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Olesha's Zavist: Utopia and Dystopia Author(s): Milton Ehre Reviewed work(s): Source: Slavic Review, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 601-611 Published by: Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2499856 . Accessed: 13/11/2012 11:49 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Slavic Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.230 on Tue, 13 Nov 2012 11:49:03 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Olesha's Zavist: Utopia and DystopiaAuthor(s): Milton EhreReviewed work(s):Source: Slavic Review, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 601-611Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2499856 .

Accessed: 13/11/2012 11:49

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserveand extend access to Slavic Review.

http://www.jstor.org

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MILTON EHRE

Olesha's Zavist': Utopia and Dystopia

Utopia and dystopia designate the human dream of happiness and the human nightmare of de- spair when these are assigned a place (topos) in space or time. Since narrative literature "is es- sentially an imitation not of persons but of action and life, of happiness and misery,"' utopian and dystopian inventions are mere extremes of literature's ongoing story. In realistic fictions, although social circumstances may range from the incidental to the decisive, the story of the movement to happiness or unhappiness is usually told in terms of individual achievement and failure. In the utopian and anti-utopian scheme deliverance or damnation depend on the place where one has found oneself, whether it is "the good place" or "the bad place." Although uto- pias are allegorical constructs of the rational mind, attempting to bring order to the disorder of life, their denial of what is for the sake of what ought to be makes them a species of fantasy literature-a dream of reason.)

When the literary imagination eschews mimetic designs, when it refracts rather than reflects reality, it is, in Harry Levin's words, "likely to show either a wishful or else an anxious ten- dency, to emphasize the aspirations or the revulsions of its epoch, to produce an idyll or a sat- ire."' In utopian literature idyll (or panegyric) blends with satire, as praise of the ideal alternates with, or at least implies, criticism of the real. Dystopian literature is almost pure satire. Like his or her utopian antagonist, the dystopian writer postulates imaginary worlds, "nowheres," where reason, instead of triumphing, has gone berserk. Many utopias are unashamedly escapist, but the best of them, Plato's Republic, Thomas More's Utopia, raise ideal possibilities to remind us how far we fall short of being truly human. The dystopian vision also proceeds from some standard of human value and finds utopia more dehumanizing than the society it seeks to displace. Since literature, like life, is compounded of wish and anxiety, writers are often ambivalent, so that skeptical irony infiltrates the purity of utopia (even in More's locus classicus), pastoral contends with history (Oblomov and Voina i mir), utopian visions clash with deflating dystopian parody (Fedor Dostoevskii and Iurii Olesha).

Revolutionary epochs spawn utopias and rejoining dystopias (idyll, panegyric, and satire have been characteristic modes of Soviet literature). Hope and anxiety intensify as utopia ceases to be a hypothetical standard by which to measure actual society, what Northrop Frye has called "an informing power in the mind,"4 and promises (or threatens) to become an actuality. After 1917 a new world seemed in the making, "idushchikh svetlykh let," as Vladimir Maiakovskii sang, where "solntse . . . vzoidet nad griadushchim bez nishchikh kalek."' Industrialization would transform Russia into a paradisiacal landscape; socialist principles would give birth to a new Adam:

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." V. P. Shestakov, in Russkaia literaturnaia utopiia, ed. V. P. Shestakov (Moscow: Moskovskii universitet, 1986), 14.

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

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," Vladimir Maiakovskii, lzbran- nye proizvedeniia, ed. V. 0. Pertsov and V. K. Zemskov (Moscow-Leningrad, 1963) 2:550, 126.

Slavic Review 50, no. 3 (Fall 1991)

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602 Slavic Review

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the proletarian poet Aleksei Gastev exulted.6 Not only the energy of machines but also their rationalized activity provided a model for the utopian ambitions of the revolutionary years. In the Azbuka kommunizma of 1919, Nikolai Bukharin and Evagenii Preobrazhenskii predicted the ad- vent of a society as well-regulated as a mechanical contraption and as harmonious as an or- chestra: Communist society

must be an organized society. Anarchic production. competition of private entrepreneurs, wars, crises have no place here. . . . from childhood onwards, all will have been accus- tomed to social labor, and . . all will understand that this work is necessary and that life goes easier when everything is done according to a prearranged plan. . . . There will be no need for special ministers, for police or prisons, for laws and decrees-nothing of the sort. Just as in an orchestra all the performers watch the conductor's baton and act accordingly, so here all will consult the statistical reports and will direct their work accordingly.7

From such cheerful dreams nightmares like Evgenii Zamiatin's My, George Orwell's 1984, and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World are born.

