Envy

Olesha Yury

Description

Andrei Babichev is a paragon of Soviet values, an innovative and practical man, Director of the Food Industry Trust, a man whose vision encompasses such future advances for mankind as the 35-kopeck sausage and the self-peeling potato. Out of kindness, he rescues from the gutter Nikolai Karalerov, violently tossed from a bar after a drunken and self-destructive tirade. But instead of gratitude, Babichev finds himself the subject of an endlessly malignant jealousy, as Kavaelrov sees in him a representative of the new breed of man who has prevented him from realizing his true greatness. A scathing social satire, Envy is a concise and incisive exploration of the paradigmatic conflicts of the early Soviet age: old versus new, imagination versus pragmatism, and the alienation of the romantic artist in the age of technology. Critics as far apart as Gleb Struve ("One of the most interesting and original works in the whole of Soviet literature?) and Pravda ("Olesha's style is masterful, his psychological analysis infinitely subtle, his portrayal of negative characters truly striking?) have praised the novel, and one of the signs of its universality is the fact that it has been claimed by nearly every school of critics and interpreted as everything from a submerged homosexual story to a 20th-century Notes from the Underground.

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 16 janvier 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781590209417
• Langue: English

Extrait

Copyright
This edition first published in the United States in 2004 by
Ardis Publishers
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Translation copyright © 1975 by Ardis
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Ardis Publishers is an imprint of Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc. www.ardisbooks.com
ISBN 978-1-59020-940-0
CONTENTS
Copyright
Introduction to Envy (T. S. Berczynski)
Olesha // Envy
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Part Two
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
INTRODUCTION
Yury Olesha’s short novel Envy was first published in 1927, in Red Virgin Soil, a journal edited by Alexander Voronsky. Until the appearance of Envy, Olesha, who was born in Elizavetgrad in 1899 and raised in Odessa, was almost completely unknown as a writer. In the beginning of NEP he moved to Moscow where he began working for Gudok (The Whistle), a railroad workers’ newspaper, in which he published agitational verse under the pseudonym “Zubilo” (“Point Tool”). In the years following the publication of Envy, which was an immediate success, until the establishment of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1932, Olesha published the majority of his fiction, including a satirical novel for “children,” Three Fat Men (1928), which he had written in 1924; two collections of short stories, Love (1929) and The Cherry Stone (1930); and the play, A List of Blessings (1931).
In his speech at the first All-Union Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers, Olesha, in the face of the demand for “socialist realism,” defended his earlier work and dedicated himself to the theme of youth, promising “plays and stories” in which the characters would “decide problems of a moral nature.” Yet, Olesha provided only one such work with this theme, a scenario entitled A Strict Youth (1934). After two editions of selected works already published by Olesha earlier appeared in 1935 and 1936, Olesha published very little fiction. In the late thirties Olesha devoted his attention primarily to film scripts and newspaper reporting and during World War II turned to translation of Turkmenian and Ukrainian writers while he lived in Ashkhabad. During the “thaw” in 1956, after being almost silent for nearly twenty years, most of Olesha’s early works were reissued in a collection, and he contributed selections of his notebooks to Literary Moscow II, perhaps the most significant publishing event of the “Year of Protest.” The final years of his life, until his death in 1960, were devoted to his autobiography, Not a Day without a Line (1965), and a screen adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Idiot.
Envy is Olesha’s best work. Stylistically, it represents one of the most provocative pieces of prose fiction from the 1920’s. The problem of style in the novel is complicated by the shift in point of view from first person in Part I to third person in Part II. While Kavalerov’s monologue monopolizes Part I and represents the dominant style in the novel, stylistic unity is not sacrificed for the sake of the narrational scheme. In Part II Ivan Babichev’s voice dominates, with the aid of a third-person narrator, echoing many of the peculiarities of Kavalerov’s heavily poetic language. To speak of Kavalerov’s style is in essence to speak of Olesha’s style in Envy . At the All-Union Congress of Writers in 1934, Olesha admitted that “Kavalerov looked at the world” with his eyes and that the “hues, colors, images, comparisons, metaphors and conclusions of Kavalerov” were his own. Kavalerov’s mode embraces the whole work, its conception and realization. He is as much Envy for us as he is the “envier” for Ivan Babichev.
