Thursday, January 20, 2011

He showed his especially sparkling teeth manfully.

"And still, maybe, someday in a large waxworks museum there will stand a wax figure of a strange man, thicknosed, with a pale, kind face, with disheveled hair, boyishly plump, in a jacket which has one button left on the belly; and on the cube there'll be a plaque:

NIKOLAI KAVALEROV

And nothing more.  That's it.  And everyone seeing it will say, 'Ah, that's the one who lived at a famous time, hated everyone and envied everyone, bragged, got carried away, was obsessed with great plans, wanted to do a lot and did nothing – and ended up by committing a disgusting, malicious crime…'"


Завысть, or Envy


Not the cover of the book I read.  Or rather, the cover of the book in a different translation.  Berczynski's translation, which I did read, is invisible online.  I have no idea how I came to own it.

Author:  Yury Olesha.  Wrote this when he was 27.  He was… odd.  Not as odd as Gogol (but who is?), but still, the fact that Kavalerov's narrative style is a direct echo of Olesha's own worldview.  

"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." (emphasis mine)

Date published:  1927, right in the middle of what has been termed Russia's Silver Age (1917-1934).  Envy, like so much of Russian literature, was first published in a literary journal (Red Virgin Soil/Красная Новь - yes, that is a real thing).

What's so special about this, then?:  Envy is divided into two parts, the first told in first-person narration from the point of view of the envious Kavalerov, the second told in third-person and focusing more on Andrei and Ivan Babichev, but ending on Kavalerov's fate.  Furthermore, consistency in tense is as tenuous as Ivan's and Kavalerov's holds on reality.  There is even a Hamlet-esque "play within a play," with the "Tale of the Meeting of the Two Brothers" chapter in the second half of the book (which I really think is a dream).  Overall, the fluctuating, bizarre structure of the novel continues Pushkin's tradition of openly defying and disdaining lines of genre and rules of form.  

Thematically, lines between what is the object of the satire (Soviet models of living) and what is the subject (dreamers and fantasists) is blurred, as neither comes out winning. 

From the backflap of the Berczynski (which is far more useful than this Schwartz version pictured): 
"First published in 1927, Yury Olesha's Envy is, both stylistically and thematically, one of the most provocative novels from the Soviet era.  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.

[…all this a clip from Torchwood after the jump!]


Out of kindness, he rescues from the gutter Nikolai Kavalerov, 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 Kavalerov 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 and Pravda 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 twentieth-century Notes from the Underground."

And from Wikipedia, just for some oddly-phrased, poorly-explained fun:  "Envy is acclaimed by Vladimir Nabokov as the greatest novel produced in the Soviet Union.  It is remarkable both for its poetic style, undulating modes of transition between the scenes, its innovative structure, its biting satire, and for its ruthless examination of Socialist ideals."  

Did I get caught up on innovative in both those description and end up giggling over how Brits pronounce it (à la Torchwood)?: 

Yep.

Would Ivan's Ophelia machine be totally at home in the Torchwood world?:  Why yes, I think it would, at that.  Ivan Babichev – Andrei's older, flightier brother – is a dreamer and a preacher of creativity, and claims throughout the novel to have invented a machine that can do anything, be anything, overcome anything.  He has named it Ophelia, because it is somehow tied to tragedy, and femininity.  I can't claim I really understood as much of this book as I thought I might have, but Ivan's ramblings are entertaining and soothing and contradictory and, well, here:

"I tell you:  my dream was the machine of machines, the universal machine.  I thought about the perfect instrument, I hoped to concentrate hundreds of different functions in one small apparatus.  Yes, my friend.  A beautiful, noble task.  For the sake of this is was worth becoming a fanatic.  I had the thought of subduing the mastodon of technology, to make him tame, domestic… to give man such a little lever, simple, familiar, which wouldn't frighten him, would be ordinary, like a doorknob…
[…]
But I've prohibited it.  One fine day I understood that it is to me that the supernatural possibility of getting revenge for my epoch has been given… I've corrupted the machine.  On purpose.  Out of spite."

He burst out laughing in a happy laugh.

"No, understand, Kavalerov, what great satisfaction.  I endowed the greatest creation of technology with the most vulgar human feelings!  I disgraced the machine.  I got revenge for my age, which gave me the brain that lies in my skull, my brain which though up the marvelous machine…"

Favorite lines:  Olesha is weird, and Envy is weirder, but there are still gems here.  From Part 1, narrated by Kavalerov, we have:

It's raining

The rain walks along Color Boulevard, rambles through the circus, turns into the boulevards and, having reached Petrovsky Heights, suddenly goes blind and loses confidence.

I cross "The Horn" thinking about the fabulous fencer who walked in the rain repelling the drops with his foil.  The foil sparkled, the skirts of his doublet fluttered, the fencer twisted, bobbed like a flute – an stayed dry.  He received his father's inheritance.  I got soaked to the ribs and, it seemed, received a slap in the face.

From Part II, narrated in the third-person and focusing more on Ivan than Kavalerov, we get this lovely image from the middle of what (I am pretty, mostly sure) is a dream:

"His speech broke off.  But even so he'd said too much.  It was as though they'd grabbed him by the last sentence, as one might grab an arm – they twisted his sentence behind his back.  He stopped short."

Perfect.

According to Caryl:  Just because this works, and because I am going to Willamette U next week to hear her speak.  Yes, I am.

"Anti-utopias, it turns out, are as double-voiced as utopias.  It is both impossible to remain as we are, and impossible to survive in a society where our current vices have been eliminated. […] In his 1927 novel Envy, Yury Olesha (1899-1960) ridicules the self-satisfied New Soviet Production Manager Andrei Babichev – a virtuous, well-fed, public-spirited poshlyak – but discredits even more the envious, superfluous sponger and social relic who is telling the tale."

Take-away:  The takeaway here is that the "new man" and the "new century" and the "new age" are all ephemeral, and can all cause envy, right or not.  That's what I got.


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