Though Olesha's Zavist' has its dark satiric moments as well as idealizing tendencies, it is best read as a comic meditation on the utopian dream. The panegyrist praises his ideal and the satirist mocks men and institutions that have been deflected from a norm he values. Olesha is unsure. His novel has the dispassionateness of comedy-it struggles to locate a stance before the imperatives of paradise in the making, but it ultimately remains content with revealing the way of the world. Perplexed by utopia, uncertain about where he stands, or where he should stand, he has turned his confusions to advantage, nurturing what John Keats called the "negative capabil- ity," the capacity of the mind to be tolerant of "uncertainties, mysteries, doubts."8 Ideology's loss is art's gain, as Olesha explores the ramifications of the utopian project with intellectual irony and replaces the polemics of dystopia with his characteristic whimsy.

The novel presents three ideal states. Andrei Babichev is an intermediary between the rotten old order and the future paradise. He busies himself constructing a utopia of production and consumption. His heirs, Volodia and Valia, children of a collectivist society, have finally cleansed themselves of the confusions and burdens of life as men have known it. These athletic youths inhabit a brave new world of play. Kavalerov and Ivan Babichev, remnants of prerevolu- tionary society, organize "a conspiracy of feelings" to vindicate the superannuated aristocratic values of individual heroism, romantic love, adoration of woman, and beauty (Kavalerov derives from the Russian for cavalier). Kavalerov is torn: He longs to assert his personality and yet aches to find a home in the bosom of Babichev's utopia. He is also an artist manque, and in his creative use of language and poetic ruminations (he is the narrator of the first half of the book) he sug- gests a third ideal-a utopia of art.

Without Andrei Babichev the novel might have fallen into those clear-cut allegorical op- positions of the right and wrong way (Kavalerov against Volodia) which provide the axes of

6. "My rastem iz zheleza," in Proletarskie poetv pervvkh 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 histori- cal survey of Soviet versions of utopia, see Jerome M. Gilison, The Soviet Image of Utopia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1975). The revolution also gave rise to a number of peasant pastorals but the urban industrial model soon won out. See Katerina Clark, "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.

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).

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Olesha's Zavist': Utopia and Dystopia 603

utopian literature. Through this original comic creation the entire utopian enterprise is thrown into a play of literary irony. Andrei huffs and snorts, but for all his comic dishevelment, he em- bodies a kind of perfection. William Harkins, in one of his several ground-breaking essays on Olesha, has described Andrei as a hermaphroditic figure, playing the role of both protective fa- ther and nourishing mother to the orphans Kavalerov and Volodia.9 He resembles one of those primitive androgynous gods, fecund, sexually complete, spawning offspring who are fragmented into hopelessly partial masculine and feminine natures.'0 He is large and physically imposing- "obraztsovaia muzhskaia osob'." His masculinity, however, is suspect: The root of his name is "baba" or "woman," he is a "grown-up fat boy" whose breasts bounce in tune to his steps; most curious of all, he has been blessed with the maternal power to give birth."

