disciple Nikolai Kavalerov on the one hand, and the new Soviet ethos of science, industrial progress, and collectivism preached by Andrei Babichev and his protégé Volodia Makarov on the other. As the two Babichev brothers vie against each other to enlist the ideological and personal loyalties of the members of their country's younger generation, represented in Olesha's novella by Kavalerov, Makarov, and especially Valia Babicheva, the socioeconomic and political ramifications of this competition are conveyed largely in sexual, gastronomical, and alimentary terms. As Eric Naiman has argued convincingly in a recent study, “ideological fictions during the 1920s led political discourse to become preoccupied with sexuality and the body.”⁴Envy provides, I believe, an edifying example of what Naiman calls the “ideological poetics” that dominated Soviet fiction during the decade following the Bolshevik Revolution, when food, sex, and the body figured prominently in discourses about War Communism, NEP, and socialist construction. Moreover, even when Olesha's story is read not mainly as an ideological conflict between the old and the new, but rather as an aesthetic struggle between the imaginative artist and his society's banal utilitarian aims, the acts of eating and feeding still manage to play a significant semantic, thematic, and structural role in the text. This is because the gluttony depicted in Envy is to be understood not merely in the literal sense of physical overeating, but also in the figurative sense: as a trope for a kind of gourmandism that is ocular, verbal, and even narrational in nature.

THE FOOD OF POWER/THE POWER OF FOOD

What emerges from part 1 of Envy, as a direct result of Kavalerov's rather disjointed account of his brief stay at the apartment of Andrei Babichev, is the strong sense of existential alienation and social rejection that dwells within the acute consciousness of this angry and hypersensitive young narrator. Kavalerov is desperately (and, it turns out, anachronistically) seeking an old-fashioned type of fame—romantic in nature and European in origin—that no longer seems to exist in the brave new socialist world that the Bolsheviks are already well into the process of constructing in Soviet Russia. The dreamy hero therefore bristles with indignation at the idea that his host and ostensible benefactor, a man who seems (to Kavalerov) to possess little or no insight, imagination, or sensitivity, should be accorded such a large measure of respect and prestige by the members of this society simply because he holds the government post of director of the Food Industry Trust. As Kavalerov himself is only too well aware, however, what he calls a sense of indignation, others are more apt to characterize as merely a feeling of envy toward that “remarkable” man, Andrei Babichev. In either case, it becomes clear early in part 1 that Olesha's abject hero harbors an almost overwhelming feeling of resentment toward both Andrei Babichev and the new Soviet society that admires and honors him.

Our picture of this important government official is thus colored in a very fundamental way during part 1 through the carnivalizing perspective provided by the animus-ridden narrator, who both fears and abhors Andrei Babichev.⁵ By focusing our attention almost exclusively upon the physical reality of his host, Kavalerov reifies the food commissar's power, influence, and success almost entirely in physical terms and bodily images.⁶ Kavalerov so magnifies Andrei Babichev early in the story that the latter instantly becomes quite literally a “big man”: he emerges as a gargantuan male specimen who possesses huge breasts that bounce when he walks, the magnificent groin of a buck antelope and of a “production man,” a broad back where a birthmark reveals, for Kavalerov, Andrei's “aristocratic” origins, and a large protruding stomach (p. 14). Indeed, Kavalerov at one point in part 1 characterizes his host as a “corpulent giant” (p. 32). The young narrator's seemingly obsessive fascination with Andrei's corporeality—his vision of this adult version of a “chubby boy” (mal'chik-tolstiak) in various stages of nakedness, physical exercise, and bathroom activities (p. 14)—leads him to exaggerate seriously the enormity of this allegedly gigantic figure, who becomes, within Kavalerov's active and hyperbolizing imagination, an “idol” and a “monument” that in many respects recalls Pushkin's thundering statue, the Bronze Horseman.⁷

In gastronomical and alimentary terms, this sheer physicality of power that Kavalerov perceives in Andrei Babichev expresses itself mainly as a voracious appetite for food. “He is a glutton (obzhora),” the narrator declares in the very first chapter of part 1,

He dines away from home. Last evening he came home feeling hungry and decided to have a bite to eat. There was nothing to be found in the sideboard. He went downstairs (there is a store at the corner) and hauled back a whole bunch of stuff: 250 grams of ham, a can of sprats, canned mackerel, a large loaf of bread, a good-sized half-moon of Dutch cheese, four apples, a dozen eggs, and “Persian Pea” fruit jellies. Fried eggs and tea were ordered as well (there is a communal kitchen in the building where two cooks take turns serving). … He ate the fried eggs right from the pan and removed the bits of shell as if he were chipping off enamel. His eyes filled with blood; he removed and put on his pince-nez, smacked his lips, and snorted; and his ears moved. … He stuffed himself until he was full.

(p. 15)

Although gluttonous overeating has often been represented in literary texts as a comic device that helps to sustain the carnivalesque spirit of life affirmation, regeneration, and renewal (witness, for example, the gastronomic hedonism of such endearing comic figures as Shakespeare's Falstaff and Fielding's Parson Adams), it is also a deadly “sin” that has traditionally been used for satiric purposes by authors who wish to inveigh earnestly against social, moral, and political excesses.⁸ Indeed, gluttony serves as perhaps the central satiric theme in Olesha's Three Fat Men (Tri tolstiaka, 1924), where a small cruel oligarchy of the “rich” (bogachi) and the “gluttonous” (obzhory) is shown to batten upon the common people, growing fat at the expense of the starving masses.⁹ Andrei Babichev's gluttony in Envy has been interpreted both ways: some critics see this “sausage-maker” (kolbasnik) as the comic figure of Carnival himself (“a bloated fat man, who is often festooned with sausages and other food”),¹⁰ while others consider the Soviet food commissar's great fondness for food as a satiric sign that “the revolutionary has degenerated into a ‘Fat Man’ (that is, he has become a member of a ruling class no less corrupt than that of the three fat men in Olesha's first novel).”¹¹

Regardless of whether we understand Andrei's gluttony comically or satirically, the detailed enumeration provided by the narrator of the various culinary items that go into making up one of Andrei's evening snacks, as well as the narrative focus upon Andrei's physiognomic reactions while he is engaged in the act of eating that snack, tells us as much about Kavalerov's awe at his host's prodigious capacity for ingesting food as it does about the latter's gluttony. In Crowds and Power, in that section where he discusses the psychology of eating (“The Entrails of Power”), Elias Canetti writes that “everything which is eaten is the food of power.”¹² Canetti goes on to explain that the glutton who can eat more than anyone else (what he calls a “champion eater”) is in many cultures accorded great respect and is often taken by people to be their chief. In such cases, Canetti points out, the inherent connection between power and digestion becomes especially clear and obvious. In Envy, Kavalerov seems intuitively aware of the awesome power that is expressed by the gluttony of the corpulent Andrei, for the narrator freely admits that he genuinely fears his host, who, he claims, is in essence “crushing” him (p. 32). Milton Ehre observes that in his overwrought imagination Kavalerov, who “feels oppressed, smothered by the very physical presence of the man,” has made Andrei into a gargantuan figure who, by his sheer bulk, threatens “to destroy him, unman him, devour him.”¹³ Through his role as the proofreader who checks Andrei's official memos, Kavalerov has gained an appreciation for how the modern food-processing machines that are used in the Food Industry Trust's factories are able to “devour” various animal parts and convert them either into food products or industrial articles:

Thus, the blood collected during slaughter may be processed either for food, for the preparation of sausage, or for the manufacture of light and dark albumin, glue, buttons, paints, fertilizers, and feed for cattle, fowl, and fish. The suet of all types of cattle and the fat-retaining organic waste product—for the preparation of edible fats: tallow, margarine, artificial butter, and of industrial fats: stearine, glycerine, and lubricative oils. The heads and hooves of sheep, with the aid of spiral electric drills, automatic cleaning machines, gas-operated lathes, cutting machines, and scalding vats, are processed for food products, industrial bone oil, the hair and bones for various articles.

