Regular marked price: $12.95Discount Price: $10.36
Cost Savings: $2.59 (20%)Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Normal ship time within one day
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 891.7342
EAN num: 9781590170861
ISBN number: 1590170865
Label: NYRB Classics
Manufacturer: NYRB Classics
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 178
Printing Date: May 31, 2004
Publishing house: NYRB Classics
Release Date: May 31, 2004
Sale Popularity Level: 303928
Studio: NYRB Classics
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Yuri Olesha's novella combines social satire, effervescent humor, and a wild visionary streak in the story of a Soviet Babbitt, a hero of industry who presides over an unheard-of increase in the production of sausage. But beside this man with the unshakable self-regard is the bitter sponger who, consumed with resentment, sees through him.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
-
I was surprised to read several overenthusiastic reviews on this page - I think the book deserves 3.5 stars. I've read it in Russian and realize that it is hard to understand it completely without being very familiar with transitional pre-Stalin period of Soviet life and culture. Therefore, the difference in opinions is probably natural. However, I want to share a few thoughts driven mostly by the reviews rather than the book itself.
Olesha is not on par with Gogol and Dostoevsky (I am sure Olesha would be shocked if someone would suggest it to him). Such comparison proves one more time, that while Dostoevsky is broadly admired by Western readers, his genius is "too Russian" to be understood completely in translation. The same can be said about Gogol, although for other reasons, while it is probably much easier to comprehend translated Tolsoy or Lermontov without loosing much - they are much more "Western". I am sure that 20th century alone gave at least a dozen (or two) of Russian writers more gifted than Olesha, not to mention several giants of 19th century.
Even though the book was effectively banned for many years, the author was not a tragic victim of the Soviet regime as Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn or Pasternak. His own political views were less unequivocal, and to the Soviet reader he was known as creator of "revolutionary fairytale" genre ("Three fat men"). "Envy" is not pro- or anti-Soviet, it is really 19th vs. 20th century - "feelings" against "machines". The main character of the book is not a rebel or a victim of the system - he is the product of the environment. His nature with all its shortcomings is probably partially based on author's inner world. With a great risk of overextending, my guess is - Olesha shared some of the feelings of his character, seeing how some of his close friends of the youth become "official" writers favored by the regime, while others, treated the same way as he nevertheless wrote the cult books of the period (Ilf, Petrov)
Rated by buyers 
-
A contemporary and associate of Bulgakov. Isaac Babel, Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, Yuri Olesha wrote "Envy" in 1927. The Russian authors of that era were attempting to come to terms with increasing government censorship and pressure to write within the confines of "socialist realism," initially moving, as here, in the direction of satire and literary adventure. Intially approved by the government, "Envy" soon made its way to the ever-expanding banned books list and Olesha's career as a serious writer was over. He died in 1960.
Given that historical background, "Envy" is most likely to be of interest to students of early 20th century Russian history and literature. The casual, non-Russian-speaking reader is likely to find it neither enjoyable nor, in many places intelligible.
That person, and I am one, would be better off reading Bulgakov's masterpiece The Master and Margarita.
Some mention should be made of the quality of the bookbinding and printing of "Envy," both of which are excellent. The book is a pleasure to hold in the hand and read.
