Iurii Olesha, Zavist' [Envy]

Alison Rowley (Concordia University, Canada)

Ed. by Neil Cornwell, University of Bristol
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 2.2.2.00: Post-1917 Writing and Culture in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, 1917-present.
Vol. editors: Neil Cornwell (University of Bristol), Roman Koropeckyj (University of California, Los Angeles), Andrei Rogatchevski (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1927

Places

Russia (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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Recommended Reading

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as an attack on outdated bourgeois values, but Olesha was soon under fire because readers sympathized more with the characters who embodied, in the eyes of Soviet officials, those very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…

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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 18 April 2024.]

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