(p. 29)

These gigantic food-processing machines are understood by Kavalerov as merely mechanical and technological extensions of the mighty director himself. Indeed, as we shall see later when Kavalerov's battle against Andrei for possession of Valia is discussed in more detail, the “devouring” of sacrificial animals (such as sheep) that is brought about by Andrei's machines provides a rather fitting gastronomic and alimentary analogue, in Kavalerov's mind, for the formidable power—sexual as well as political—wielded by the robust director of the Food Industry Trust.

The gastronomical and alimentary dimensions of Andrei's power are not exhausted, however, by his gluttonous appetite and his prodigious capacity for consuming food. They also include his role as the official provider of physical nourishment for the entire Soviet population. Andrei, in other words, not only consumes the food of power; he also exploits the power of food. Characterized by Kavalerov as the avaricious and jealous chief of everything within the government bureaucracy that concerns “glutting” (zhran'e), Andrei is said to desire for himself total control over the production and distribution of foodstuffs in the country (p. 15). The creator of Chetvertak and of the cheap but nutritious thirty-five kopek salami desires, in effect, to become the sole nourisher of the Soviet people. “He'd like to cook all the omelettes, pies, and cutlets, and bake all the bread, himself,” Kavalerov asserts. “He'd like to give birth to food” (p. 15). Where Andrei the consumer threatens to swallow up the world, Andrei the producer threatens to dominate that world by controlling the means of sustenance available to it.

CARNIVORISM: GASTRONOMICAL AND SEXUAL DEVOURING

Ivan Babichev, whose “Conspiracy of Feelings” has emerged out of his rebellion against his powerful, gluttonous brother's socialist plan to eradicate all the old-world emotions associated with the bourgeois epoch, likewise grasps intuitively Canetti's notion of the “food of power,” for he repeatedly describes power relationships in masticatory and alimentary terms that emphasize the destructive and violent aspects of oral ingestion.¹⁴ Unlike Bakhtin, who views the act of eating in a rather benign and bloodless way as a “joyful,” “exultant,” and “triumphant” encounter between man and his world,¹⁵ Olesha recognizes the inherently aggressive and violent nature of our need to feed ourselves. In this respect, the author of Envy shares some very close affinities with Dostoevsky, in whose works gastronomical and sexual desire manifests itself largely as a rapacious appetite for power.¹⁶ In Dostoevsky's fictional world, as I have noted elsewhere, “the ingestion of food—whether it be as a mimetic or metaphoric act—tends to indicate not taste, enjoyment, and nourishment but rather violence, aggression, and domination. Dostoevskian characters … do not merely eat; they seek to devour, digest, and destroy.”¹⁷ A similar semioticization of eating as devouring seems to occur in Olesha's novella as well, where Ivan refers to himself as a “devourer” (pozhiratel') of crayfish. “Look: I don't eat them,” Ivan points out, “I destroy them” (p. 57). Olesha proceeds to pun on the word zhrat' (“to devour”) when he has Ivan say that he devours crayfish “like a high priest” (kak zhrets) or, literally, “like one who devours” (p. 57).

Predatory imagery is likewise invoked in Envy as a way to communicate the bestial nature of gastronomical and sexual power. When Ivan tries to impress upon Kavalerov the necessity of waging an ideological “battle of the epochs” against Andrei Babichev and Volodia Makarov, for instance, he recounts for his newly found disciple an anecdote about how he, as an adolescent boy, had once “torn to pieces” (terzal) a haughty and beautiful twelve-year-old girl who was threatening to eclipse Ivan's superiority and popularity among his peers through her ability to get whatever she wanted and to have everyone worship her.¹⁸ Jealous of the magnetic powers of attraction that this popular girl possessed, the thirteen-year-old Ivan tore the clothes as well as scratched the physiognomy of this poor sacrificial “victim” that he, much like a wild beast, had “caught” in his claws (p. 66). Projecting these same primitive predatory instincts outward toward his brother and the whole new Soviet world that Andrei represents, Ivan imputes to them a similarly bestial appetite for power, violence, and destruction. “They are devouring (zhrut) us like food,” he complains, when explaining to Kavalerov the nature of the current ideological struggle.

They are ingesting the nineteenth century into themselves, like a boa constrictor ingests a rabbit. … They chew and digest. What is of use, they imbibe; what is injurious, they throw away. … Our feelings they throw away, our technology they imbibe!¹⁹

What is also “gnawing” (glozhet) at both Ivan and Kavalerov, the self-proclaimed “king of vulgarians” here realizes, is a feeling of envy that threatens to destroy the two of them unless they act soon. They must either find a way to kill the predatory, carnivorous “beast” of Bolshevik ideology, which threatens to devour them like food, or resign themselves to being eaten up and thus ingested into the “collective body” that some advocates of proletarian culture during the 1920s—such as Aleksei Gastev—envisioned as the incarnation of Soviet society.²⁰

As we learn from his letter in part 1, Kavalerov has likewise declared war against Andrei and had already agreed to join Ivan's conspiratorial army even before meeting Andrei's older brother. “And I too am waging war against you: against a most ordinary barin, egoist, sensualist, and dullard, who is convinced that everything will turn out fine for him,” Kavalerov had written to Andrei. “I am waging war for your brother, for the girl whom you have deceived, for tenderness, for pathos, for personality, for names—like ‘Ophelia’—that are disturbing, for everything that you crush, you remarkable man” (p. 41). Unlike Ivan, however, Kavalerov seems motivated to launch a military campaign against Andrei less for ideological reasons than for personal ones.²¹ Bitterly resentful at his recent displacement from Andrei's divan—and thus his rejection, in favor of Volodia Makarov, as the salami-maker's spiritually adopted son—Kavalerov has also grown increasingly angry that this fat, powerful monster seems to stand in his way romantically as well, blocking his pursuit of the young and beautiful Valia. For the ideologically naive Kavalerov, Andrei's power—his ability to devour and destroy—is understood as a threat not so much to this romantic dreamer himself or even to the old-world values that he embodies. The perceived threat, rather, is that the gluttonous Andrei will swallow up the object of Kavalerov's sexual desire: his beloved Valia.