Rated by buyers -
Lately, I have found myself on a bit of a reading jag with the Russian literary novelists who were effectively repressed and, thus, went sadly unread during their lifetimes. There is a strange kind of bitter sweetness to the writing as well as power, wit, satire and illumination with a markedly Soviet flare. Because Soviet censorship and cultural repression were ultimately death knells to Russian writers, you have to admire their persistance amid the hopelessness of their culture for their publication. They wrote neither for money nor fame, like American commercial novelists: these Russians wrote because they were driven within their souls to write. These Russians are writers' writers: they never sold out to their cultures and, in fact, suffered immensely because of their opposition to it. The eponymous theme of this novel places at odds an inventor and a bevy of commonplace individuals -- the classic bourgeois versus the proletariat of the Russian class system: serfs versus masters. The inventor is what Nietzsche would call a "Higher Man" and the peasants suffer from "resentiment" as Nietzsche described the envy of the lower classes in "The Will to Power." If you were a higher man, this emotion was expected to be displayed against you by the less powerful who would seek to bring you down to their level. Marx, Lenin and Stalin were all classic Nietzschean higher men. I had a bit of a hard time becoming transported or immersed or even connecting with the characters of this tale and don't really understand the very high marks others seem to give Olesha, who doesn't really compare as well to Lermontov, Bulgakov, Pushkin, Platanov or Zamyatin, for example. Without giving away the ending, let me just say that I was indifferent to it. But in a way the denouement represents a kind of superior Russian realism of the sort Olesha may have wanted to project in Envy. The novel left me flat in the same way that Disgrace and Atonement did: maybe it's just the vapid theme that went wanting in this novel for me. By all means read the Russians but I would seek out the others very first and perhaps circle back to Olesha.
Rated by buyers 
-
I had difficulty reading the very first few pages simply because I didn't catch on that the very first person narrator--who is derisively observing his roommate's bathroom routine--is to some degree emotionally destabilized by his own hard life as well as misplaced perceptions. I usually prefer lyrically-written work with sentences that flow beautifully, however, while reading Olesha's Envy, I realize just how much the novels I prefer are the way they are because the writer lives in an environment that enables some hope. As harsh as the environment is, Olesha's novel is peppered throughout with charming phrases which disarm the critical reader: Valya was "lighter than a shadow. The lightest of shadows--the shadow of falling snow--might have envied her" (54).
The novel's Introduction, by Ken Kalfus, is informative. Envy was published in 1927 when some form of satirical protest against the Soviet government was still possible; Lenin had died in 1925 and Stalin had ousted Trotsky, and it wasn't much longer--in about 1934--that it was no longer possible for a writer or journalist to speak and write freely. Olesha's work was suppressed and not re-printed until after Stalin's death in 1956. At only 152 pages, this novel is ideal for high school students wanting something more than routine American literature; honors students can definitely handle comparing the fictional treatment of social conditions. Also college freshman in Comparative Literature or fiction writing can study how a writer's environment conditions the craft of fiction.
To go into more detail, if the world of Envy feels claustrophobic, there are good reasons: Yuri Olesha's narrator, or main character, is responding to a society in which the rich and poor are increasingly polarized. People in control seem to dominate the powerless, and those in control are absolutely stupid and boring people. The conditions Olesha wrote about also indicate that most people have diminishing expectations for the future, and to want change seems futile because change is impossible. (Sorry if this situation sounds familiar in 2006.) To create a novel out of this sort of human dilemma, conditions which were escalating in 1920's Russia, the author had to position himself somewhere between the two poles of rich and poor, of government official and social outcast. To do so, Olesha created the character Nikolai Kavalerov, a sort of slacker or lay-about whose vague or shapeless revolt against his conditions engages the reader's attention. The novelist's craft must give the characters energy so that the plot moves forward to some resolution; to do that, Olesha gives Kavalerov a kind of offensive honesty, a raw self-expression. One-third of the way through the novel, Kavalerov writes a cathartic letter to Comrade Babichev declaring, "Actually, I have just one feeling: hatred. . . . And like all officials, you're a petty tyrant." To understand this eruption as refreshing or humorous, one must read carefully. Read and find out if Kavalerov actually delivers the letter.
Rated by buyers -
Olesha is on par with Gogol, Dostoevsky, Voinovitch or Bulgakov, but he never gets treated that way. The very first part of this is brilliant. Possibly meant to be a condemnation of Kavalerov, instead this wicked, jealous, indecent, and meek man is real and quite sympathetic.
The second part is not nearly as good, but still worth it. Some argue that this was pro-Soviet, some anti-Soviet, I think it's somewhere in the middle: an ingenious juxtaposition that forces one to reflect on life and the nature of consciousness, be it a burden or not.
Find other books like this one:
