[In the following essay, Holzapfel compares a novel by the Cuban writer Edmondo Desnoes to Envy, finding in both a literary response to the fate of the individual in a mass society.]

The theme of the fate of the individual human being in a mass society has been a major preoccupation of twentieth century literature as a whole, but has had special resonance in post-revolutionary societies, as has been the case in Russia and, more recently, in Cuba. In Russia this theme can be traced through over half a century of literary history with meaningful patterns of development clearly emerging. The Cuban experience thus far parallels and echoes the literary debate that was carried on in the early Soviet period. Like the Russian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution allowed from the beginning a campaign to promote the arts and encouraged experimentation. But since individual and free responses to the data of experience are autonomous and uncontrollable, the state—Soviet and Cuban—soon reacted with apprehension to the early literary products and sought to change the attitude of writers toward their work.

My intent here is to examine Edmundo Desnoes' Inconsolable Memories in relation to Yurii Olesha's Envy,¹ which is perhaps the most striking parallel to Desnoes' novel to have come out of post-revolutionary Russia. Comparing these somewhat dissimilar works brings us first of all to the recognition of a banal event: that history repeats itself in the way revolution affects the lives of writers as well as that of their fictional creations. More significantly, the comparison unveils a pattern of the psychological responses of the individual caught up in the overpowering events of revolution, a pattern composed of the ambiguities and ironies of the authors' ideological intentions. It is in this pattern that we can discover the greatest coincidences between the two novels and the reason for the universal appeal they both exert.

Inconsolable Memories, a short novel written at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, explores the theme of the individual who resists the pressures of collectivization, or, to use a Soviet term, “who is out of tune with history.” A product of the initially permissive climate created by the Revolution, Inconsolable Memories catches and concentrates the essence of the post-revolutionary moment. It became an immediate success in Cuba and abroad, including the countries on both sides of the “Iron Curtain,” and in 1968 the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry produced the now famous film version that bears the novel's original title—the film's English title, Memories from Underdevelopment, being a literal rendering of the Spanish Memorias del subdesarrollo. Desnoes collaborated with the director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea in writing the script, but he saw the film as a betrayal of the novel, though acknowledging that the film had an important “objective” dimension that was missing in the novel.² The film, unlike the novel, boasts a firm ideological foundation, reflecting the hardening in the official cultural lines that was occurring at about the time of what became known as the “first Padilla affair,” 1968-69. Some of the more insightful critical assessments of the novel have been made in relation to the film version.³ The ideological content of the latter is elaborated with documentary footage, thus juxtaposing the subjectivity of the novel to the realities of a society in the throes of revolutionary change. The film is usually considered superior to the novel, although both have been equally successful with their respective audiences.

Envy was written in 1927, ten years into the “new future” secured by the Bolshevik Revolution, and two years after the resolution published by the Central Committee announcing a liberal doctrine in severely dogmatic terms. A complex work, sometimes described as expressionistic, this short novel has a variety of styles and is open to many levels of reading. At the time of its publication it enjoyed emphatic official endorsement. But as controversy over its meaning widened, Soviet critics revised their opinion and the novel eventually became unavailable. Those who read Envy against the background of a “revolutionary poetics” considered its main accomplishment as having reduced the two dissident intellectuals, Nikolai Kavalerov and Ivan Babichev, to their basic components of hate and envy. Others viewed more sympathetically what they thought to be outmoded types and who symbolized, in the Soviet era, the degradation and death of old values. Intellectuals, on the other hand, tended to identify with the drunken pair and understood the novel as a plea for the rights of the individual suffering under the mass pressures of the new society.

Olesha had fervently welcomed the Revolution, and when promise of a new freedom did not materialize, he “still accepted the regime with his reason and proceeded to argue against his heart and his feelings.”⁴ Thus when in 1931 he adapted Envy for the stage, using a new title, A Conspiracy of Feelings, he tried to make his ideological intentions less ambiguous in order to comply with the official Soviet dogma that art should be “a spontaneous reflection of reality,” reality being the ideological superstructure on the economic base.