This affinity between the gastronomical and the sexual that underlies Kavalerov's irrational fear for Valia's safety recalls a long-standing tradition within Western literature and culture of associating women with food. “From time immemorial the female has been identified with edible commodities,” Eira Patniak argues in her study of the literary treatment of the “succulent gender.”²² In Envy, this close identification between women and food is manifested in a number of ways. In a scene that seems to parody the way that Akakii Akakievich's acquisition of a new overcoat is likened to the acquisition of a bride in Gogol's famous short story, Kavalerov describes Andrei Babichev's emotional response to receiving a piece of the newly produced salami by means of a metaphor that conjoins the gastronomical with the nuptial: “Having received a slice of this intestine in his hand, Babichev blushed and even got embarassed at first, just like a bridegroom who has seen how beautiful his young bride is and what an enchanting impression she is producing on the guests” (p. 31). Women and food are likewise linked when Kavalerov dreams of having a beautiful young woman crawl up to him to engage in sexual activity under his comforter, the highly cherished piece of bedding that previously was used by an old woman to cover her steaming hot pies. The narrator claims that he is able to “relish” and “savor” (smakovat') the interval of bliss that precedes sleep under this warm comforter. In addition, Kavalerov reports that he feels positively “gelatinous” (tochno byl ia zhelatinovyi) in the warmth of this comforter, the designs on which turn into “pretzel-shaped biscuits” (v krendelia) (p. 26). When, in a relaxed mood of post-coital satisfaction, he asks the dream girl how much he owes her for her sexual favors, she replies, “Two bits” (chetvertak), a response that is clearly meant to allude to the price that will be charged for a meal in Andrei's communal dining hall of the same name. In addition, Kavalerov describes the lecherous and sexually provocative widow Prokopovich in decidedly gastronomical terms when he says of her that she is “fatty” (zhirna) and that she could be squeezed out like a “liver sausage.”²³

For Kavalerov, this connection between women and food becomes especially palpable in the case of his benefactor's purportedly prurient interest in Valia. In his letter to Andrei, Kavalerov accuses the director of the Food Industry Trust of viewing his own niece as nothing other than a “tasty little morsel” (lakomyi kusochek) to which this unrestrained libertine wishes to “treat himself” (polakomit'sia).²⁴ Later, when he finally musters enough nerve to return to Andrei's apartment and confronts both Babichev and Makarov face to face, Kavalerov tells his young rival that Andrei had lived with Valia during Volodia's absence and that he plans further to “amuse himself” (pobalovat'sia) with her during those four years that will elapse before Volodia finally marries Valia (p. 47). In both of these instances, Kavalerov seems to be projecting onto Andrei his own hedonistic desires, for he depicts the latter's putative gastronomical and sexual consumption of Valia primarily in terms of the code of pleasure: Andrei, in short, is portrayed more as a refined epicure who wants to “taste” the delicate sexual charms of this appealing young girl, than as a gluttonous brute who threatens to “devour” a rather defenseless creature.²⁵ More often than not, however, Kavalerov is inclined to understand Andrei's lustful pursuit of Valia in terms of power rather than pleasure: he views this pursuit, in other words, in terms of gastronomical and sexual violence. Not unlike Ivan, Kavalerov thus resorts to the language of hunting and the imagery of predatory animals when he seeks to describe the rapacious nature of Andrei's sexual and ideological designs upon Valia. Babichev is accused, for example, of wanting to “subdue” (pokorit'), to “tame” (priruchit'), and to “control” (zavladet') this vulnerable young creature (p. 39). “You are a glutton (obzhora) and a gourmandizer (chrevougodnik),” Kavalerov exclaims in the midst of his bitter denunciation of Andrei's purportedly carnal intentions towards Valia. “Will you not stop at anything for the sake of your physiognomy? What will deter you from debauching (razvratit') the girl?” (p. 39). Just as Ivan Babichev is afraid that the powerful Andrei will “devour” him, along with all the other disenfranchised remnants of the dying bourgeois epoch that he represents, so too does Kavalerov fear that the gluttonous director of the Food Industry Trust will “make use of” Valia in the same way that his ferocious food-processing machines utilize animal parts: “You want to use (ispol'zovat') her,” Kavalerov writes, “as you use (I purposely apply your own words here) ‘the heads and hooves of sheep with the aid of cleverly applied electric spiral drills’ (from your brochure)” (p. 39). Since Andrei's alleged debauchery and devouring have become nearly synonymous in the narrator's mind, Kavalerov can be seen as promising to protect Valia against both gastronomical and sexual harm when he vows boldly in his letter that he will not allow Andrei either to “get” Valia or to “use” her. Kavalerov believes that Valia must be defended against what one critic calls “the hungry lusts” of Andrei Babichev, “who would like to eat her.”²⁶

DOMINANCE IMAGINED AND REAL: DIGESTION, GESTATION, CREATION

In our discussion of how Olesha mobilizes gastronomic and alimentary motifs to depict the central power struggle in Envy between the romantic individualism of the old epoch and the utilitarian collectivism of the new epoch, we have seen how food and eating have been semioticized more according to the paradigm of power than that of pleasure. The “power” of food and eating in Olesha's text—expressed through images of gluttony, carnivorism, and predation—has been successfully harnessed by Andrei Babichev and Volodia Makarov. Both the food commissar and his young sidekick, the “new Edison,” are achieving a considerable amount of practical success and worldly fame within this new Soviet society. Ivan Babichev and Nikolai Kavalerov, on the other hand, although they may have managed to win the sympathy of many readers, seem everywhere to have been decisively defeated in their campaign to liberate Valia from the domain of the utilitarian, collectivist, and industrialist ethos of Soviet communism. The utter powerlessness that Ivan and Kavalerov experience in their competition against Andrei and Makarov is made especially manifest through the machine motif in the text.

As noted earlier, the gigantic food-processing machines at the Food Industry Trust's factories, which savagely “devour” the body parts of animals, graphically reify for Kavalerov the considerable power that Andrei seems to possess: that is, his ability to “devour” both gastronomically and sexually. The food commissar's young disciple Volodia, who prides himself in being an “industrial” man and who considers himself to be a “human machine,” boasts that the heavy industry machines in his hometown of Murom are even more powerful, efficient, and ferocious than the ones at Andrei's salami factories in Moscow:

The machines here are real brutes (zver'e)! They are thoroughbreds (porodistye)! Remarkably indifferent, proud machines. Not like the ones in your salami factories. You use primitive means (kustarnichaete). All yours can do is slaughter calves for you. … I am envious of the machine—that's what it is! In what way am I inferior to it? After all, we are the ones who invented and designed it but it has turned out to be much more ferocious than us.

(p. 59)

In sharp contrast to these powerful machines of socialist construction in Moscow and Murom (identified respectively with Andrei and Volodia), their two ideological opponents can only proffer the imaginary machine named Ophelia. Although Ivan advertises his creation as being the “machine of machines” (mashina mashin), the “universal machine” (universal'naia mashina), and the “genius of mechanics” (genii mekhaniki), the Ophelia machine turns out in the end to be only a child of Ivan's overly active imagination: a mirage that does not exist in reality (p. 72).

