Envy (New York Review Books Classics)

Rating:
Summary: Olesha's Envy
Review: I love this book. Olesha is a masterful artist and his descriptions of the world are strange and wonderful. He is my favorite Russian author save Gogol.

Rating:
Summary: Not to be overlooked
Review: Olesha is on par with Gogol, Dostoevsky, Voinovitch or Bulgakov, but he never gets treated that way. The first part of this is brilliant. Possibly meant to be a condemnation of Kavalerov, instead this wicked, jealous, indecent, and meek man is real and quite sympathetic.

The second part is not nearly as good, but still worth it. Some argue that this was pro-Soviet, some anti-Soviet, I think it's somewhere in the middle: an ingenious juxtaposition that forces one to reflect on life and the nature of consciousness, be it a burden or not.

Rating:
Summary: Not to be overlooked
Review: Olesha is on par with Gogol, Dostoevsky, Voinovitch or Bulgakov, but he never gets treated that way. The first part of this is brilliant. Possibly meant to be a condemnation of Kavalerov, instead this wicked, jealous, indecent, and meek man is real and quite sympathetic.

The second part is not nearly as good, but still worth it. Some argue that this was pro-Soviet, some anti-Soviet, I think it's somewhere in the middle: an ingenious juxtaposition that forces one to reflect on life and the nature of consciousness, be it a burden or not.

Rating:
Summary: Save Olesha from the ghetto of "Russian History!"
Review: The immediate context for this novel is Lenin's New Economic Policy of the early 1920s. This is a wonderful and wierd book that reflects the tensions of the time as artfully as NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND did the 1840s. In fact, Envy's structure would be quite familiar to Dostoevsky--the first section a vicious diatribe, the second a novella of sorts which places its hero within new social forms to which he is hostile and unaccustomed. An attack on rationalism, a masterpiece of modernism, a political screed, whatever. The result is several thousand miles from esoterica, which is to say it is wonderful literature.

Rating:
Summary: Olesha's Envy
Review: This book is magical! (Wink, Wink) You start off reading from the first person perspective; but before you realize it, you are reading from a third person point of view. From first to third, you will be stratching your head and asking yourself, "The main character, what's up with him? Is he on [drugs]? Is Ophelia really alive?" And the comments you make to yourself. "I didn't know they had minage a tois back then" or "Wow...people can people really get excited about sausages." Of course, if you are reading this book for a class, you might want to ask yourself: "Am I reading an anti-socialist criticism of the Bolsheviks or the proproganda of poletariats? Is this an examination of values between two different generations?"

But for what ever reason you pick up this book to read, it is going to be like Dostoevsky's "The Double" or Mandelstam's "The Eyptian Stamp" all over again, but only this time you feel as if you are high [or something].