There is general agreement among critics that Olesha draws on Dostoevsky for his portrayal of the two “negative” characters in Envy. These Dostoevskian traces are present, perhaps self-consciously so, in recognition of Dostoevsky's unsurpassed exploration in modern literature of the psychology of revolt. He perceived in his characters a dualism of revolt and reaction that is paradoxical and irrational and that separates them from a common cause with other men. In particular, the narrator of Notes from the Underground has come to represent the prototype of the rebellious antiutopian antihero. In Envy Kavalerov is endowed with the irrational emotional attitude of the underground man, while the chaplinesque Ivan Babichev is cast in the mold of the Dostoevskian buffoon. Like the latter, Ivan is a frustrated member of the middle class, a “compulsive liar and dreamer and masochistic seeker for attention from others.”⁵

Envy is told in two parts from the respective points of view of these “negative” characters. Both are poets of a sort and are locked in a love-hate relationship with Ivan's brother Andrei. The latter is an ambitious and successful bureaucrat, famous for having created a food trust. Kavalerov, in quest of idealized love and personal glory, despises Andrei's crude manners and his materialistic approach to life. Yet he cannot help envying him, even loving him, and would sell out for gratuitous and infamous notoriety. His contradiction is the result of not being able to resign himself to insignificance, as he considers himself “a son of his age,” belonging to the future. Ivan's revolt, on the other hand, is bound up with his conception of the fantasy machine Ophelia, invented by him to destroy all machines and to make possible the triumph of feelings, those old-fashioned feelings of pride, envy, jealousy, foolishness and heroism. In the end it becomes clear that both Ivan and Kavalerov are engaged in a sterile struggle, for they are reduced to sharing for the rest of their lives a lecherous and repulsive widow in a rococo bed.

The protagonist of Inconsolable Memories, Sergio Malabre, also belongs to the long line of existentially unfulfilled underground types in modern literature.⁶ Sergio has remained in Cuba while his wife, relatives and friends have all gone to the United States. Although he is malcontent in his isolation he gloats over the fact that he no longer has to put up with any of them. Hating the underdeveloped nature of pre and post-revolutionary society, he reveals himself in an emotionally charged monologue—that constitutes the entire novel—to be narcissistic, self-indulgent as well as self-contradictory. He recognizes that he is doomed to boredom, inaction, and perhaps extinction in a society created for the masses. He regards this insight with feelings of despair and masochistic pleasure:

There is no longer bourgeois variety for the happy few, only flat socialist equality for all. I don't have a future: the future is planned by the State … They have eliminated bourgeois freedom in order to plan the workers' future. There's even a weird morbid pleasure in knowing that people like me are slowly becoming extinct!⁷

Among the more significant passages of the novel, from the standpoint of theme and technique, are Sergio's allusions to his former friendship and the description of his encounter with a writer whom he familiarly addresses as Eddy—the fictitious Edmundo Desnoes. In earlier passages he reads and comments on one of his books. Later he attends a literary colloquium in which Eddy participates. Sergio's attitude toward Eddy is clearly ambiguous. Seeing his former friend now in an elevated position, Sergio despises him thoroughly, but not without a tinge of envy. Eddy appears to him as conceited and even god-like. In Envy the pompous and powerful Andrei Babichev, whom Kavalerov reviles and envies, is Eddy's counterpart. In both novels the reader is relieved of becoming the adversary of the “successful” character because of the unmitigatedly venomous attack directed at each by their detractors.

Rodríguez Monegal, who views Inconsolable Memories as a composition en abîme, describes the relationship between Sergio and Eddy as that of master and servant found in the traditional comedy with the servant-buffoon laughing at his master. Monegal correctly observes that the author uses “the ambiguity of his narrator-protagonist to unfold his criticism as heroic (serious) and parodic (clowning).” He adds that “such duplicity corresponds, of course, to the ambiguities of a text that seeks to praise the Revolution from a restrictive poisonous perspective of a mediocre intellectual, a totally alienated bourgeois character.”⁸ With this doubling device Desnoes also succeeds in duplicating the ambiguous situation Olesha had created in Envy through Kavalerov's emotional monologue—in the form of a letter that is never mailed—directed against Andrei Babichev and the farcical fantasies of the buffoonesque Ivan.

Olesha's novel, as mentioned earlier, has been described as expressionistic, a term that in the end is too vague and misleading about its achievements on the formal level. Nils Ake Nilsson, who has studied this aspect of Olesha's works, offers a more precise description of the novel as a work of fantastic realism:

He [Olesha] seldom gives us a straightforward description, a simple full-face view of an object or person. Instead we usually see his world of objects and people reflected in buttons, mirrors and metallic surfaces; we catch distorted glimpses of them through glass windows and bars; they appear enlarged or diminished through binoculars, telescopes or microscopes.⁹

Nilsson additionally mentions light and shadow and wind and rain as elements that contribute to Olesha's unique vision of people and objects. He also points out the influence of films, especially the Charlie Chaplin movies.

Inconsolable Memories, in contrast, makes no pretension to fantasy. Sergio describes his experiences of the past and present and comments on them in a manner that is essentially realistic. However, the work is self-consciously “experimental,” as exemplified by the fictionalization of the author analyzed by Rodríguez Monegal. Other literary devices include the interspersal of lines from popular songs in Spanish and English, the “literary criticism” by the narrator of the stories—his own—included in the appendix of the novel, and his observations of reality triggered by mental associations, reading, mirrors, paintings, photographs, tape recordings and films.