The Ophelia machine ought to remind us, therefore, that the only real weapon which the severely disempowered Ivan and Kavalerov have at their disposal, in the seemingly hopeless struggle they are waging against Andrei, Volodia, and their entire new epoch, is the power of imagination. The only way these two sociopolitical losers can hope to fight back against their more heavily armed and technologically advanced ideological opponents is by attempting to combat them verbally and epistemologically: that is to say, through the use of colorful imagery and inventive metaphors. Thus Kavalerov finds that he can attack his enemy Andrei by resorting to what Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour calls an “orgy of name calling”: he can mentally debase the powerful Soviet food commissar by surrounding him with demeaning images (either sexual or scatological in nature) that suggest oral and anal fixations.²⁷ Ivan, meanwhile, fights back not only by dreaming up the imaginary Ophelia machine but also by inventing all sorts of apocryphal tales, anecdotes, and legends, the most notable of which, the “Tale of the Meeting of the Two Brothers,” is interpolated into the narrative near the end of chapter 6 in part 2. This skazka represents a pure wish-fulfillment fantasy on Ivan's part: in it, his Ophelia machine destroys his worldly successful brother and dismantles the ideologically threatening Chetvertak project that Andrei has been constructing. Both Kavalerov and Ivan thus attempt to subdue their common foe by means of imaginative projections that are—from a realistic, commonsensical viewpoint—necessarity momentary and illusory in nature.

When Envy is read primarily as a story about the ideological struggle between old-world bourgeois and new-world Communist values, these imaginative (and imaginary) projections tend to be interpreted as feeble, even pathetic attempts on the part of Ivan and Kavalerov to cover up their own serious personal inadequacies. By distorting and transforming the world of reality to fit their own solipsistic version of it, each of these pitiful creatures is merely seeking to compensate for his actual powerlessness within Soviet society. When Envy is read not as a cautionary tale about ideological competition, however, but rather as a story about the artist's inevitable conflict with his society, these imaginative projections by Ivan and Kavalerov can be understood as serving to illustrate the power of the artistic imagination to control reality—its ability to transform the world by means of imaginative, inventive, and idiosyncratic perceptions (or defamiliarizations) of it. This “imagined dominance” that we find in many of Olesha's works, whereby a character of acute consciousness is able—through the power of his creative imagination—to transform a prosaic reality into a poetic one, reflects the magically liberating function that the author of Envy ascribed to artistic creation. “The great strength of art is that it transforms life,” Olesha said in 1936. “It combines parts of actual reality, creates a new picture in which the truth of facts gives place to poetic truth.”²⁸ When we read Envy as an exposition of Olesha's aesthetic principles and we view Ivan and Kavalerov as embodiments of the author's artistic consciousness, then we can understand their “imagined dominance” not as evidence of their real-life powerlessness, but rather as a testimony to the magical power of poetic inspiration. Understood as an elaboration of Olesha's aesthetics of perception, Envy could thus be said to contrast the banal prosaicism of Andrei and Makarov, who dominate the real industrial world of Soviet Russia, with the inspired poeticism of Ivan and Kavalerov, who dwell instead in the “invisible land” of artistic inspiration.²⁹ As artists of the word and the imagination, Ivan and Kavalerov greatly outshine those two decidedly unimaginative artisans, Andrei and Makarov, whose practical achievements in government, industry, and sports are so highly valued and duly recognized by the members of the utilitarian society that surrounds them.

This dichotomy between poetic and prosaic modes of perception seems to parallel the two radically different approaches to the creative process that are presented in Olesha's novella. On the one hand, Andrei and Makarov, as practical men of action, are identified with the socioeconomic and political metamorphosis of their country—the revolutionary transformation of both human beings and social reality—that Bolshevism has sought to bring about in Soviet Russia. The construction of socialism, undertaken by bureaucrats, technicians, and engineers rather than by men of poetic sensibility, is represented in Envy more often as mere mechanical production (or even reproduction) than as true creativity. Indeed, Andrei's much celebrated culinary endeavors—the production of the famous salami and the construction of Chetvertak—are both depicted in reproductive terms that serve to emphasize the grotesque nature of his activities: that is, they are both referred to as the “children” to which this sterile hermaphroditic giant has “given birth.”³⁰ The grotesque imagery associated with this parturitional metaphor becomes especially prominent in the case of the new salami, which is depicted as being phallic as well as excremental in form. It is said to dangle from Andrei's palm “like something alive” (kak nechto zhivoe) and its creator lovingly arranges a “bedding” for it when he lays it down upon his desk (pp. 29-30). Much like a protective, fondling new mother, who sits solicitously by her baby's cradle, Andrei moves away from the desk without taking his eyes off the new salami in its bedding, sitting himself down in an armchair which he finds with his backside. The proud parent is likewise congratulated by his friends, whom he invites to a feast that might be understood to serve here—not unlike the party that celebrates Akakii Akakievich's acquisition of a new overcoat in Gogol's tale—as the equivalent of a christening party. In a text where the gastronomical and alimentary are repeatedly linked with the sexual and the familial, Andrei's successful breeding of a new “species” (poroda) of salami provides a fitting parallel for his ideological plans to breed a whole new species of human being in Soviet Russia. Indeed, Ivan suggests that his brother kidnapped Valia for precisely this purpose: “I know, I know your plans. You want to give my daughter away to Volodia. You want to raise a whole new breed (poroda). My daughter is not an incubator. You won't get her. I won't give her to Volodia. I'll strangle her with my own hands” (p. 58). By the end of the novella, however, Ivan's daughter (whom her father at one point calls the “ovary” of femininity) has indeed gone over—quite willingly, it seems—to Volodia, with whom she will no doubt eventually help to breed an entire generation of “new” Soviet people.³¹

One very effective way that Olesha is able to debase production and reproduction as metaphors for creativity in Envy is to identify them with the human digestive process: that is, with bodily evacuation of excrement. The description of the processing of foodstuffs and industrial byproducts by the machines at Andrei's salami factories, for instance, is anatomized in such a way as to resemble a primitive digestive process: blood, raw fat, and animal parts are put into one end of these “devouring” machines, which process (or “use”) them, and then waste products emerge out the other end of what appears to be an industrialsize alimentary canal. This unflattering parallel between gestation and defecation becomes especially pronounced in Kavalerov's description (rife with intimations of excrementality) of the “birth” of Andrei's famous salami. “Finally the species (poroda) was bred,” Kavalerov writes. “Out of the mysterious incubators crawled a plump, tightly stuffed intestine, rocking with the unwieldy swaying of its trunk” (p. 31). The salami, consequently, presents itself to us as what William Harkins calls a “repulsive parody” of a newborn child, for it reminds us simultaneously of a fetus emerging from the mother's womb and of fecal matter emerging from the rectal end of the alimentary canal. “In its shape,” Harkins writes,

a sausage suggests feces, a symbolism which Olesha's lovingly sensual description of the new sausage does little to mask. The child may confuse the act of defecation with that of giving birth; in the child's view, both excrement and babies are “born,” and Andrei's sausage is in a sense the “child” of his spirit.³²

One clear consequence of Kavalerov's scatalogical description of the birth of Andrei's salami is thus the serious and disturbing implication that the Soviet food commissar's long-awaited, much-ballyhooed “child” is no more significant or appealing than a piece of excrement.