Kavalerov, in describing him, focuses on his groin-"A splendid groin. A tender furry spot. A forbidden corner. The groin of a producer" (pp. 20-21). Men may produce through the use of external tools; from their bodies they produce only waste. Sigmund Freud, however, found that children in fantasy turn the evacuation of excrement into the act of childbirth. 12 Andrei seemingly envies the feminine power to produce nourishment and life from the body. The ambi- tion of this affable, unimaginative bureaucrat is no less than to make motherhood obsolescent, to usurp her traditional function: "He's greedy and jealous. He would like to cook all the omelets himself, all the pies, all the hamburgers, and bake all the bread. He wanted to give birth to food. He gave birth to the Quarter." He gives birth to a gigantic cafeteria (the Quarter), which in turn gives birth to a sausage: "Finally the species hatched. From mysterious incubators, its trunk swaying ponderously, crawled out a fat, tightly stuffed intestine." This extraordinary sausage is "born" with the qualities of a living organism: "A sweating surface, yellow bubbles of sub- cutaneous fat. . . . The sausage hung from Babichev's pink dignified palm as if something alive." Like Akaki Akakevich viewing his new overcoat, Babichev regards his sausage as a be- loved woman: "Holding a slice of this intestine in his hand, Babichev blushed, at first even felt embarrassed, like a bridegroom beholding the beauty of his bride" (pp. 22, 39-41).

This swollen "Buddha" promises the world unlimited abundance: "Borshch shall flow like an ocean, buckwheat will be heaped in mountains and jelly descend upon you like a glacier!" The sofa he offers to the homeless Kavalerov (and later to Volodia) is a simulacrum of paradise, a Cockaigne of milk and honey: "I observe . . . how the ringing bubbles from the submerged depths become rolling grapes, how a succulent bunch of grapes springs up, an entire vineyard thick with bunches, a sunny road beside the vineyard, warmth." The slatternly Anechka is Babichev's double-she is also fat ("like a liver sausage"), also a provider of food for a collec- tive (she cooks for an artel), also surrounded by the intestines of animals, and she too offers Kavalerov a paradisiacal bed: "Above him hung heavy clusters of grapes; Cupids pranced, apples tumbled from horns of plenty." Besides unlimited abundance, these beds offer fulfillment of infantile fantasies of omnipotence. If he were a child on Anechka's magnificent bed, Ka- valerov daydreams, he would not have to obey "either space or scale or time or weight or grav- ity." He would be like "a king" (pp. 31, 23, 34, 115, 92).

Babichev's ambition to produce from the self, to procreate out of his own being, is a nar- cissistic fantasy, denying the need for the other, negating mutuality, proclaiming a godlike self- sufficiency. We first meet Babichev at his toilet, pampering his rosy, well-fed flesh: "'He washes himself like a little boy-trumpets, dances, snorts, lets out howls ." Whenever he appears he is

9. William E. Harkins, "The Theme of Sterility in Olesha's Envy," Slavic Reviewv 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. Iurii Olesha, Povesti i rasskaz, (Moscow, 1965), 20-21. Citations from Olesha's works are from this edition. I have used the translations by Andrew R. MacAndrew, Envv and Other Works (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 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.

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604 Slavic Review

absorbed in his own body, scratching his nose, examining his fingernails. Kavalerov accuses him of "intoxication with himself," of being "bloated with self-satisfaction," calls him "an egoist, a sensualist, a dullard convinced everything will go his way" (pp. 20, 51, 54).

In Kavalerov's overwrought imagination Babichev and Anechka are gargantuan parental figures, promising security and nourishment, but threatening by their sheer bulk to destroy him, unman him, devour him. He feels oppressed, smothered by the very physical presence of the man: "You overwhelmed me. You crushed me under your weight. . . . I look at you, and your face becomes strangely enlarged, your torso bloated-the lines of a clay idol curve out, swell." As he fears being crushed by the colossal weight of Babichev, he also seems to be in terror of being eaten by him. Babichev and Anechka proffer food but they also gobble it voraciously. Babichev "is in charge of everything concerned with gorging (zhran'e)," he is a "glutton" (obzhora i chrevougodnik). He would use people as he uses the waste products of animals. Dark recesses, black holes dot the landscape of the novel, threatening to swallow Kavalerov. In rage and terror he struggles to preserve his individuality against the threat of annihilation: "I am fight- ing for . . . personality (lichnost')." He finally succumbs, falling into the abyss of Anechka's encompassing body, that "symbol of my masculine humiliation" (pp. 50, 22, 52, 35).

