SOURCE: LeBlanc, Ronald D. “The Soccer Match in Envy.”¹Slavic and East European Journal 32, no. 1 (spring 1988): 55-71.

[In the following essay, LeBlanc, using the works of other Russian writers for comparison, argues that the soccer match in Envy is an apt metaphor for the romantic competition in the novel.]

Georg Lukács begins his essay “Narrate or Describe?” by making a comparison between the “depiction” of a horse race in Zola's Nana (1880) and the “narration” of the steeplechase in Tolstoj's Anna Karenina (1877). What is so striking about these two scenes, Lukács argues, is the vastly different way the authors fit them into the narrative structure of their respective novels. With Zola, the horse race serves as a mere descriptive tableau for the reader, where “the events are loosely related to the plot and could easily be eliminated” (110). With Tolstoj, on the other hand, the race is “no mere tableau but rather a series of intensely dramatic scenes which provide a turning point in the plot” (111). Tolstoj thus raises the horse race from the realm of mere incident and integrates it into what Lukács calls a “critical dramatic context”—specifically, the Vronskij-Anna-Karenin love triangle. The critical distinction Lukács makes between Tolstoj's “narration” and Zola's “description” raises some interesting questions with regard to another athletic competition that is portrayed on the pages of a Russian novel: Jurij Oleša's memorable depiction of a soccer match in Envy (Zavist'; 1927). Although Oleša's novel is a decidedly modern work, written during a period of intense artistic experimentation in the Soviet Union, the description of the soccer match in Envy does share a surprisingly large number of affinities with the steeplechase scene described in Anna Karenina. Like Tolstoj's celebrated horse race, Oleša's soccer match is integrated very tightly into a critical dramatic context, since it is an event whose significance is directly related to the novel's central love triangle of Nikolaj Kavalerov, Valja Babičeva, and Volodja Makarov. Indeed, in Oleša's novel, where competition itself becomes a major theme, the soccer match serves as a highly appropriate metaphor for the contest, fraught with ideological and psychological significance, being waged for Valja Babičeva's affection. What distinguishes Oleša's use of the sports trope from Tolstoj's and makes it so characteristically modern, however, is the way the author of Envy deliberately enshrouds the final outcome of the soccer match—and thus by extension, the outcome of the novel's central competition—in a mist of ambiguity.

Oleša's novel constitutes one of the most interesting, bizarre, and original works in all of Soviet literature. When it was first published in 1927, Envy received rave reviews both in the U.S.S.R. and in the West, bringing Oleša the type of instant fame that can only be compared, as Struve has noted (106), to Dostoevskij's legendary overnight success with Poor Folk (Bednye ljudi) in 1846. That Soviet as well as Western critics should continue today to overcome the formidable ideological barriers dividing them in order to praise Oleša's novel merely testifies to the widespread ambiguity that informs this work.² “Envy is a complex novel,” William Harkins observes,

sometimes described as expressionistic, written in a variety of styles and with many planes of meaning. Elements of realist, romanticist, and symbolist styles are present. Dreams, fantasies, and lies are introduced, often as reality. It is a work in which the author's ideological intentions are far from clear or unambiguous, a work deeply hedged with irony.

(443)

The themes developed in Oleša's novel—primary among them the conflict between the old world and the new—were certainly not original in Russian literature, especially in Soviet Russia of the 1920s, when bright, daring, and innovative young writers such as Belyj, Pil'njak, Babel', Zamjatin, and Fedin were writing prose works that dealt boldly with the cataclysmic effects of the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War upon their homeland and its people.³ What is original about Oleša's novel, critics agree, is its rather unorthodox treatment of such themes, its highly symbolic use of imagery, and its somewhat expressionistic development of sjužet and portrayal of character. Indeed, with its deliberately simplistic fabula, its small cast of characters, and its abundance of striking imagery, Envy is a work that clearly invites metaphoric interpretation and suggests allegorical meaning.

In an article that examines the sexual imagery in Envy, William Harkins argues that the hero of the novel, Nikolaj Kavalerov, is engaged upon two main quests: first of all, he is seeking after a father and, secondly, he is searching for a love object (450). In both of these quests Kavalerov's efforts are being thwarted mainly by his chief competitor and ideological opposite, Volodja Makarov. The primary conflict in Envy is thus between the new Soviet man of action, epitomized by Makarov, whose values and mental outlook are favorably attuned to the industrialist, productivist, collectivist Weltanschauung of the new regime in Russia, and the twentieth-century version of the Russian “superfluous man,” represented by Kavalerov, whose old-world romanticism is essentially alien to the rationalism, realism, and scientific pragmatism of the new communist order.⁴ By the end of part 1 of Envy, which is told from the subjective perspective of Kavalerov himself, the hero has already been defeated in the first of his two quests. In searching for a father, he competes unsuccessfully with Makarov for the affection of Andrej Babičev, the communist bureaucrat whose dream it is to create the ultimate sausage and to build enormous but cost-effective communal dining halls throughout all of Soviet Russia. Babičev has adopted the athletic young Volodja Makarov, who once saved his life, as his live-in protégé. While Makarov is away at school, however, Andrej picks the drunk Kavalerov up off the street and allows him, in Volodja's absence, to stay at his place and sleep on his sofa. Babičev's sofa, where Volodja used to sleep and where Kavalerov now does, thus becomes an emblem of the paternal affection Andrej is capable of bestowing upon these two young men. The competition for that affection is clearly won by Makarov, for upon his return to Andrej's home he regains his rightful claim to the sofa Kavalerov had temporarily usurped. As the loser in this competition, Kavalerov is therefore compelled to give up his place at Babičev's and return to his former bed at the widow Anečka's. And in place of Andrej Babičev, the successful Soviet man as father-figure, Kavalerov is left with Andrej's eccentric, unorthodox, and decidedly unsuccessful brother, Ivan Babičev.