As opposed to this crudely debased and highly parodied brand of creativity that is typical of Andrei, Volodia, and the other unimaginative engineers of socialist construction in Soviet Russia, Ivan and Kavalerov represent true artistic creativity, for they inhabit the “invisible land” of poetic inspiration. These two dreamers are not “breeding” a new “species” of salami or human being; they are instead “giving birth” to imaginative, unorthodox, and creative metaphors. D. G. B. Piper asserts that one of the most important messages in Envy is the author's warning that the industrial transformation of Russia taking place during the 1920s threatens to destroy the domain of art and poetry. According to Piper, Olesha's novella dramatizes the “struggle for existence” between the builder's visible world and the artist's invisible land.³³ Art, understood in Oleshan terms as a means of visually and verbally appropriating the world, enables the creative sensibility, however, to dominate, control, and ultimately transform external reality. “For Olesha, the creative imagination does not merely depict the world,” Ehre writes, “it transforms it.”³⁴ In aesthetic terms, therefore, the true “power” in Olesha's story resides not with the hopelessly uncreative, sterile couple of Andrei and Volodia, but rather with the poetically fecund duo of Ivan and Kavalerov. As instantiations of the twin muses of “Observation” (Kavalerov) and “Imagination” (Ivan), these two castaways from the new modern epoch combine to give the fictional world represented in Envy all of its artistic and creative power. They help to create what one critic has called a “utopia of art.”³⁵

GLUTTONY, EPICUREANISM, AND METAFICTION

For the greater part of this essay we have approached Olesha's text as a story about ideological struggle and explored how power in Envy is manifested in large part through gastronomic language and alimentary imagery. This semioticization of food images and eating metaphors continues to be sustained, however, even when we read Olesha's novella as an elaboration of the author's aesthetic principles. The gluttony of which Andrei Babichev is guilty in an actual physical or gastronomical sense could be said to find its metaphorical and metafictional equivalents in Kavalerov's ocular gluttony (his hunger for perceptual observations) as well as in Ivan's verbal gluttony (his appetite for telling imaginative tales). Kavalerov, who possesses the sensibilities of an artist, has often been considered to serve as Olesha's spokesman on aesthetic matters, since he shares with his creator such a “highly pictorial style” that is designed to “delight the eye.”³⁶ Soon after Envy was first published, one of Olesha's contemporaries noted with some displeasure this ocular gourmandism on the part of the acutely observant Kavalerov. “One could say that Kavalerov is a professional observer,” Zh. El'sberg wrote. “He is a gourmand of observations, partly of sense perceptions in general, but mostly of visual observations in particular.”³⁷

The author of Envy himself invites us to consider Kavalerov's ocular appetite as a metaphorical gourmandism by contrasting his narrator's hunger for perceptions directly to Andrei's hunger for food. Thus, as Kavalerov nears the end of his lengthy description of Andrei's gargantuan midnight snack in the opening chapter of part 1, the food commissar invites his new lodger to join him in this repast. Kavalerov's response is to tell us that he prefers instead to “amuse” himself with “observations” (razvlekaius' nabliudeniiami), implying by this that his feast, unlike Andrei's, will be visual and perceptual in nature rather than physical and gastronomical (p. 15). “If Kavalerov accuses his benefactor, Andrei Babichev, of being a glutton,” writes Beaujour, “in his next breath Kavalerov serves himself up an even more incontinent feast by observing Babichev eat.”³⁸ A similar contrast between Andrei's appetite for food and Kavalerov's appetite for observations is provided when the latter refuses to partake in the feast arranged to celebrate the birth of the new salami. Kavalerov, the perceptive visual artist, prefers instead to “observe” the banquet from the balcony outside Andrei's apartment. “I turned down the invitation to take part in the meal,” he explains. “Instead I observed them from the balcony” (p. 32). Kavalerov thus chooses again to remain “an onlooker, enjoying his own ‘banquet’ of impressions.”³⁹ From the safe distance that the balcony affords him, and from that outside perspective, Kavalerov, as a “new” Tiepolo, is able to paint for us a deliciously ironic verbal canvas, titled “The Banquet at the Home of the Industrial Executive,” a word-painting that far surpasses in artistry the Socialist Realist celebrations of well-being and abundance—such as, for example, Sergei Gerasimov's Feast at the Collective Farm (1937)—that will come to dominate Stalinist art of the 1930s.⁴⁰ Rendered impotent (if not anhedonic) by the intimidating nature of the real world that surrounds him, Kavalerov—in anticipation of the frustrated male protagonists we often find in the postmodern American films of Woody Allen—thus becomes a chronic voyeur, who experiences pleasure mainly in a scopophilic way: that is, by cinematically viewing and observing others.⁴¹

Where Kavalerov's ocular gourmandism and Andrei's physical gluttony dominate the first part of Envy, part 2 is dominated instead by Ivan's verbal gluttony—by samples and paraphrases of his florid oratory, theatrical monologues, rhetorical improvisations, and apocryphal narratives. Whereas his artistic partner Kavalerov hungers greedily for visual stimulation, the speech-making Ivan instead craves the spoken word. Like Gogol, Sterne, and other comic improvisators, Ivan is what Simon Karlinsky would characterize as a “word glutton”: that is, he possesses “the stylistic peculiarity of verbal exuberance—an appetite for words that can only be described as verbal gluttony.”⁴² The clever rhetorical inventions of this Chaplinesque figure—whether they be legends about dream machines and magic soap bubbles or wish-fulfillment fantasies such as the Ophelia machine and the “Tale of the Meeting of the Two Brothers”—are designed not only to delight his listeners but also to help shape their perception of contemporary sociopolitical reality. “But all the same it's good that legends are already being made up,” Ivan explains.

The end of an epoch, a time of transition, needs its own legends and fairy tales. After all, I'm happy that I'm going to be the hero of one such tale. And there's going to be one more legend: about a machine that carried the name “Ophelia.” … The epoch will die with my name on her lips. That is what I'm now directing my efforts toward.

(p. 60)

Ivan, as we know, ultimately fails to sustain this final legend about the Ophelia machine. His “Conspiracy of Feelings” (as well as the spiritual counterrevolution that it seeks to enact) collapses in large part, Kazimiera Ingdahl argues, because Ivan himself is gradually transformed during this story from an artist to an ordinary philistine. In crossing from the land of poetic fantasy to the gray and banal terrain of prosaic reality, Ivan changes, in Ingdahl's words, from a “king of the vulgarians” (korol' poshliakov) to a mere “vulgarian” (poshliak).⁴³

