Envy

“I have a conviction that I wrote the book ‘The Envy’ that will live for centuries. I still have its handwritten draft. From these pages there emanates an aura of elegance.” — Yuri Olesha

Nikolai Kavalerov lives on a couch at the home of the successful Soviet official Andrei Babichev, and with a painfully sharp perception watches his carefully ordered, well-fed life. Envy corrodes Kavalerov from within, tossing him from one extreme to another—filling him with, at one moment, contempt, and at the next, admiration, and then hatred.

‘The Envy’ is a book about the change of eras, when the old world—along with its dreams, passions, and such “unnecessary” feelings as love, jealousy, or pride—gives way to a new world ruled by a rational person. However, Kavalerov does not fit into these confines.

This is a novel about how terrifying it is to feel superfluous in one’s own time, to fall behind while the world changes at breakneck speed. About the fact that envy is not merely a sin or vice, but a painful cry of a person suffering from unacknowledgment, insolvency, and the inability to express oneself.

The work was highly praised by contemporaries. Maxim Gorky called the young writer’s “‘good audacity’” and included Olesha among the authors he reads “with pleasure, even with greed.” Vyacheslav Polonsky said that Olesha “knows how to see the way an ordinary mortal does not see.” Viktor Shklovsky called the denouement of ‘The Envy’ “catharsis—an очищением of feelings, the relief of pain through the beauty of necessity.”

Listen to Yuri Olesha’s novel ‘The Envy’—without which it is difficult to imagine 20th-century Russian literature—in a masterful performance by Grigory Peryelya.