In part 2 of the novel, which is narrated not by Kavalerov but by a new third-person narrator, the hero's second quest continues to put him into direct competition with Volodja Makarov, as they both vie for the affection of Ivan Babičev's daughter Valja. Here again Kavalerov is defeated in his quest by Makarov, with the decisive moment being, as we shall see, the soccer match near the end of part 2.⁵ The reader first learns of this competition between Kavalerov and Makarov for Valja's affection through the personal letters the two young men write to the spiritual father they both seek so ardently, Andrej Babičev. Volodja's letter, among other things, assures the reader that the competition for Valja is not simply wishful thinking on Kavalerov's part, not simply the delusion of his romantic imagination. Indeed, Volodja betrays in his letter a very real concern for Kavalerov's capacity to usurp both Andrej Babičev's paternal affection and Valja's love:

And how will it be now? Well, I will return—what will happen to your eccentric? And what if your eccentric breaks down and cries? And what if he doesn't want to leave your sofa? And you'll even feel sorry for him. Yes, I'm jealous. … Don't you forget me, Andrej Petrovič. What if I arrive and it turns out that this Kavalerov of yours is now your best friend, I'm forgotten about, and he's taken my place for you? He does calisthenics together with you, and he goes to the construction site. So what? And maybe he's turned out to be a remarkable guy, much more pleasant than I am—maybe you have become friends with him, and I, the Edison of the new century, will have to pack my bags and get the hell out. Maybe you're sitting with him and with Ivan Petrovič and with Val'ka—and you're laughing at me? And maybe your Kavalerov has married Val'ka? Tell me the truth. In that case, I'll kill you, Andrej Petrovič. I swear. For betraying our conversations, our plans. Do you understand?

(58-60; translations mine, RDL)

Volodja's letter, with its mention of talks and plans between himself and Andrej, also makes it clear that the quest for Valja's affection is to a large extent contingent upon success in attaining (or retaining) Andrej's paternal affection, since Volodja's apprehensions seem based largely upon the power that the elder Babičev wields in his parental role as matchmaker.

Kavalerov's letter to Babičev likewise reveals that the hero's quests for Andrej's affection and Valja's love are indeed very closely intertwined. In this letter we see that Kavalerov regards Andrej-the-father rather than Volodja-the-suitor as his primary competitor for Valja, as his main opponent. “You will not get her,” he writes to Andrej. “She will be my wife. I have dreamt about her my whole life. You and I will wage war. We'll do battle!” (51). This young girl serves as the object of desire not only for Kavalerov and Makarov as competitive suitors, however, but also for Andrej and Ivan Babičev as competitive fathers in search of a daughter. Ivan wants his daughter to serve as the symbol of femininity for the old, dying epoch he represents: “I sought a being of the female sex. I sought a being in whom all the feminine qualities were combined together. I sought the ovary of feminine qualities. Femininity was the glory of the old epoch. I wanted to shine with this femininity. … I found such a being. Alongside me. Valja. I thought that Valja would shine over a dying epoch” (92-93). Uncle Andrej, on the other hand, seeks to enlist Valja among the ranks of the new people in the Soviet epoch he represents. The competition between Andrej and Ivan Babičev for Valja-as-daughter thus becomes enmeshed with the competition between Kavalerov and Makarov for Valja-as-lover. The generational conflict, immortalized within nineteenth-century Russian literature through Fathers and Sons (1861), is portrayed in Oleša's novel, much as it had been in Turgenev's, along ideological lines that divide both the “fathers” and the “sons.” The competitions assume obvious Oedipal dimensions in Envy, however, for Kavalerov seems to consider Andrej-the-father rather than Volodja-the-son as his chief rival for young Valja, and Ivan seems to consider Volodja rather than Andrej as his chief rival. “I don't even blame Andrej,” Ivan confesses at one point, “as much as that swine who lives at his place … that boy has ruined my life. Oh, if only he'd get kicked in the kidneys playing soccer” (92). The competition between Kavalerov and Makarov for Valja's affection thus becomes mixed not only with their competition for Andrej's paternal affection but also with the competition between the Babičev brothers for Valja's “filial” loyalty.⁶

The conversation between Ivan Babičev and Nikolaj Kavalerov at the beer-hall in part 2, chapter 4, sets in motion their conspiracy to free Valja from what they both see as the baleful influence Andrej Babičev and Volodja Makarov have been exerting upon her. Indeed, Ivan here openly encourages Kavalerov to murder Andrej: “Kill him. Leave an honorable remembrance of yourself as the hired assassin of the century” (98). Ivan, of course, wishes mainly to get revenge on his brother for having stolen his daughter away from him. Not long after their beer-hall conversation, however, Ivan and Kavalerov eavesdrop on Volodja and Valja practicing the high jump in her courtyard and suddenly Ivan's hopes of ever regaining his daughter's allegiance seem forever shattered. The sight of these two “new people” training for athletic competition, under the watchful eye of Andrej Babičev, leads Ivan to the realization that he has lost his daughter irretrievably to the new Soviet “camp” (122). Grabbing her legs as she sits astride the stone wall surrounding the courtyard, Ivan confesses to her that he has been mistaken: “I thought that all feelings had perished—love and loyalty and tenderness, but all that has remained, Valja … only not for us; for us there remains only envy and more envy” (122). In desperation, like some tragic figure out of Shakespeare, Ivan begs Valja to tear out his eyes. As a final mark of his capitulation, Ivan proposes to Kavalerov that they drink a toast “to the youth that has passed, to the conspiracy of feelings that has collapsed” (123).