The difference between the kinds of metaphoric gourmandism practiced respectively by Ivan Babichev and Nikolai Kavalerov involves more, however, than simply the particular sense organ (the eye versus the mouth) or the sensory orientation (the ocular versus the oral) that dominates their hunger. Their gluttonous appetites can also be differentiated with respect to the disparate semiotic codes according to which they operate. Like his brother, Ivan understands well how power functions in the world; his keen ideological awareness, as we saw earlier, alerts him to the very real danger that the new epoch will “devour” him and those who share his nostalgia for the values and emotions of the old epoch. Ivan's verbal gluttony, as a consequence, itself operates mainly according to the paradigm of power: his legends, sermons, and other oratorical improvisations are designed in large measure to assert control and dominance. Not unlike the physical gluttony shown by his brother Andrei, Ivan Babichev's verbal gluttony reflects a carnivorous appetite to swallow up the world around him. The creator of the Ophelia machine pursues a violent and apocalyptic course in his campaign to wreak vengeance upon the new epoch that has rejected him. Kavalerov's ocular gourmandism, on the other hand, operates almost entirely according to the paradigm of pleasure. It constitutes, as El'sberg has noted, the gourmandism of an “aesthete” and an “epicure.” “Kavalerov is not inclined to have his appetite satisfied by a ‘plat du jour’ (dezhurnym bliudom), cooked up by life,” El'sberg explains. “He is in a position himself to make up a menu for his own Lucullean feast of observations and sensations.”⁴⁴ Kavalerov's craving for perceptual stimulation, in other words, turns out to be less gluttony than hedonism; indeed, we might say that he is, in his role as an observer, a gourmet rather than a gourmand. As El'sberg points out, Kavalerov clearly “delights” (naslazhdaetsia) in the observational “delicacies” that he serves himself up at the aerodrome scene in part 1 of the novella. “At the aerodrome many wonders were combined together,” reports Kavalerov, who then proceeds to describe them and finally concludes by saying, “I savored (smakoval) this taste, these entrancing contrasts and combinations” (p. 33). This same hedonistic, epicurean sense of “savoring” and “relishing” occurs when Kavalerov speaks of the imaginative flights back to childhood that he is able to entertain during those blissful, somewhat auto-erotic moments between sleep and wakefulness that occur when he lies down on Andrei's divan. “I again know how to prolong this interval,” he notes, “how to savor it (smakovat'), how to fill it with the thoughts that I like” (p. 24).

The power associated with gluttony, Canetti reminds us, derives primarily from the people who witness the glutton—or “champion eater”—in the act of eating. Andrei's gargantuan appetite, his prodigious capacity to ingest food, is interpreted as a sign of his power both by Kavalerov (the observer within the text who directly witnesses it) and by the readers of Envy (the extratextual observers who are presented with Kavalerov's narrative depiction of it). The power accorded to Andrei by those who live within the fictional world he inhabits is likewise a function of his being perceived as a “big man” in both the literal and figurative senses of that term: he impresses people by his enormous physical size as well as by his high-ranking government position. “It was very pleasant to see Babichev for two reasons: first, he was a famous person; and second, he was fat,” it is reported in Ivan's fantasy tale about the unveiling of Chetvertak. “Fatness (tolshchina) made this famous man endearing. They gave Babichev an ovation. Half of the applause was to salute his fatness” (p. 75). Evidence of Ivan's verbal gluttony, especially of his dazzling rhetorical performances in beer halls, is likewise available for an audience of contemporaries to witness. Indeed, apocryphal legends about Andrei's brother—already well known to his fellow drinking buddies—soon begin to make the rounds among a sizeable portion of the local population as well. “Conversations began to circulate about the new preacher,” the narrator states in part 2. “From the beer halls the rumor spread to apartments, crept along service entrances into communal kitchens. … The gossip penetrated into offices, rest homes, and markets” (p. 59).

Whereas both Andrei's physical gluttony and Ivan's verbal gluttony are on display for an audience that exists within the fictional world created in the text, Kavalerov manifests his ocular gourmandism—made apparent through his role as the narrative eye (and narrative “I”) in part 1—exclusively to an audience that exists only outside the text. We, the readers of Envy, are the only ones who are truly able to witness and appreciate the hedonistic delight that this perceptual “aesthete” and “epicure” enjoys in his idiosyncratic visual observations and daring flights of imagination. As a result, Kavalerov's gourmandism could be said to replicate Olesha's own alleged “epicureanism” of details as a writer, for the author of Envy likewise serves up to his readers what one critic has characterized as an “intemperate feast.”⁴⁵ Such a metafictional use of gastronomy in prose fiction is not without historical precedent, of course, especially among writers of satire and comedy; Rabelais, Fielding, and Gogol, among other authors, have invoked the comparison of the literary artist to a chef who serves up a rich and tasty verbal feast to his readers. As Andrew Varney observes, it is virtually impossible “to describe aesthetic experience, which we might normally think of as purely abstract and intellectual, without referring to food or the processes of consuming it.”⁴⁶ If writing is understood metaphorically as cooking, and reading as eating, then we see that the power of art consists in its capability to transform not only the world—changing the raw into the cooked, nature into culture—but also the people who live in it: that is, the readers of the text. Both the chef and the writer perform what Ronald Tobin has characterized as “an archetypal, sacred, and creative act that produces original, complex products which change the consumer emotionally, intellectually, and physically.”⁴⁷ In some very fundamental ways, a great work of literature, like a good meal, transforms those who are fortunate enough to be served and to consume the artist's creation.

What makes Olesha's metafictional use of gastronomy and alimentation unique, however, is that his authorial surrogate, Kavalerov, in his capacity as narrator, feeds not only us; through his position as a hungry observer of visual phenomena and imaginative fancy, he also feeds himself. Beaujour is no doubt correct when she asserts that Kavalerov, considered as a member of his society, is “not a producer, just a consumer.”⁴⁸ But when he is considered as an observer and a narrator, Kavalerov both consumes and produces. What Andrei does at the level of physical actuality, ingesting both the food of power and the power of food, Kavalerov does at the level of artistic metaphor and narrative metafiction. The opulent visual feasts that he prepares are intended for the pleasure of both himself and his audience. In a gastronomical and alimentary sense, he serves simultaneously as both a chef and an eater; in a literary and metafictional sense, meanwhile, he is at once a writer and a reader. Perhaps the correct metaphor to employ when describing Olesha's aesthetics, therefore, is neither gourmandism nor epicureanism, but rather voyeurism—or even metavoyeurism. For we, as readers of Envy, delight equally in “observing” Kavalerov, Ivan, and their creator, Olesha, as they in turn attentively “observe” the world around them and imaginatively transform it by means of various perceptual tricks and verbal manipulations. Although the artist, as Henri Bergson insisted, perceives the world for the pure pleasure of perceiving, the artist's ultimate task remains, nonetheless, to share those original and insightful perceptions with others and thus help us, his readers, to see the world anew as well.⁴⁹ In the case of Olesha's Envy, where gluttony evolves from metonym to metaphor to metafiction, we are invited to a feast that we are able simultaneously to observe (as voyeurs) and to partake in (as consumers). We can, in a sense, have our proverbial cake (or sausage) and eat it too. Best of all, perhaps, this invitation to a tastefully prepared, colorfully presented, and abundantly provisioned literary meal allows us to gain entry into that marvelous “invisible land” where our fine dining experience takes place.

Notes

1. M. M. Bakhtin, Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia kul'tura srednevekov'ia i renessansa (Moscow, 1990), 24. For Bakhtin's treatment of banquet imagery, the grotesque body, and the material bodily lower stratum in Rabelais' works, see especially pp. 305-480. Victor Peppard, who is one of the few critics to discuss the use of carnival imagery in Olesha's works, considers Envy to be “not only Olesha's most richly carnivalistic work but also a special exemplar of carnivalistic fiction in twentieth-century Russian fiction.” See The Poetics of Yury Olesha (Gainesville, 1989), 76-77.