Movies are also important because they offer the narrator an escape from his solitude, helping him to forget and forget himself. But only one of the films mentioned is central to the development of the theme of the novel: Hiroshima mon amour. Sergio does not comment on the film's content; rather he focuses his attention on one memorable line which the heroine speaks when she realizes, upon having told her Japanese lover of her sufferings during World War Two, that these are gradually fading away and that she is losing what she always cherished most: “an inconsolable memory.” Her words make him think of Elena, his Cuban mistress who, as a product of underdevelopment, could never attain the spiritual consistency of the French woman. The theme of the film—love in a context of war—also ties in with Sergio's present life. He is living through the Missile Crisis with the threat of atomic destruction hanging heavily over the island. This heightens his awareness of the vacuity of his life and he recognizes that, like Elena's, his life is also the result of underdevelopment.

In Envy Olesha's characters, doomed to sterility in the new social order, are left with “an incurable nostalgia” for the Russian cultural values of the past and another world that may evolve in the future. In Inconsolable Memories Sergio understands that in the cultural underdevelopment of Cuba—past and present—“an inconsolable memory” belongs to the realm of the unattainable. He brings his memoirs to a close in an atmosphere of gloom charged with the prospect of annihilation by an atomic explosion. He is trapped on the island and made helpless by the overwhelming historical circumstances that leave him, the bourgeois intellectual, no choice. The socialist state holds no promise for his future, while his own rebellious response is merely an empty gesture. Olesha's novel, while also emphasizing the sterility of the utopian state and of individual rebellion, does not relinquish hope for a future that may be distant and unfathomable but one that incontrovertibly belongs to the new generations, symbolized in the novel by Ivan's daughter Valya.

The thematic structure of either of these works is not original. It was particularly typical of the early period in Soviet literature to deal with the conflict between the old and new values and the dislocation of bourgeois intellectuals in a collective society. However, Olesha succeeds in stating the problem in a highly original form, created by his use of “fantastic photography,” and giving it a universal dimension through the portrayal of a concrete human conflict: the hate, envy and love the “negative” characters have for their antagonist. Desnoes' neo-realistic novel, on the other hand, may be limited by its form in reaching a high level of artistic expression. Nevertheless, Inconsolable Memories, like its Russian counterpart, provides the reader with a convincing picture of the crucial issue created by the Revolution: the relationship between the individual and society expressed in terms of the moral dilemma the individual conscience experiences vis à vis the social demand.

Both Envy and Inconsolable Memories became in their respective countries and historical moments the epitome of the new revolutionary novel. In both instances the central preoccupation with isolated human destiny was a disturbing element to the new mentality that stood against the survival of individualism and subjectivism, and the novels were accordingly recast: Envy as a play and Inconsolable Memories as a movie. These were attempts on the part of the authors to bring their works in line with the demands of the times. Yet neither author was able to adjust to life under socialism. Olesha was sent to a concentration camp before the end of the thirties (rehabilitated in 1952) while Desnoes chose to become an exile, a role that Sergio had stoically rejected.

Notes

1. Memorias del subdesarrollo was first published by Ediciones Unión of the National Union of Writers and Artists (UNEAC), 1962. The English version, Inconsolable Memories (New York: The New American Library, 1967), omits the stories that constitute an appendix of the novel. Envy was published in English in a collection of Olesha's fictions: The Wayward Comrade and the Commissars, translated by Andrew R. MacAndrew (New York: The New American Library, 1960), pp. 11-121.

2. Reported by Julianne Burton, “Alienation and Critical Response,” Review (Winter 1976), pp. 53-54.

3. See the article by Julianne Burton cited above and the following: Emir Rodríguez Monegal, “Literatura: cine: revolución,” Revista Iberoamericana, Nos. 92-93 (1975), pp. 579-591; Henry Fernández, D. I. Grossvogel, Emir Rodríguez Monegal, “3 on 2: Desnoes, Guitérrez Alea,” Diacritics (Winter 1974), pp. 51-64.

4. Andrew R. MacAndrew, “Introduction,” 20th Century Russian Drama (New York: Bantam Books, 1963), p. 24.

5. William E. Harkins, “The Theme of Sterility in Olesha's Envy,” in Major Soviet Writers: Essays in Criticism, edited by Edward J. Brown (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 286-188.

6. Even the Spanish title Memorias del subdesarrollo is an obvious allusion to Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground as it echoes the Spanish translation of the Russian title, Memorias del subsuelo.

7. Memorias del subdesarrollo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Galerna, 1968), pp. 49-50. My translation.

8. “3 on 2,” p. 53.

9. Through the Wrong End of Binoculars,” in Major Soviet Writers, p. 254.