In 1927 issues seven and eight of the well-known literary journal Red Virgin Soil [Krasnaia nov’] caused a sensation. They introduced Iurii Olesha’s novel Zavist’ [Envy] to the Soviet reading public. Positive reviews followed from both specialized periodicals like Revolution and Culture [Revoliutsiia i kul’tura] and mass circulation newspapers such as Pravda. Reviewers initially saw Envy as an attack on outdated bourgeois values, but Olesha was soon under fire because readers sympathized more with the characters who embodied, in the eyes of Soviet officials, those very “negative” values. Charged with “formalism”, in other words with focusing on form at the expense of content (meaning the Party line), Olesha found himself in an ambiguous, and potentially dangerous, position for the remainder of the 1920s and much of the 1930s.
Soviet prose in the 1920s was dominated...
1907 words
Citation: Rowley, Alison. "Zavist'". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 27 April 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=24344, accessed 09 June 2026.]