2. Aleksandr Zholkovskii notes that food plays a “central role” in Envy and that the food motif “overflows into the theme of love and sex.” See “Dialog Bulgakova i Oleshi,” Sintaksis 20 (1987): 102-4.

3. Zavist', in Iurii Olesha, Izbrannoe (Moscow, 1974), 13. All further citations from Envy will be noted parenthetically in the text where appropriate and will come from this edition. This opening bathroom scene provides a good example of what Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour calls the use of “imagined description” in Envy, a technique where we get “the verbalization of something which the describer does not actually see. The detail must be ascribed to the construct of the imaginer, not to the actual scene.” See her seminal study, The Invisible Land: A Study of the Artistic Imagination of Jurii Olesha (New York, 1970), 47n.12.

4. Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, 1997), 4.

5. Neil Cornwell provides several edifying examples in Envy of how “angles of presentation can affect the reader's perception of particular characters and events.” One of the characters most affected by this technique, he notes, is Andrei Babichev, who “is surrounded with derisive imagery of orifices and gluttony” by the narrator Kavalerov. See “Olesha's Envy,” in Essays in Poetics, no. 1 (1982):121.

6. Wayne Wilson asserts that by casting an “evil eye” on Andrei, “Kavalerov hopes to transform his godlike dimensions into scatalogical waste.” See “The Objective of Jurij Oleša's Envy,” Slavic and East European Journal 18, no. 1 (1974): 31-32.

7. In The Artist and the Creative Act: A Study of Jurij Oleša's Novel “Zavist',” trans. Charles Rougle (Stockholm, 1984), Kazimiera Ingdahl discusses this Bronze Horseman connection (pp. 69-75). “For Andrej is in a sense the Peter the Great of the new age, continuing the tsar's rational program of construction by collectivizing and modernizing the Russian state,” Ingdahl notes. “His building of the collective lunchroom ‘Četvertak’ may be interpreted as a degraded counterpart to Peter's founding of the capital of the future Russian empire” (p. 70).

8. Robert Palter discusses gluttony in fiction at some length in his “Reflections of Food in Literature,” Texas Quarterly 21 (1978): 6-32.

9. Olesha, Izbrannoe, 186-87.

10. Peppard, The Poetics of Yury Olesha, 60, 80.

11. Andrew Barratt, Yurii Olesha's “Envy” (Birmingham, 1981), 43. Barratt is paraphrasing here the view expressed by A. Belinkov in Sdacha i gibel'sovetskogo intelligenta: Iurii Olesha (Madrid, 1976).

12. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York, 1962), 219.

13. Milton Ehre, “Olesha's Zavist': Utopia and Dystopia,” Slavic Review 50, no. 3 (1991): 604.

14. Ivan's rebellious “Conspiracy of Feelings” against the corpulent Andrei thus bears some unmistakable affinities with the war against “the gluttonous and the wealthy” that Prospero helps to launch in Tri tolstiaka. “Your brains are afloat in fat,” the captured Prospero tells the Three Fat Men. “You can't see any further than your own fat bellies” (Olesha, Izbrannoe, 117, 118).

15. Bakhtin, Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable, 310.

16. Janet Tucker, who refers to the author of Envy as “an heir of Dostoevsky,” correctly notes that “Oleša, like Dostoevsky, links power and sex.” See Revolution Betrayed: Jurij Oleša's “Envy” (Columbus, 1996), 25, 80.

17. Ronald D. LeBlanc, “An Appetite for Power: Predators, Carnivores, and Cannibals in Dostoevsky's Fiction,” in Food in Russian History and Culture, ed. Musya Glants and Joyce Toomre (Bloomington, 1997), 126.

18. In Tri tolstiaka, the Three Fat Men condemn the actress Suok to being “torn to pieces” by the wild animals maintained in the Palace bestiary. Her death sentence reads, in part, “Ee rasterzaiut zveri” (Olesha, Izbrannoe, 183).

19. Zavist', 73. This predatory creature also makes his appearance in Olesha's Tri tolstiaka, where the muscles of the strongman Lapitup are seen as moving under the skin “like rabbits swallowed by a boa constrictor.” Likewise, Tutti, the heir to the Three Fat Men's throne, has been raised with a bestiary so that the future ruler may learn to imitate the predatory behavior of wild animals. “Let him see how the tigers are fed on raw meat and how the boa constrictor swallows up live rabbits. Let him listen to the voices of bloodthirsty beasts and look into their devilishly crimson eyes. Then he will learn to be cruel” (Olesha, Izbrannoe, 126, 160). Political rule by predatory beasts will later be depicted in Soviet literature by Fazil Iskander in his satiric beast fable, Rabbits and Boa Constrictors (Kroliki i udavy, 1982).

20. See chapter 1, “The Creation of the Collective Body,” of Naiman's Sex in Public for an interesting discussion of Gastev's role in formulating the notion of the “collective body” during the 1920s (esp. 65-78).

21. “If Kavalerov bears a personal grudge against the Bolshevik regime,” Andrew Barratt notes, “Ivan displays an opposition which is more recognizably ideological” (Yurii Olesha's “Envy,” 52).

22. Eira Patniak, “The Succulent Gender: Eating Her Softly,” in Literary Gastronomy, ed. David Bevan (Amsterdam, 1988), 59-74.

23. Zavist', 25. Linkage between women and food is also established when Kavalerov, in an instance of quasidirect discourse, paraphrases Anechka's advice to him that he give up his quest for the ephemeral girl of his dreams (the one with the dainty hands and the egg-shaped face). He uses here the same demonstrative pronoun—the feminine form ta (“that one”) (p. 25)—which Andrei Babichev later uses when speaking of the prize-winning salami that he wishes to send to an exhibition in Milan (p. 30).

24. Ibid., 39, 40. The connection between gastronomical and sexual pleasure is made even more explicit at the lexical level in Russian by the common element (lakom) found in such expressions as “tasty morsel” (lakomyi kusok), “delicacy” (lakomstvo), “gourmand” (lakomka), “to treat oneself” (lakomit'sia), and “to have a sweet tooth” (byt'lakomkoi).

25. Ronald W. Tobin distinguishes between the very different semioticizations of the acts of eating and making love as “tasting” (goûter) versus “devouring” (manger) in “Les mets et les mots: gastronomie et sémiotique dans L'Ecole des femmes,” Semiotica 51, no. 3 (1984): 133-45.

26. Robert Payne, “Introduction,” in Yuri Olyesha, “Love” and Other Stories, trans. Robert Payne (New York, 1967), xv.

27. Beaujour, The Invisible Land, 47. “Kavalerov surrounds Babichev with symbols of food and excrement,” Beaujour writes. “He tries to further degrade Babichev by a whole complex of images which tend to identify even the wonderful new salami Babichev has developed with bowels and intestines” (ibid.).

28. “Urii Olesha Talks with his Readers,” International Literature, 1936, no. 3:83.

29. This contention is made, for instance, by I. G. Panchenko, who argues that Olesha in his novel contrasts “the value of the inner world of man, his capacity for vivid emotions” (revealed in Kavalerov and Ivan) to “a prosaicness, a lack of spirituality” (found in Andrei and Volodia). See “Problema garmonicheskoi lichnosti v romane Iu. Oleshi Zavist' i ego dramaturgicheskom variante Zagovor chuvstv,” Voprosy russkoi literatury 2, no. 24 (1974): 33.