Structurally, the text displays a marked disdain for genre lines. Although most commentators refer to this short prose piece as a novel, it is that only in the loosest sense. Envy accomodates a variety of materials and means: verse, letters, bureaucratic memoranda, an excerpt from a pamphlet and even a sign. Other devices which distinguish the work from a long, sustained, prose narrative are the shift in point of view already mentioned, the shift to direct dramatic form during Ivan’s interrogation and the inclusion of “The Tale of the Meeting of Two Brothers,” which serves as a play within the play.
Thematically, Envy exhibits a conflict of diametrically opposed views. Kavalerov, who embodies the present, who can be nothing but what he is, is caught in the clash between the brothers Babichev. Andrei, the corpulent Soviet bureacrat, who takes credit for creations not his own, looks to the future through the young, virile soccer player, Volodya Makarov, whom he adopts as a son and who envies the machine and wants to achieve physical perfection. Ivan, a “great impostor,” values fantasy above all and claims to have invented “Ophelia,” a machine with the aid of which he threatens to reclaim the world for human feelings and hopes to achieve emotional freedom. As Andrei claims Valya, Ivan’s daughter, through her involvement with Volodya, Ivan attempts to win back his daughter to the “conspiracy of human feelings” which he has planned and in which he has involved Kavalerov, who is himself in love with Valya. These complex interrelationships and the attendant imagery suggest a variety of possibilities, including both the psychology of Freud and the philosophy of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground . The rich verbal texture, the concern with perception and the numerous literary allusions reflect the problems of the creative personality in an unreceptive society. Olesha unashamedly examines the relationship between art and life.
Olesha’s Envy is not easily rendered into English, as previous efforts by other translators have demonstrated; either the sense or the poetry (or sometimes both) of Olesha’s prose is sacrificed. This translation is an attempt to be true to the original, as much as possible, to keep both image and idea in tact and to try to transmit some sense of the poetic prose. For this reason, certain liberties have been taken, at times, with what is normally considered “good English usage.” Salem, Oregon T. S. Berczynski
OLESHA // ENVY
I
In the morning he sings in the john. You can imagine what an effervescent and physically-fit person this is. The desire to sing arises in him like a reflex. These songs of his, in which there’s neither melody nor words but just a “ta-ra-ra,” which he pipes out in permutations, can be interpreted like this:
“How I like to live… ta-ra! ta-ra!.. My bowels are buoyant… ra-ta-ta-ta-ra-ree… In me the fluids flow flawlessly … ra-ta-ta-doo-ta-ta… Gush, guts, gush… tram-ba-ba-boom!”
When he passes by me in the morning on his way from the bedroom (I pretend to be asleep) to the door leading into the viscera of the apartment, the bathroom, my imagination follows him. I hear the commotion in the phone booth of a bathroom, where it’s tight for his bulky body. His back bangs against the inner side of the closed door and his elbows hit the walls; he shuffles his feet. Inset in the bathroom door is frosted, oval glass. He turns the switch; the oval is illuminated from within and becomes a beautiful opal-colored egg. With a mental stare I see this egg hanging in the darkness of the corridor.
He weighs about 220 pounds. Not long ago, when walking down stairs somewhere, he noticed how his breasts bounced in beat with his feet. Therefore he decided to add a new series of gymnastic exercises.
This is a model, masculine specimen.
Usually he indulges in gymnastics, not in his own bedroom, but in that room of unprescribed purpose where I am kept. Here it’s roomier, airier; there’s more light, more radiance. In through the open balcony door pours coolness. Besides this, here there’s a sink. The mat is moved in from the bedroom. He’s stripped to the waist, wearing knit longies fastened by a single button in the middle of his belly. The azure and rose-colored world of the room revolves in the mother-of-pearl objective of the button. When he lays his back on the mat and begins to raise his legs in turn, the button can’t bear it. The groin is unveiled. His groin is grand. The tender spot. The forbidden corner. The groin of a production man. It’s the same such groin of suede dullness I saw on a buck antelope. The girls, his secretaries and clerks, would certainly be penetrated by love currents from just one glimpse of it.
He washes like a little boy: pipes, hops, snorts, emits howls. He captures water by handfuls and not quite getting it to his armpits, splashes the mat. The water scatters on the straw in full, clean drops. The foam falling into the basin bubbles like a pancake. Sometimes the soap blinds him–swearing, he tears at his eyelids with his thumbs. He rinses his throat with a screech. Under the balcony people stop and throw back their heads.
The rosiest, quietest morning. Spring in full swing. On all the window sills stand flower boxes. Through their slits seeps the cinnabar of a forthcoming florescence.
(Things don’t like me. Furniture tries to trip me. Once some sort of lacquered corner literally bit me. With my blanket I always have complex interrelations. Soup which is served me never cools.