1. Aristotle, Poetics, 1450. Aristotle, of course, is referring to tragedy, but his argument applies to most narrative.

2. In the Russian tradition Utopia most often appears in dreams rather than as a result of the other traditional Utopian stratagem, a journey to an as yet undiscovered land, perhaps because, as one commentator puts it, “the Russian writer and thinker often felt the gap between the ideal and reality more sharply than did his European compeer.” Shestakov, V. P., in Russkaia literaturnaia utopiia, ed. V. P. Shestakov (Moscow: Moskovskii universitet, 1986), 14 Google Scholar.

3. Levin, Harry, The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 28 Google Scholar. For a discussion of the relation of Utopian literature and satire, see Elliott, Robert C., The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970 Google Scholar.

4. Northrop Frye, “Varieties of Literary Utopias,” in Utopias and Utopian Thought, ed. Frank E. Manuel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 34.

5. From “Vo ves’ golos” and “Razgovor s fininspektorom o poezii,” Maiakovskii, Vladimir, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, ed. V O. Pertsov and V. K. Zemskov (Moscow-Leningrad, 1963) 2: 550, 126Google Scholar.

6. “My rastem iz zheleza,” in Proletarskie poety pervykh let sovetskoi epokhi, 2nd ed., Biblioteka poeta, ed. Z. S. Papernyi and R. A. Shatseva (Leningrad, 1959), 148.

7. Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhenskii, Azbuka kommunizma (1919), 36-39. For a historical survey of Soviet versions of Utopia, see Gilison, Jerome M., The Soviet Image of Utopia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1975 Google Scholar. The revolution also gave rise to a number of peasant pastorals but the urban industrial model soon won out. See Clark, Katerina, “The City versus the Countryside in Soviet Peasant Literature of the Twenties: A Duel of Utopias,” in Bolshevik Culture, ed. Abbott Gleason et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 175–189 Google Scholar.

8. John Keats, Letters, ed. M. B. Forman, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), 72, 96: nos. 32 and 44 (21 December 1817 and 3 February 1818).

9. William E. Harkins, “The Theme of Sterility in Olesha's Envy,” Slavic Review 25, no. 3 (Spring 1966): 444-445. My debt to Harkins is large.

10. See Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries, trans. Philip Mairet (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 174-175.

11. Olesha, Iurii, Povesti i rasskazy (Moscow, 1965), 20–21 Google Scholar. Citations from Olesha's works are from this edition. I have used the translations by MacAndrew, Andrew R., Envy and Other Works (New York: Doubleday, 1967 Google Scholar, but have modified them, often considerably. At one point in the novel Babichev is called a “mama” (60).

12. Sigmund Freud, “Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex,” The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Random House, 1938), 590.

13. Harkins, “Theme of Sterility,” 446.

14. Gary Saul Morson speaks of the parodist's “irony of origins” that “reveals the historical or personal circumstances that led someone to make or entertain a claim of transhistoricity,” and how anti-utopias “call attention to the ways in which desire rather than reason has shaped a set of ideas.” The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky's “Diary of a Writer” and the Traditions of Literary Utopia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 118-121. The novel as a genre is essentially ironic, while Utopia is didactic. Of the three Utopias of Zavist', only Volodia's and Valia's escape the “irony of origins,” which is perhaps why they are the least credible—to know a thing, or at least a human being, we want to know its history.

15. The mysterious remark, “Give birth to a son,” makes sense when set beside Ivan's remark (76): “You're just getting old, Andriusha! You just need a son!… The family is eternal, Andrei!” Parenthood, like art (see below), is a way of overcoming death.

16. Also, Kavalerov physically resembles Babichev (see 36), to whom his oedipal rivalry extends. In each case he is struggling against an identification with a father figure he cannot respect, who is not the “example of a great man” (51). Anechka, in trying to seduce him, says, “You are already a papa” (35).

17. On Olesha and Dostoevskii, see V. Polonskii, “Ocherki sovremennoi literatury (preodolenie Zavisti),” Novyi mire (1929): 189-208; and Jackson, Robert Louis, Dostoevski's Underground Man in Russian Literature (The Hague: Mouton, 1958), 158–165 Google Scholar.

18. Compare Olesha's allegory, “Liompa,” in which children greet a world of expanding horizons, while the sole adult (the dying Ponomarev) undergoes a simultaneous process of loss, a shrinkage of possibility. In the lovely scene of Zavist', where Kavalerov sees in a park “beautiful mothers,” whose breasts represent “milk, motherhood, marriage, pride, and purity” (63), however, we have a suggestion that adulthood may not always be sterile.

