Russian history since the fifteenth century might be read as envy of the other. Petr Chaadaev's agility could take Russians’ sense of inner lack and replace their envious gaze westward with a vision of possibility, but the country continues to maintain a charged ambivalence toward cultural and social differences. In her study of Yurii Olesha, Konstantin Vaginov, and Aleksandr Grin, Professor Yelena Zotov explores literature from the 1920s that investigates the dynamic of envy. She also acknowledges a critical idol, Mikhail Bakhtin. Though conceding that “Bakhtin never explicitly wrote about envy,” Zotova likens his “absolute aesthetic need for the Other” as “one's ultimate desire to be a hero in someone else's narrative” (36). Other theoreticians of envy, including Harold Bloom, Max Scheler, and Melanie Klein are vetted and introduced as suitable company for the Saransk master, but Zotova is particularly drawn to René Girard, whose theory of desire, like Bakhtin's reception model, is triangular.
To set up a paradigm for her investigation, Zotova devotes an early chapter to Aleksandr Pushkin's inventive portrayal of the envious craftsman in “Motsart i Sal'eri,” and characteristically pivots to Bakhtin in promoting her view of authorship: “While Salieri is only capable of objectifying Mozart from without, Mozart is both outside of Salieri and within him” (97). Zotova then considers the dramatized conflict of novelty and obsolescence in Olesha's Zavist΄, and while never quite reconciling it with Pushkin's interest in the opposition of artisan/master, she acutely registers the writers’ similar focus on the self-consciousness of narration: Salieri the storyteller, and the “self-censoring and confused ‘author’” that destabilizes Olesha's novel (105). Zotova is equally apt in targeting the busy intertextuality of Vaginov, which effectively and simultaneously appropriates its sources and renders them “chuzhie.” Using the distancing voice that marks Vaginov's affinity with OBERIU prose, the interventionist narrator of Kozlinaia pesn΄ seesaws between mockery and adulation of his various models, particularly two real-life figures from Vaginov's own circle, Lev Gumilev and Bakhtin. Zotova concludes with Grin's stories of the fantastic, focusing upon “Fandango” and “Alye parusa.” “If Olesha portrays the pain of envy from within the envious consciousness of the author, and Vaginov conceptualizes this pain as the author's failure to achieve outsidedness in his parodying homage of Bakhtin…. Grin's empathy always lies with the envied” (199).
This is not completely true. Assol, the Cinderella-like heroine of “Alye parusa” is shunned, not envied, and commands the narrator's and reader's sympathy because she is an outcaste. Having defined the 1920s in terms of socio-economic change and brutal repression, Zotova labors somewhat to explain the escapist writings of Grin. Using its ostentatious display of fetishized objects—the paintings in Brock's apartment, the sumptuous treasures of Professor Bam-Gran—Zotova quickly unlocks “Fandango” with an envy-based reading, but “Alye parusa” resists her efforts to complicate what is a straightforward fairy tale.
Zotova's uncritical acceptance of Bakhtin exacts a price. In allowing him to exert a strong gravitational pull on her thinking, she does not submit his ideas to the test of usefulness, instead reversing the normal direction of critical reading and reconciling elements of her writers’ stories with Bakhtin's theory of authorship. Further, while Bakhtin gives Zotova a vocabulary for describing alienation, his deeply religious theory of interpersonality, founded on responsiveness to others, inevitably turns the works of Olesha, Vaginov, and Grin into failures, which they are not, conceptually or aesthetically. Girard and Bakhtin may both premise human activity on a response to incompleteness, but Girard's “desire” (A wants B because B is looking away at C) and Bakhtin's summons to engage the other (A and B need each other to complete themselves) are absolutely opposed in outcome.
Though their most nuanced approaches to the theme of envy fall in the 1930s, one questions Zotova's exclusion of the “Berlin” Vladimir Nabokov (especially Mashen΄ka and “Sogliadatai”) and Mikhail Bulgakov. With its repulsive incarnation of the “new man,” “Sobach'e serdtse” certainly anticipates Olesha's Andrei Babichev. All these works were published in or before 1930. Further, while it offers Zotova a fitting springboard for her argument about envy, one wonders at her choosing “Motsart i Sal'eri” over Fedor Dostoevskii's Zapiski iz podpol΄ia, which exerted an untold impact on the Modernist authors she addresses.
Zotova has read an impressive amount of scholarship—given the mountain of academic writing devoted to Zavist΄ alone, an astonishing feat. Olesha is paradoxically the author where Zotova is able to contribute the most, particularly in her analysis of the Odessan's imagery of disfigurement, which she finds to be a metaphor for both cultural dislocation and the belligerence of envy. Zotova's theses also beg to be read in relation to discussions of fame/shame cultures. Though the theoretical apparatus of the monograph often loses in depth what it attempts in latitude, her readings will reward students of the individual authors, particularly Olesha and Vaginov.