A flaw exists in Babichev's perfection, a worm in the meat of his paradisiacal apple. Nostal- gic for family life, aching for a son, he seeks not so much to destroy the family as to project it into political life. He promises a domesticated and paternalistic utopia, the state, as Harkins as- tutely notes, turned into mother and father.'3 In doing so, Babichev unwittingly introduces the deadly anxieties of what Freud called "the family drama" into the utopian quest. If Babichev's utopia is the projection of a child's fantasy of unlimited nourishment and omnipotence, it also carries along with it all the terrors of childhood. The omnipotent parent has the power, in the child's imagination, to guarantee safety and well-being, but the parent also has the power to destroy the child. Babichev's narcissism and Kavalerov's dependency fit into each other as a hand into a glove. Babichev's expansive self seeks to devour the world and evacuate it as "produc- tion"; Kavalerov, in terror that his individuality will be smothered, still yearns for what he fears: escape from the anxieties of individuation, comfort in those enveloping beds, extinction in the wombs of those "dark recesses."

This sophisticated and ironic novel is never too certain to what extent Babichev's awesome power is a projection of Kavalerov's desire, that in reality he may be merely a well-meaning and not-too-bright bureaucrat caught up in the general zeal to make the world a better place. His utopia is a collaborative effort, yet another "conspiracy of feeling," a product of his own out- sized ambitions and Kavalerov's envy and anxious dependency that magnify parental power. The opening scene, with its blending of the commonplaces of the toilet and Kavalerov's hyperbolic paean to the "splendid groin," inaugurates the comic irony that runs through the book. In Ka- valerov's feverish eyes Babichev is heroic and monstrous, but the image of "a grown-up fat boy," gargling and splashing water on his pampered body, locates him simultaneously in the ordinary life of weak flesh. 14 But surely Olesha's point is that the most ordinary of men harbor the most extravagant of dreams.

Foremost among these is the dream of perfection. Babichev, Kavalerov imagines, has it; Kavalerov envies it. Locked in a protracted adolescence, nostalgic for the comfort of childhood, he also longs to become a man and enter the world of the parents, to partake of their power, but he views the world of the parents with profound suspicion and dread. In a passage that is crucial

13. Harkins, "Theme of Sterility," 446. 14. Gary Saul Morson speaks of the parodist's "irony of origins" that "reveals the historical or per-

sonal 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.

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Olesha's Zavist': Utopia and Dystopia 605

for an understanding of Olesha, Kavalerov questions the very fact of paternity. Lolling in delight on Babichev's "excellent sofa," his mind leaps from his surrogate father to his biological father (p. 34):

Once, changing my shirt, I saw myself in the mirror and suddenly caught a striking resemblance to my father. In reality there is no such resemblance. I remembered: my par- ents' bedroom, and I, a boy, am watching my father as he changes his shirt. I feel sorry for him. It's already too late for him to be handsome, famous. He is already done, finished. He already can't be anything other than what he is. . . . And now I recognize my father in myself. Not a formal resemblance-no, something else, I would say-a sexual resem- blance, as if I suddenly perceived in myself, in my very substance, my father's seed. It was as if someone were telling me: you're done, finished, through. Give birth to a son (Rozhai svna).

A profound biological pessimism pervades these lines. The very process of maturation leads inevitably to a kind of perfection-a child grows until he is "done, finished." But completion- "perfection"-is a dead end where possibility disappears and life dries up. To give birth is an act of despair, the last resort of a soul that has gone dead. 15 At the end of the novel Kavalerov real- izes his oedipal fantasy and enters the paradise of Anechka's bed to supplant her husband- "You very much remind me of my husband." Symbolically he has taken his father's place- "Kavalerov remembered his father changing his shirt." His dream of paradise achieved- "Above him hung heavy clusters of grapes; Cupids pranced, apples tumbled from horns of plenty" (p. 115)-he is nevertheless in despair. No doubt the final scene enacts the punishment of castration, but Kavalerov's rage (he strikes Anechka in fury) is over his very success. The mother won, the paradise of her bed gained, Kavalerov has become his father.'6 That fateful "sexual resemblance," the "father's seed" in his "very substance," has become manifest, and as a consequence he is "done, finished, through." Like Dostoevskii, Olesha warns us that the worst that can befall us is to get what we want.'7 A paradox lies at the heart of utopia: Our ends achieved, life becomes emptied of purpose. Striving, ambition, growth are meaningless when human desire is fully satisfied. Dystopian writers usually locate the error of utopia in excessive or misplaced rationalism. For Olesha, the paradox of utopia seems to be embedded in the very cycle of life, as humans grow toward a completion or "perfection" that is synonymous with death. It is as if adulthood, or at least the lives of most adults, was tainted, while only the child (and, as we shall see, the artist), is blessed with the possibility of creative action.'8