Kavalerov, however, violently refuses to accept either Ivan's invitation to drink or his cynical assessment that their situation is, in fact, hopeless. Grabbing Ivan by the collar and calling him a son-of-a-bitch, Kavalerov promises to prove to him that his youth has not in fact passed: “I will prove it to you … Tomorrow—do you hear me?—tomorrow at the soccer match I'll kill your brother” (123). The soccer match at which Kavalerov will supposedly murder Andrej Babičev is the game scheduled for the next day between a visiting German team and the Soviet national team on which Makarov plays.⁷ Kavalerov wants to kill Andrej there for a variety of reasons. First of all, he is motivated by the desire to take revenge on the father figure who has rejected and thus offended him. Secondly, he is seeking, if not fame, at least notoriety, as the “hired assassin of the century.” And, finally, he wishes to eliminate the person who seems to stand in the way of his having Valja. Determined to avenge his whole unsuccessful life, Kavalerov apparently believes that by murdering Andrej, he will at last attain the object of his desire. “I will get Valja—as a prize for everything,” he had declared earlier in part 1 of the novel, “for the humiliations, for the youth I never managed to see, for my dog's life” (51).⁸ Thus Oleša, as Victor Peppard has noted, “creates the expectation that a main conflict of the novel, the one between Kavalerov and Andrei, will be resolved in dramatic fashion at the game” (183). We should bear in mind, however, that no actual plan for this murder is ever revealed, nor is any preparation evident. There is, for example, never any explicit mention made of a weapon.⁹ Thus the reader may well be inclined to dismiss Kavalerov's threat to kill Andrej as simply another instance of idle talk on the part of a character who, as has become quite clear from his narration in part 1 of the novel, tends to be a man of words rather than a man of action.

The soccer match, in any event, clearly has enormous significance for Kavalerov at a metaphorical level. Here it serves as a symbolic contest between the romantic notion of individual glory (embodied by the German team), to which Kavalerov adheres, and the pragmatic notion of collective effort (embodied by the Soviet team), with which Makarov is associated. Indeed, to the two quests which Harkins has mentioned, the quest for a father and the quest for a love object, there could be added a third quest in which Kavalerov is engaged throughout the novel: namely, the quest for glory. It is the German soccer star Gecke, with his flamboyant and individualistic style of play, who best personifies Kavalerov's romantic dream of “European” glory—of individual achievement which displays one's unique personality and talents.¹⁰ As the hero himself had put it earlier, “In Europe there is broader scope for a talented man to attain glory. There they love another's glory. … We have no path for the individual attainment of success. … I want to show the power of my personality. I want my own personal glory” (24). Gecke could thus be said to serve as a surrogate for Kavalerov in this sporting event. The soccer match itself, as a result, becomes a contest not merely between two teams, the German and the Soviet, or between two individual players, Gecke the offensive scorer and Makarov the defensive goalie. It also becomes a contest between two diametrically opposed and competing ideologies: between the romantic, European notion of glory as individual achievement and the practical, Soviet notion of glory as collective effort. In this ideological sense, the contest at the soccer match reflects the conflict in Oleša's novel between the old-epoch values of Ivan Babičev and Kavalerov and the new-epoch values of Andrej Babičev and Makarov. The prize in this ideological competition is, once again, Valja Babičeva, because Kavalerov's romantic dream of glory is tightly linked with his dream of winning Valja's affections. “I will get Valja, not you,” he has told Andrej earlier. “We will resound in Europe, there where they love glory” (51).

The soccer match is significant for Volodja Makarov, on the other hand, because athletic prowess and success in life's endeavors are central to his identity as the new Soviet man of action.¹¹ Soccer ability is, after all, his most remarkable quality in the new epoch; consequently, it is instrumental in maintaining his attraction, in sexual as well as ideological terms, for both Valja and Andrej. As a “positive hero,” whose dedication to an ideological cause and whose iron-willed discipline are reflected in superior physical prowess, Makarov has a direct literary predecessor, of course, in Raxmetov, the spartan, ascetic strongman portrayed in Černyševskij's famous monument of nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary fiction, What Is To Be Done? (1863). Given the mythic function that sports have come to fulfill within modern culture, especially in the Soviet Union, Volodja Makarov may be said to constitute a twentieth-century version of those princely warriors and bogatyrs—such as Aleksandr Nevskij, Dmitrij Donskoj, Il'ja Muromec, Dobrynja Nikitič, and Aleša Popovič, among others—whose heroic exploits resonate throughout the literature and folklore of Russian culture. In this respect, the Soviet sports hero very much resembles the Soviet aviation pilot from the Stalinist literature of the 1930s and 1940s, for both types of hero, as Katerina Clark has pointed out, possess many of the same iconic attributes that we find in the medieval Russian saint, military warrior, or prince.¹²