30. William Harkins considers both of Andrei's culinary creations—the salami and Chetvertak—to be “a parody of true creativity.” See “The Theme of Sterility in Olesha's Envy,” Slavic Review 25, no. 3 (1966): 447.

31. Olesha, however, explicitly discredits such reproductive “breeding” in “The Cherry Stone,” where we are told that a child of the loins is far inferior to a child of the artist's mind. In fact, the character Fedia in that story asserts that dreamers such as himself should be producing not children, but rather “trees for the world” (Olesha, Izbrannoe, 218).

32. Harkins, “The Theme of Sterility,” 447. Harkins goes so far as to speculate whether the novella's opening scene, when Andrei is sitting on the toilet defecating, might not be the very moment when the new salami—the product of Andrei's sterile creativity—is actually engendered (447 n.9). At the lexical level, Olesha's use of the word chrevougodnik (rather than gurman) to denote Andrei as a “gourmand” links the womb (chrevo) with the stomach, and thus helps further to associate parturition with defecation. In “Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex,” Freud observed that children in fantasy frequently turn the evacuation of the bowels into the act of childbirth. See The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. A. A. Brill (New York, 1938), 590. In private correspondence with me (letter of 21 October 1991), Daniel Rancour-Laferriere confirms that the “linkage of digestion and gestation is traditional in psychoanalysis (cf. theories of ‘anal birth’).”

33. D. G. B. Piper, “Yuriy Olesha's Zavist', An Interpretation,” Sylvanite and East European Review 48, no. 110 (1970): 31, 39. “The poetry of Kavalerov's vision conflicts with the prose of scaffolding and concrete,” Piper notes. “The industrialisation of the '20s threatens the ‘invisible land’ of poetry” (p. 31).

34. Ehre, “Olesha's Zavist': Utopia and Dystopia,” 609.

35. Ibid., 602. Janet Tucker provides a similar reading. “Oleša's invocation of a higher reality through Ivan's adventures and fables and Kavalerov's experiments with visual reality,” she writes, “are Oleša's way of creating a multidimensional reality through art, a reality transcending Soviet determinism.” See “Jurij Oleša's Envy: A Re-examination,” Slavic and East European Journal 26, no. 1 (1982): 58.

36. Ehre, “Olesha's Zavist': Utopia and Dystopia,” 609. For discussions of Olesha's pictorial style and Kavalerov's powers of observation see also Marietta Chudakova, Masterstvo Iuriia Oleshi (Moscow, 1972), 66-67; Wayne Wilson, “The Objective of Jurij Oleša's Envy,” 31-40; and Nils Åke Nilsson, “Through the Wrong End of Binoculars: An Introduction to Jurij Oleša,” in Major Soviet Writers: Essays in Criticism, ed. Edward J. Brown (New York, 1973), 254-79. Barratt warns, however, of the danger of overestimating Kavalerov's “much-vaunted powers of imagination,” which he interprets as a psychological symptom of this character's alienation from the world of reality (Yurii Olesha's “Envy,” 14-16).

37. Zh. El'sberg, “Zavist' Iu. Oleshi kak drama intelligentskogo individualizma,” in El'sberg, Krizis poputchikov i nastroeniia intelligentsii (Moscow, 1930), 69.

38. Beaujour, The Invisible Land, 39.

39. Ibid.

40. In “Food as Art: Painting in Late Soviet Russia,” Musya Glants discusses how food—as an important symbol of abundance and well-being—was widely used during the Stalinist period “to glorify the beauty of Soviet life and the happiness of the people” (p. 219). See Food in Russian History and Culture, ed. Musya Glants and Joyce Toomre (Bloomington, 1997), 215-37. Rimgaila Salys, meanwhile, traces the subtext of Italian rococo art—and Tiepolo's The Banquet of Cleopatra (c. 1743-44) in particular—operative in Envy, a subtext that undermines the proto-Socialist Realist style emerging within Soviet art and culture of the late 1920s. See “Sausage Rococo: The Art of Tiepolo in Olesha's Envy,” in Olesha's “Envy”: A Critical Companion, ed. Rimgaila Salys (Evanston, 1999), 101-22.

41. In “Crimes and Misdemeanors in Manhattan,” Norman K. Denzin discusses how “anhedonia” turns many of Allen's male characters into voyeurs. See Denzin, Images of Postmodern Society: Social Theory and Contemporary Cinema (London, 1991), 95-106.

42. Simon Karlinsky, “Portrait of Gogol as a Word Glutton (With Rabelais, Sterne, and Gertrude Stein as Background Figures),” California Slavic Studies 5 (1970): 170. In a similar vein, Panchenko observes that Ivan's letter to Andrei contains traces of what he calls “verbal buffoonery” (slovesnogo skomoroshestva). See “Problemy garmonicheskoi lichnosti,” 35.

43. Ingdahl, The Artist and the Creative Act, 106.

44. El'sberg, “Zavist' Iu. Oleshi kak drama intelligentskogo individualizma,” 70.

45. N. Berkovskii, “O prozaikakh,” Zvezda, no. 12 (1929): 152.

46. Andrew Varney, “Art and the Alimentary Canal: Reading and Eating in Defoe and Fielding,” in Food for Thought, ou Les avatars de la nourriture, ed. Marie-Claire Rouyer (Bourdeaux, 1998), 174. “Whether we like it or not,” Varney adds, “the alimentary canal is a major highway of aesthetic discourse, and almost all parts of it are traversed as we savour and digest our reading” (p. 174).

47. Ronald Tobin, Tarte à la crème: Comedy and Gastronomy in Molière's Theater (Columbus, 1990), 4. Ehre strongly disapproves of this trope of the literary artist as chef. “Babichev produces articles for consumption, things that are to be devoured,” Ehre writes, “the artist creates things that are alive, like cherry trees. They exist not to be eaten but to be contemplated. … Objects of art outlast their consumers” (“Olesha's Zavist': Utopia and Dystopia,” 610). My argument, however, is that in Envy the visual and verbal “meals” provided by the artist (whether Kavalerov, Ivan, or Olesha himself) can be both contemplated and consumed. For studies that examine alimentation as a trope for artistic creation and reader reception see Lindsey Tucker, Stephen and Bloom at Life's Feast: Alimentary Symbolism and the Creative Process in James Joyce's “Ulysses” (Columbus, 1984); Sarah Thornton, “Digestion as a ‘Fleshly Poetry’: Diet and Discourse in the Victorian Novel,” in Food for Thought, 183-201; and Bruce Boehrer, The Fury of Men's Gullets: Ben Jonson and the Digestive Canal (Philadelphia, 1997).

48. Beaujour, The Invisible Land, 39.

49. In “Through the Wrong End of Binoculars,” 269-74, Nilsson discusses both Henri Bergson's aesthetic views (the idea that the artist perceives for the pure pleasure of perceiving) and Aleksandr Voronskii's theory of literature (the idea that the artist's responsibility is to share his or her perceptions with the reader).