In the novel Envy, Yury Olesha portrays the alienation of the bourgeois in the wake of the Russian revolution. The protagonist, Nikolai Kavalerov, realizes gradually that the new Soviet man is not to be envied but to be ignored. The critical incident occurs at the climax of the novel, when Kavalerov dreams of the death of the Christ-like Ivan Babichev at the hands of his own disaffected machine. At the end of the novel, Kavalerov decides to remain in the bed of the widow Prokopovich, symbol of decadence and decay. He comes to realize that a transition to a new Soviet man is impossible, and his envy changes to indifference. The Soviet world is represented in Envy as a place where individuality is lost and replaced with collective ideals--romanticism replaced with empiricism and emotions replaced by logic.
The Soviet ideal as portrayed in Envy is similar to other novels of the proto-social realistic type. The familiar characteristics include the disdain for bourgeois feelings and a driving desire to emulate a machine. The new Soviet man in Envy is represented by Volodia Makarov, a young soccer star and engineering student. The great goals in Envy are the opening of the Quarter cafeteria and the development of the superior salami.รก Olesha's tone deliberately belittles the ideals of the social realist novels. The triviality of the goals in Envy represents the hollow nature of the Soviet emphasis on materialism. A humorous passage satirizing this Soviet staple shows Andrei Babichev addressing a crowd of housewives on the efficiency of his cafeteria:
And you give half your day to a peewee puddle of soup. We'll turn your peewee puddles into shining seas. We'll ladle out cabbage soup by the ocean, pour out buckwheat by the burial mound, gelatin will move by the glacier (Olesha, 7)!
Even in this example, the materialism comes at the expense of humanism. The scope and scale is so grand as to deny a person his or her in...