Makarov's individual heroics, however, are tempered by his absolute loyalty and devotion to the larger social unit. In Soviet literature, such loyalty tended to express itself as part of a Stalinist myth which Clark calls that of the “Great Family” (114-35). In Oleša's novel, with its sports trope, this loyalty is exhibited instead through team spirit, team play, and team work. During the soccer match in Envy, therefore, it is appropriate that the goalie Makarov, who fully embodies the Soviet ideal of unselfish collective effort, should compete against the high-scoring Gecke, the supreme individualist who acts as a surrogate for Kavalerov. Both as a player and as a person, Volodja Makarov, we are told, seeks not to flaunt his talent but rather to subordinate it to the commonweal: “The strongest feeling in him was the feeling of comradeship. As though concerned about a certain equilibrium and trying to correct some anomaly permitted by nature in the distribution of abilities, he sometimes even had recourse to contrivances, with the aim of somehow softening the impression he made and denigrating himself. He hastened to diminish his own splendor” (100). The “comradeship” of Volodja, the ultimate team player, thus contrasts sharply with the extreme individualism epitomized by Gecke in soccer and by Kavalerov in life. In terms of the East-versus-West theme, the soccer match also provides the patriotic Makarov with a marvelous opportunity to make good on his promise to “take the bourgeois world down a peg” (101).

The focus of narration during the depiction of the soccer match itself supports this dramatic context by concentrating upon the two main competitors in the game: Gecke and Makarov. This encourages the reader to view the match as a contest not so much between two teams as between these two particular players, upon whose movements all the narrative attention is focused. The fans in attendance at the stadium likewise cheer on these two star players to the virtual exclusion of the rest of the German and Soviet players. From the moment the German team takes the field, all eyes are riveted upon Gecke, the “star” whom everyone has been hoping would make the trip to Moscow for this game. “The celebrated Gecke proved to be a truly awesome player,” the narrator observes at one point. “All attention was concentrated upon him” (125). A very similar telescoping effect is produced by Andrej Sinjavskij in his depiction of a soccer match in The Trial Begins (1961). The attention of thousands of fans, the narrator tells us, is focused on the person of that honored master of sports and famous athlete, Skarlygin, the center-forward of the Spartak team, who is quickly closing in on the Dynamo goal. Their goalie Ponomarenko, meanwhile, is getting ready to leap up and block the shot. “Shoot, Saša, shoot!” the stadium moans just as the decisive confrontation is about to take place (157).

Ponomarenko rolled over and over on his side, squeezing the ball to his stomach. Starlygin likewise fell to the ground, but he jumped back up to his feet right away, propelled by the roar of the crowd. He could no longer stop, because the goal, for whose sake he had been forced to suffer so much, was near, and thousands of fans demanded victory, and there were only thirty seconds remaining in the game. Skarlygin kicked, and kicked, and kicked again.

(157-58)

As in Oleša's novel, only two of the soccer players in The Trial Begins, a goalie and a high-scoring center, are ever named; it is upon them that all the narrative and audience attention is focused.¹³

In his depiction of the soccer match in Envy, Oleša's narrator also emphasizes, in terms that clearly reflect the novel's central ideological conflict, the contrasting styles of play of the two principal players: “As a soccer player, Volodja represented the total opposite of Gecke. Volodja was a professional sportsman, while the latter was a professional player. For Volodja, it was the general course of the game that was important, the common victory, the outcome. Gecke strove only to display his skill … he valued only his own individual success” (127). The intensity that the narration acquires when it depicts Volodja's remarkable save of what seemed to be a sure goal by Gecke and then later the German star's masterful maneuvering in scoring a goal against the Soviets, adds to the impression that this contest transcends the level of mere sporting event. It extends to the level of competing ideologies, with European individualism being pitted against Soviet collectivism, and of competing personal fates, with Kavalerov being matched against Volodja in the pursuit of Valja's love. A similar kind of allegorization is achieved in Sinjavskij's The Trial Begins, where Skarlygin's aggressive attempt to score a goal becomes an appropriate metaphor for the sexual frustration experienced throughout the story by Vladimir Petrovič Globov, the Stalinist procurator, who is in attendance at the soccer match. “In the most tense moments of the action,” Globov muses,

a soccer match is much the same as making love to a woman. You do not notice anything around you, except the goal, which propels you forward furiously: Forward! At any price. Even death or anything else. Only to break through and attain it. Only to score this one goal, a goal predestined by Fortune herself. Closer, closer, faster. … And it is no longer possible to delay, to postpone it to another time. … Please, I beg you, Marina, do you understand? I beg you!

(157)

The “aborted” goal, which Skarlygin scores in the final seconds of the game, likewise points to the allegorical nature of this sporting event in Sinjavskij's novel. “When the goal is scored and then disallowed,” Deming Brown observes, “additional symbolic meanings accrue that are related to the novel's themes of creativity, sterility, and abortion” (342).

The soccer match in Envy assumes significance not only on the field, where it symbolizes a contest between two competing ideologies, but also in the stands, where Kavalerov's intended murder of Andrej Babičev is scheduled to take place and where Makarov's sexually and ideologically attractive style of play is on display for Valja, Andrej, and the other twenty thousand Soviet fans in attendance at the stadium to see. This dual importance of the soccer match is underscored by the narrative techniques used to depict the stadium scene.¹⁴ Oleša adopts here a device very similar to the one used to describe the horse race in Anna Karenina, with the narrator depicting the action not only on the field but also in the stands. And he does so, just as Tolstoj had earlier, not “panoramically” but “dramatically.” In Tolstoj's novel, the steeplechase is actually described twice: once from the perspective of Vronskij as he rides Frou-Frou in the race (part 2, chap. 25) and then later from the vantage point of Anna, her husband, and the other spectators who are watching the race from the grandstand (part 2, chap. 28).¹⁵ It is during this latter scene that Karenin, who is not at all interested in the races (“My race is a more difficult one,” he quips to a soldier at one point in this chapter), watches the spectators rather than the riders. His eyes are especially drawn to Anna, upon whose pale, stern, and breathless face her cuckolded husband is forced to “read” that which he would prefer not to know (227). In much the same way that Karenin observes not the horse race itself but rather Anna's reactions to Vronskij's performance in it, Kavalerov observes Valja's reactions to the play of Gecke and Volodja, rather than the action on the soccer field.¹⁶ When the German star threatens to score against the Soviet goalie, Valja's reaction reveals her feelings for Volodja quite vividly: “At that moment Valja, who had leaned over to the person sitting next to her, grabbed his arm with both her hands, squeezed her cheek to it and—thinking only about one thing: to hide her face in order not to see the horrible sight—continued to look with squinting eyes at the terrifying movements of Gecke, black from running in the heat” (126). Likewise when Volodja makes a great save, she responds with obvious relief and joy: “Valja resumed a natural pose and began to laugh … ‘Makarov! Makarov! Bravo, Makarov!’ she yelled along with all the others” (126). By observing the reactions of their loved ones in this way, both Karenin and Kavalerov come to realize that the “prize” (i.e., the affection of the woman they love) has been irretrievably lost, regardless of the actual outcome of the sporting event.¹⁷

By halftime that outcome already seems to have been decided, especially as far as Kavalerov is concerned. Although the German team did score a goal in the first half and now leads by a score of 1:0, the Soviet team has the benefit of the wind at its back for the second half of the game. Moreover, a moral victory of sorts has already been won, since the highscoring Gecke has been held to but one goal by Volodja and the other Soviet defenders.¹⁸ The fans respond accordingly at the halftime break by lifting Volodja triumphantly up in the air and by applauding not only him, but also the rest of his other “team”—that is, Andrej Babičev and Valja. “And there stands Valja. And Andrej Babičev is with her,” the narrator reports. “All three are being applauded by the onlookers” (132).¹⁹ Kavalerov's plan to murder Andrej in the stands, meanwhile, never does materialize. As mentioned earlier, there never had been any real plan or overt preparation for this murder prior to the match. During the entire stadium scene, in fact, there is never any mention at all of the desire to murder Andrej, although Kavalerov does indeed see Andrej sitting not too far away from himself in the stands near the end of the first half.²⁰ The hero, whose attention is riveted upon the reactions of Valja up in the stands above him, seems incapable of any movement or activity during the match. Indeed, when the ball is suddenly kicked out of bounds and comes to rest directly at Kavalerov's feet, he sits there frozen in his seat, unable even to bend down and throw it back. This crippling passivity makes him appear ridiculous in the eyes of the many fans who are now watching him: “At this minute all the thousands of fans, as much as they were able, presented Kavalerov with their unsolicited attention, and this attention was laughable. It's possible that even Valja was laughing at him, at the person caught under the ball! It's possible that she's enjoying herself doubly, jeering at an enemy in a ludicrous situation” (130). The ball is eventually thrown back onto the field, quite energetically, by none other than that quintessential Soviet man of action, Andrej Babičev. “Kavalerov's failure to pick up the ball,” Peppard has argued, “shows him to be incapable of action, and signals the failure of his plan to kill Babichev” (185). Kavalerov's ridiculous passivity, in any event, continues during the halftime break, when he can manage to do no more than stare lasciviously at Valja as she battles the wind that keeps lifting her skirt up and exposing her legs. Valja, for her part, is totally oblivious of Kavalerov's presence at the stadium, neither taking any notice of him nor hearing him when, at close range, he whispers words of love to her.²¹ Instead, she runs off to join Andrej Babičev, who is waiting for her with an outstretched hand. As the second half of the game is about to begin, the hero finally realizes that Valja's chaste love is inaccessible to him: “both because she is a young girl and because she loves Volodja” (133). On the playing field, meanwhile, Kavalerov's romantic, European dream of individual glory has apparently been crushed by Makarov's Soviet-style collective effort. Valja's reactions to the play of both Gecke and Makarov, as well as her complete lack of awareness of Kavalerov's presence at the game (and of his existence generally), have left little doubt in the hero's mind that he has lost and Volodja has won this contest. Just as the high-jumping scene earlier had led Ivan to realize that Valja belongs to Andrej and Volodja, so now does the soccer-match scene lead Kavalerov to a similar realization.

