Emotion's Great Defender: the Pitiful and the Beautiful in Yury Olesha's Envy
Olesha is carefully ambivalent in his writing toward the question of individualism. He nearly outright states his ambivalence several times throughout the novel. One such moment is the soccer match, which is set up as a battle between Russia and Germany, the teams being led by Volodya and Goetske, respectively. Volodya is a soccer player for the Soviet Union and is a team player, representing collectivism. Goetske, who plays for Germany and plays for personal glory, represents individualism. Olesha does not make it clear who wins the soccer match, though he does say that the crowd was “swinging Volodya Makarov.” The lack of clarity in the outcome of the match conveys his ambivalence between individualism and collectivism (141). Another moment Olesha expresses his ambivalence is the very end of the novel, when Ivan Babichev, a romantic character who creates a machine to kill all machines and a one-time ally of the main character, Kavalerov, says “indifference is the best of all conditions of the human mind” (52). Though ambivalence and indifference are not quite the same, they both exist in the space between choosing one side or the other.
Olesha also conveys ambivalence through his characterization. Each of his characters is pitiful, ridiculous, or both. Two of the main characters, who are in opposition throughout the novel, can be used as an example with which to see this: Kavalerov and Andrei Babichev. The character Kavalerov, an individualistic, envious drunk, narrates the first section as he stays in the house of Andrei Babichev, a man who has a large role in the new Soviet state. Kavalerov constantly describes Andrei with satire. He takes these descriptions quite far, saying once that “last night [Andrei] came back hungry and decided to have a bite to eat” and “he kept taking his pince-nez off and putting them back on, he smacked his lips, he snorted, his ears wiggled” (9). The narrator uses zoomorphism—giving a human the traits of an animal—by giving Andrei pig-like qualities, thereby degrading him, making fun of him. However, Andrei is not the only one who receives this satirizing treatment. Kavalerov himself is pitiful. He constantly talks about his desire for “fame of [his] own,” and his desire for “a lot of attention,” but when encountered with any sort of attention he reacts bitterly and stupidly (26). Andrei takes him in because was thrown out of a bar and lying in the street. He is certainly no hero. He is, rather, a “clot of envy in the dying era’s bloodstream,” as one character describes him. This is not a particularly sympathetic description of Kavalerov; he is a clot, something that causes sickness and pain, something that no one wants (101). This depiction of Kavalerov may have, in fact, allowed Envy to be the success in the Soviet Union that it was; Pravda, the official Communist newspaper, said that it demonstrated “the envy of small despicable people, the petty bourgeois flushed from their lairs by the revolution; those who are trying to initiate a ‘conspiracy of feelings’ against the majestic reorganization of our national economy and our daily life” (xi). From this viewpoint, the character of Kavalerov is a pitiful mimicry of people at the time who were worried that the revolution would strip Soviet citizens of their individual selves. And it’s true; if Kavalerov is our great defender of emotion, he’s a pathetic one.
Yet, Kavalerov is emotion’s great defender, and Olesha reserves his most beautiful language for him, creating sympathy in the reader towards Kavalerov’s case. Kavalerov at one time describes people as “surrounded by tiny inscriptions […] on forks, spoons, saucers, [Andrei’s] pince-nez frames, his buttons, and his pencils […] no one notices them. They’re waging a battle for survival […] they rise up, class against class: the letters on the street plaques do battle with the letters on the posters” (9). Kavalerov creates, in this short section, a mirror-world of our own from the trademarks and advertisements of everyday life, and then sets them to battle with one another to mirror the discord in the Soviet Union at the time. This technique, in which the author takes a thing known to the reader and makes it unknown in order to give it meaning again, is called defamiliarization; that Kavalerov gives something that is as inane as advertisements on glasses meaning makes the reader have some degree of admiration for him. Kavalerov also describes old airplanes as “looking like birds,” instead of the current ones, which he bemoans “look like heavy fish” (43). He uses defamiliarization again, here—who would look at a plane and think of a heavy fish?—to revitalize the reader’s world. His ability to make the world more beautiful makes the reader wish they could see like Kavalerov. And here is the crux of the issue of ambivalence, the decision. In spite of ourselves, we are drawn towards the battle of inscriptions instead of the battle between nations, we dream of bird-like planes instead of reveling in the take-off of the new Soviet machine. In short, we are just as pitiful as Kavalerov. As so, as Ken Kalfus says in the introduction, he is “the mad, miserable, true hero of Envy” (xii). The desire for meaning and beauty in the world wins out.
Kavalerov’s uncertain ending complicates this win. Throughout the novel, he sees one woman, Valya, who is also the niece of Andrei Babichev, as his goal. However, he fails at this goal. At the end of the novel, he is pictured with his widowed neighbor, Anichka, whom he makes fun of in the beginning of the novel. He describes her with hatred, even going so far as to call her “the symbol of [his] male degradation” who tells him to “give up [his] dreams of extraordinary love” (29). And he does give up this dream. Kavalerov’s failure to achieve his goal of Valya could be seen as uncomplicated, a death sentence for emotion, except for a long description in chapter 3 of part two, which is not clearly attached to any one character. The narrator describes a dead lightbulb which, upon being shook, “flashes again and [burns] a little longer. Inside the bulb it’s a disaster,” and so the light has “a brief, unnatural, undeniably doomed life—a fever, a too-bright incandescence, a flash,” which soon turns to eternal darkness, but “the brief flash is magnificent” (95). Kavalerov’s life can be compared to this dead, destroyed lightbulb. Inside him, it’s a disaster—that much is obvious from his twisted hatred and envy, his incapability to achieve satisfaction or joy. And perhaps he is doomed, now, to stay with Anichka forever, but there is a brief, tender moment where he sees Valya near the end of the soccer match. A spark of light. And perhaps this is success, for Kavalerov. The metaphor of the lightbulb allows that emotional success does not need to be linear. The ending is going to be bad; but the moment in the middle, of beauty, of emotion, justifies the rest. Again, Olesha’s ambivalence and uncertainty give way to the side of emotion.
Though Olesha seems to align himself with the side of emotion, the question of individualism remains largely unanswered by this text. Through satirizing everything and making us both love and hate characters with equal measure, Olesha seems to be saying that neither option is perfect—both, in fact, are ridiculous, pitiful, unnoteworthy—and, at the same time, contain beauty. Envy, written only ten years after the Bolshevik revolution—before Stalin, before the reign of Socialist Realism, before World War II—allows us to see an author who is hesitant, uncertain of the world to come.
Bibliography
Olesha, Yuri Karlovich. Envy. Green Integer, 2012.
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