19. Morson, Boundaries of Genre, 122.

20. Barratt, See Andrew, Yurii Olesha's Envy, Birmingham Slavonic Monographs no. 12 (Birmingham, U.K.: University of Birmingham, 1981), 29–30 Google Scholar. Also Maguire, Robert A., Red Virgin Soil: Soviet Literature in the 1920s (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), 339 Google Scholar. Maguire has interesting things to say about the oedipal conflict in the novel. Also Zholkovskii, Aleksandr, “Dialog Bulgakova i Oleshi,” Sintaksis 20 (1987): 105 Google Scholar.

21. Elizabeth Beaujour locates the source of this paradisiacal scene in the work of H. G. Wells, whom Olesha admired. The Invisible Land: A Study of the Artistic Imagination oflurii Olesha (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 59.

22. Barratt, Yurii Olesha's Envy, 46-52, detects something sinister in Volodia's character and describes an intentional contrast between the idealistic Bolsheviks of the first generation of the revolution (Andrei) and their proto-Stalinist heirs.

23. Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1922), 15-23.

24. Chudakova, M. O., Masterstvo luriia Oleshi (Moscow, 1972), 93 Google Scholar. Chudakova, in her first-rate study, notes that the visual dimension, which she sees as primary in Olesha's art, exists independently of the plot (fabula) (66-67). Compare V. Badikov: “Olesha's heroes sense the world not simply in images, but as artists. In this sense their perception becomes, as it were, the hero of the novel, acquiring an objective aesthetic value.” V. Badikov, “O stile romana luriia Oleshi Zavist',” Filologicheskii sbornik 5 (Alma-Ata 1966): 58. Contemporaries compared Olesha to the French modernists—Proust, Jean Giraudoux—and Pasternak. He was jokingly referred to as “among Russians, the best French writer.” See Berkovskii, N, “O prozaikakh,” Zvezda 12 (1929): 15 Google Scholar; and K. Gur'ev, “12 stul'ev,” Na literaturnompostu 18 (1929): 70.

25. Quoted by Kazimiera Ingdahl, in The Artist and the Creative Act: A Study ofjurij Olesha's Novel “Zavist” (Stockholm: Minab-Gotab, 1984), 15. Ingdahl makes a similar point about Olesha's use of metaphor in Ni dnia bez strochki (Moscow, 1965), 257. Metaphor for Olesha was something more than a literary technique; it was his way of apprehending the world. Seeing a butterfly, he writes, “I also saw its metaphorical hypostasis—in other words I saw it twice” (ibid., 269).

26. In his speech to the First Congress of Soviet Writers (1934), Olesha acknowledged, “Kavalerov looked at the world through my eyes. Kavalerov's colors, images, similes, metaphors, and conclusions belong to me” (Povesti, 426).

27. See “Zrelishcha,” Povesti, 341-342, where Olesha speaks of the appeal of motorcycle stunts and circus tricks as events that reach “the limits of the fantastical,” creating “a picture of a nonexistent world with physical laws opposite to ours” (sports had the same attraction for him). His own art, however, is not unadulterated fantasy, but, as he put it in “The Cherry Stone,” ibid., 257, “a hybrid of practical and imaginary worlds,” or as I would put it, a species of comic fantasy. See also Ni dnia bez strochki, 238, where he talks of fantasy as having “a higher and more artistic sense when it resembles reality. “

28. In the story “Liubov',” Olesha describes the world of imagination as appearing on the border between sleep and waking and as “close to childlike feelings.” Povesti, 270. In an interview he said, “Sometimes I think that to be a poet, an artist, is to be a weak man. It's a childish profession. I think about the fact that in the world there are men and children. And the men build and struggle. The children sing.” Iurii Olesha in an interview by Sobelev, V, “Guliaia v sadu,” Literaturnaia gazeta, 29 May 1933 Google Scholar.

29. In “Liubov',” the land of imagination, joined with love, is explicitly called “paradise,” Povesti, 273-274.

30. I take this to be the meaning of the allegory “Liompa,” in which the child does not yet know the names of things and thus has no power over them, the dying Ponomarev is losing his power, while the boy building model airplanes, who knows the “laws” of science, has it. It is revealing of Olesha's ambivalence about being an artist that his mean between the poles of impotence is a budding scientist or engineer not a poet.

31. Olesha's view of art was clearly influenced by Russian formalist theory of “defamiliarization,” whereby the artist frees us from the blindness of habit and renews our sense of reality (and of literature) by viewing the world from a fresh angle of vision. See especially “The Cherry Stone,” Povesti, 259.

32. “Man's powerlessness before certain phenomena of nature and life is a subject for transformation by the power of art into splendid images. It is for this that art exists. It is the bridge between man's dream of perfection and the imperfection of his nature.” “Iurii Olesha Talks with His Readers,” trans. H. O. Whyte, International Literature 3 (1936): 88.

33. “Tsep',” Povesti, 252.

34. H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (London: Thomas Nelson, n.d.), 20.