The reader likewise senses that the soccer match marks the decisive defeat of Kavalerov's quest for Valja's love and for glory, because when the hero leaves the soccer match he immediately gets drunk and then goes to bed with Anečka Prokopovič, who represents, in his own words, his “degraded masculinity” (27). In his unsuccessful quest for Andrej Babičev as a father in part 1, Kavalerov had been left with only Ivan Babičev. Now, in his unsuccessful bid for Valja as a love object in part 2, he is left with the castrating mother-figure of Anečka. What follows in the wake of Kavalerov's night spent with the widow is his hallucinatory dream, in which he sees Valja and Volodja embracing while standing triumphantly atop the platform of Andrej's collective kitchen “Two Bits,” an image inspired, no doubt, by Volodja's letter to Andrej, a letter which Kavalerov had intercepted and read in part 1. In this same dream, the hero is witness to his teacher, Ivan Babičev, being destroyed by his own creation, the “Ophelia Machine,” which Ivan had envisioned as the means of his revenge upon the new Communist epoch. This hallucinatory dream thus reveals to Kavalerov, at the level of imagination, that which the soccer match revealed at the level of everyday reality: namely, that Valja, who has been won over by Volodja, Andrej, and the collectivist ideology of the new Soviet order, is irretrievably lost to him.²² Indeed, Kavalerov wakes from this nightmare to experience an “epiphany,” a moment of clear-sightedness, during which he comes to admit openly—just as Ivan had earlier as a result of the high-jumping scene—that he has been in error:

At that second he sensed that the time had come, that the line had been drawn between two existences—the time of catastrophe!—that it was necessary to tear himself free, to tear himself free from everything that had been … right now, right away, in no more than two heartbeats—that it was necessary to step over the line and a disgusting, repulsive life, not his own but an alien life, a violent life, would remain behind. … He had lived a life that was too easy, too arrogant; he had maintained far too high an opinion of himself.

(139-40)

In the novel's concluding scene, as a final reminder of just how low he has indeed fallen, the defeated Kavalerov is left with Ivan Babičev and Anečka Prokopovič as grotesquely inadequate substitutes for the father and the love object after which he had quested so passionately in the novel.

Thus the soccer match in Envy is indeed very tightly integrated into what Lukács would characterize as a “critical dramatic context” within Oleša's novel. On the one hand, as Barratt observes, it brings the “ideological and psychological issues of Envy into sharp focus” (35). On the other hand, it serves as the decisive contest in the competition between Nikolaj Kavalerov and Volodja Makarov for the affection of Valja Babičeva. The action described in this scene, both on the field and in the stands, is not designed to serve as a mere descriptive tableau for the reader. Instead, it significantly affects the development of plot, theme, and characterization in Envy, revealing to the hero, as well as to the reader, the ultimate failure and futility of Kavalerov's quest for Valja and for glory. The narrative techniques used in depicting the stadium scene, moreover, fit the criteria for what Lukács would distinguish as dramatic narration, rather than mere panoramic description. Examination of the soccer match in Envy would not be complete, however, without at least some mention of another important context into which this scene may be said to fit: that is, the intentional ambiguity of Oleša's novel as a whole. Many elements contribute to make Envy an ambiguous text, among them: the unreliable first-person narration of Kavalerov in part 1; the fantastic element involved in the apocryphal legends surrounding Ivan Babičev's past in part 2; the absence of adequate narrative exposition; the problematic narrative distance between the author and his positive, but flat, characters as well as his negative, but round, ones; the epistemological collision of the world of imagination with the world of reality. This textual ambiguity is particularly manifest in the final scene of the novel, the celebrated bedroom scene at the widow Prokopovič's. “Let's drink to indifference. Hurray! Let's drink to Anečka!” Ivan proposes. “Today, Kavalerov, it's your turn to sleep with Anečka. Hurray!” (141). Here the narrative breaks off, without revealing to the reader Kavalerov's response to Ivan Babičev's cynical suggestion that he partake in this grotesque and degrading ménage à trois. Will Kavalerov refuse to drink to indifference, as he refused earlier, before the soccer match, to drink to his youth having passed? Or will he at last concede that the future does indeed belong to Andrej, Volodja, Valja, and all those others who accept the new Soviet ideology? Was Kavalerov's post-game moment of epiphany an authentic capitulation, a true acceptance of defeat? Or was the hero merely trying to prepare himself—mentally and emotionally—for a rematch with Volodja and Andrej?

The soccer match shares in this pervasive ambiguity that informs the text of Envy, for the final outcome of the contest is never revealed to the reader. Instead, the narrative breaks off abruptly after halftime when Kavalerov, who has apparently seen enough, leaves the stadium. Neither the game nor its outcome is ever mentioned again in the novel. Although it is true that the Soviet team does indeed have the benefit of the wind at its back for the second half of the game, the German team, nonetheless, is leading by a score of 1:0. At least in Anna Karenina we are certain in our knowledge that Vronskij, by breaking stride (and thus Frou-Frou's back), has indeed lost the steeplechase race to his chief competitor, Maxotin, astride Gladiator. The ramifications of Vronskij's defeat are likewise clear to us. For Vronskij himself, the fall signals a failed opportunity for this once ambitious young officer to revive a flagging military career. For Anna, her lover's fall means an “overturning” of her own life. “Her shock at Vronsky's fall impels the decisive conversation with her husband,” Lukács explains. “The relationships of the protagonists enter a new critical phase because of the race” (111). At a symbolic level, Vronskij's fall foreshadows, of course, both the ultimate failure of his relationship with Anna and the tragic demise of that beautiful creature herself. In Oleša's Envy, on the other hand, the final outcome of the soccer match is left ambiguously unknown. In most respects, it is true, there would seem to be little doubt as to who wins the central competition in Oleša's novel: on all fronts—ideologically, psychologically, and symbolically—Andrej and Volodja seem everywhere to be triumphant, while Kavalerov and Ivan seem defeated. Yet we never to find out which team did in fact win the soccer game, a contest which seems to figure so prominently in the fate of the hero as well as of the ideology that he represents. Was it the visiting team, led by Gecke, whose highly individualistic style of play embodies Kavalerov's romantic dream of European glory? Or was it the home team, led by Makarov, whose unselfish team play epitomizes the Soviet spirit of comradeship and collective effort? Oleša's deliberate reticence on this point, it seems to me, creates additional ambiguity in the text and encourages the reader to question whether Kavalerov has indeed suffered a decisive defeat.²³ The author's ideological intentions in Envy, William Harkins has observed, “are far from clear or unambiguous” (443). Oleša's depiction of the soccer match seems to bear this out.

Notes

1. I wish to express my gratitude to Elizabeth Beaujour, who read earlier versions of this paper, for her many perceptive observations and helpful suggestions.

2. For a select bibliography of Western and Soviet criticism of Oleša's novel, see Ingdahl, 158-67.

3. For a perceptive treatment of Soviet literature during the 1920s, see Maguire.

4. For background on this conflict between “positive” and “negative” heroes in Russian literature, see Mathewson and Chances.

5. Wayne P. Wilson is one of the few critics to recognize that the soccer match serves as a decisive event in the fate of the hero. The match is, Wilson notes, one of two scenes in the novel that finally oblige Kavalerov to recognize Makarov and Valja as “the representatives of the future” (37). In his recent essay, Victor Peppard finds remarkable “the lack of any detailed analysis of the novel's central, climactic event, the soccer match” (179). Although Peppard promises “to elucidate the pivotal role of the soccer match” in Oleša's novel, his article mainly discusses the role of carnival elements (e.g., laughter, mock crownings and uncrownings, mésalliances, eccentricity, parodistic pairs, inversions) found in Envy. The most thorough treatment of the soccer match remains Andrew Barratt's monograph; see especially 34-36.

6. Andrej and Kavalerov compete against each other for Valja's affection much more directly, of course, in the dramatized version of Oleša's novel, A Conspiracy of Feelings (Zagovor čuvstv, 1928), where Volodja Makarov does not even appear as a character in the play. Instead, it is the forty-year-old Andrej who is in love with young Valja, Ivan Babičev's “adopted” daughter. Kavalerov claims that Valja cannot, and does not, love Andrej; she is simply impressed by his position. For a comparison of Envy with A Conspiracy of Feelings, see Appel's book. We find a similar situation (that is, romantic love crossing generational lines) in Oleša's A Strict Youth (Strogij junoša, 1934). Here a komsomol student, Griša Fokin, falls in love with the young and beautiful wife of the forty-eight-year-old Doctor Stepanov, a well-known and much-respected surgeon, who is said to have “bought” Marina's love with the material luxuries his aristocratic position within Soviet society affords him.

7. In discussing the “special cultural status” soccer enjoyed in Soviet Russia during the 1920s, when it was the most popular sport in the country and “the only sport in which the Soviets played international matches” (183), Peppard identifies an actual soccer match, played in Moscow in May 1927, that might well have served as a prototype for the match Oleša depicts in Envy; see 183 and 189 n. 11.

8. This, in fact, is not the first time that Kavalerov has threatened to kill Babičev. He threatens Andrej earlier in the novel, after he receives a slap in the face from him in part 1. “Now I'll kill you, Comrade Babičev,” he swears (63). Even Volodja Makarov, as we have seen, threatens in his letter to kill Andrej. Although Kavalerov's intention of killing Andrej is fueled mainly by his desire to take revenge and to attain fame, the hero does think to himself, in the midst of Ivan's bitter denunciation of Andrej and Volodja at the beer-hall, “I will snatch Valja away from them” (93).

9. In A Conspiracy of Feelings, by contrast, both the murder plan and the murder weapon are explicitly mentioned. Indeed, the murder weapon is presented as early as the end of the first scene, when the hero, standing with his razor glistening in his hand, asks himself: “Why did you kill Andrej Babičev?” (29). Later, in scene 7—the concluding stadium scene—Kavalerov approaches Andrej with razor in hand and threatens to slit his throat with it, only to change his mind at the last moment and turn upon Ivan, whom he kills offstage. As far as a murder plan is concerned, that idea is first broached in scene 6, at Anečka's, when Ivan insists that Kavalerov must kill Andrej if he wishes to attain fame as “the hired assassin of the century” (65). At the party for Mixail Mixajlovič in the next scene, Ivan announces to all those present Kavalerov's intention to assassinate Andrej at the soccer match on the following day, pulling a razor out of the pocket of Kavalerov's jacket as proof. The concluding scene at the stadium opens with Mixail Mixajlovič, Zinočka, and the venerable old man from the previous evening's party gathered together at the refreshment stand, where they discuss how Kavalerov will commit the crime. Later, when Kavalerov (with razor in hand) meets Valja on his way to the seat where Andrej is sitting, he tells her quite openly that he intends to slit Andrej's throat.

10. Barratt points out that the soccer star's name derives from the German word Götze, meaning “idol” or “false deity.” “Götzke's individualism,” Barratt notes, “is precisely the ‘false deity’ to which Kavalerov has pledged his faith” (35).

11. In discussing the enigmatic nature of Volodja Makarov as a character, Harkins notes that while his role as an athlete may seem a bit ridiculous, “his part in the soccer match against the Germans is clearly a heroic one.” Oleša, he adds, “seems truly to have idealized sports without irony” (448). The Soviet critic Percov agrees. Commenting on the author's portrayal of the Soviet soccer star, Percov maintains that “there is not a hint of satirical intonation” (128).

12. See especially 46-67 of Clark's book for a discussion of how the Soviet “positive hero” resembles the traditional heroes of Russian hagiography and folklore. Both the aviation pilot and the sports hero, she observes, served as “symbolic” heroes in Soviet literature, since they constituted extra-systemic figures. See 124-29 for her treatment of the aviation hero as “paradigmatic new man” in Stalinist literature. Oleša himself links the aviation hero with the sports hero in A Strict Youth. When describing Griša Fokin, the narrator takes off on a lyrical digression about the physical beauty of this new Soviet type: “There is a type of male appearance which seems to have grown out of the worldwide development of technology, aviation, and sports. … Fair-haired, blue-eyed, lean-faced, triangular torso, muscular chest—there is the type of contemporary male beauty” (304).

13. One major difference, of course, is that in The Trial Begins the spectators are yelling for the individualistic offensive player, not for the goalie.

14. Elizabeth Beaujour, in discussing Kavalerov's penchant for miniaturizing, claims that the stadium scene in Envy provides the hero with another opportunity to look down upon life from a height. “In any Olesha novel,” she writes, “the most interesting thing about going to see a sport played in a stadium is the opportunity it provides to look down from the grandstand” (51-52). As we shall see, Kavalerov in this scene does not actually look “down” to watch the action on the playing field as much as he looks “up” to observe Valja and her reactions in the stands above him.

15. “Tolstoy is not describing a ‘thing,’ a horse race,” Lukács notes. “He is recounting the vicissitudes of human beings. That is why the action is narrated twice, in true epic fashion, and not simply picturesquely described” (111).

16. In chapter two of her book on the Soviet writer, Mariètta Čudakova compares Oleša's descriptive method with that of Tolstoj; see especially 21-23. She does not, however, discuss either Tolstoj's depiction of the steeplechase or Oleša's depiction of the soccer match. There is, incidentally, a direct allusion to Anna Karenina in part 1 of Envy, when Kavalerov, in describing a country type whom Andrej receives at his office, compares this visitor to “that Levin out of Tolstoj” (14).

17. Much has been written about the problems of perception in Oleša's works. Perhaps the best study is that by Nils Åke Nilsson, who examines the visual distortions produced by binoculars, telescopes, and microscopes in Oleša's fiction. See Neil Cornwell's essay on “distortion” in Envy as well.

18. “The fans concluded,” reports the narrator, “that the second half of the game, when Gecke gets tired out and our team receives the advantage of the wind at its back, will end in a rout of the Germans” (128).

19. The halftime segment of the stadium scene in Envy calls to mind Oleša's description of his own success as a soccer player when he was a boy growing up in Odessa. “After the match,” he writes concerning a soccer game he once played there, “I was even lifted into the air by students from various schools who had run onto the field. Obviously my play had pleased the spectators” (Ni dnja bez stročki, 416). It is interesting to note that Oleša's real-life celebration scene took place after the soccer game was over, while the scene of rejoicing in Envy occurs prematurely, at halftime, well before the end of the game and the final score.

20. This makes the entire scene, in Barratt's opinion, “intensely anti-climactic, almost to the point of bathos” (35).

21. “She looked at Kavalerov, without seeing him,” the narrator reports (133). Valja's behavior thus compares with that of Anna Karenina, who watches Vronskij during the steeplechase as she overhears her husband (225). Later, when she admits to her husband that Vronskij is indeed her lover, Anna tells Karenin: “I am listening to you, but I am thinking of him” (231).

22. In “The Stadium at Odessa” (“Stadion v Odesse”; 1936), Oleša views the soccer field there as a dream converted into reality: “It is the border, the transition, the realized moment of transition of the present into the future … the first thought that comes to us after we perceive this sight is the thought that dreams have become reality. This stadium so resembles a dream—and yet at the same time is so real” (124).

23. There is perhaps more irony than ambiguity involved in the final score of the soccer match in Sinjavskij's The Trial Begins. Although the game ends in a 0:0 tie, Skarlygin's failure to score a goal in the final seconds of play seems to signal defeat. Moreover, the fact that the referee disallowed Skarlygin's goal clearly rebuts the moral stance that Globov maintains throughout the novel: namely, that since the ends justify the means, any means are allowable (the goal was disallowed because Skarlygin played unfairly, kicking the ball out of the goalie's hands). Although Globov insists that “soccer is not politics” (158), the reader of The Trial Begins seems encouraged to view the soccer match as a trope for political life during the reign of Stalin. The tie score at game's end, in that case, might well signify that a final judgment on the Stalin period, despite the denunciations made at the Twentieth Party Congress, had yet to be made in the Soviet Union during the Xruščev era. In any event, it is significant that the Job-like entreaty which Globov offers up to his idol near the end of the novel—an entreaty which betrays a cruel irony—is phrased in terms that call to mind a military campaign or a sporting event: “Master! The enemy is fleeing! My daughter has been killed and my son has been seized. My wife has betrayed me and my mother has renounced me. But I stand before you, wounded and foresaken by all, and I say to you: The goal has been achieved! We have won! Do you hear me, Master, we have won” (198).

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