Kavalerov, prompted by the evil genius of the novel, Andrei's brother Ivan, enlists in the "conspiracy of feelings," that short-lived rebellion of anarchic individualism against the stran- glehold of Andrei's utopia. The utopian seeks simplification, clarity, and rational order-the purity of the crystal palace. The dystopian parodically inverts his propositions, showing the world as more complex and hence less amenable to transformation than the utopian imagined. One of his strategies may be to move from Plato's allegory of the cave, where humanity is shown

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)," Novvi mir 5 (1929): 189-208; and Robert Louis Jackson, Dostoevsky's Underground Man in Rus- sian Literatlure (The Hague: Mouton, 1958), 158- 165.

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 possibil- ity. In the lovely scene of Zavist', where Kavalerov sees in a park "beautiful mothers," whose breasts repre- sent "milk, motherhood, marriage, pride, and purity" (63), however, we have a suggestion that adulthood may not always be sterile.

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a way from darkness to the light of reason, to what Gary Morson has called the allegory of the labyrinth.'9 Life is shown to be a dark maze from which there is no escape. In more temperate minds than Ivan's such knowledge may lead to a modest acceptance of human limitation. Ivan, driven by envy and hatred, ends in despair.

His conspiracy is doomed because it is purely destructive. Rebellions are often merely the opposite side of the coin of the despised authority. Andrei would replace the family with the state. Ivan, a parody of Christ 2-) as rumor has it, he turns wine into water-in his hopelessness about the future denounces marriage, inverting Christ's words: "You must not love one other. You must not come together. Bridegroom, forsake your bride! What will be the fruit of your love? You will bring your enemy into the world. He will devour you." Andrei's salami and Ivan's store of feelings have a similar provenance. The salami resembles excrement and is "born" of waste products; likewise Ivan's feelings are associated with filth. Ophelia, Ivan's fantastical ma- chine, his instrument of revenge, appears in a garbage dump. The name Ophelia, with its asso- ciations to art, beauty, and love, defies the new age of rationalized existence, but she herself has been contaminated: "I gave the most vulgar human feelings to the greatest technical creation. I dishonored the machine" (pp. 77, 93--94). Woman is the ideal of Ivan's revolt (hence his battle to possess Valia) but also the object of his sadism.

Art has an analogous duality. In the garbage dump lies a bottle (the allusion is apparently to Anton Chekhov's famous description of the poetic image): "If some dreamer passes along our path, he will have the pleasure of contemplating the famous bottle glass, the famous splinters of glass celebrated by writers for their ability to flash amidst garbage and desolation and create mirages for lonely travelers" (pp. 93-94). William Butler Yeats, in his great poem on the poetic process, The Circus Animals' Desertion, speaks of "masterful images," which though they "grew in pure mind," began in "a mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, . . . In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart." It is the dilemma of human life that order and disorder, produc- tion and waste, creativity and destructiveness all mingle in the rag and bone shops of our hearts. As a writer Olesha was painfully aware of the essential ambivalence of human activity, but he had difficulty living with it and sought a way out.

Babichev's utopia, though it feeds men, is not able to free them from their duality. It is only a halfway house to the real thing, the projection of a childlike fantasy of omnipotence and fully satisfied desire marred by the anxieties of childish dependence. His aristocratic birthmark reveals his ineradicable ties to the prerevolutionary order: "I am up to my belly in the old world and can't crawl out." If "perfect" in his sexual nature, he has not been able to escape the discomforts of flesh and the confusions of familial feeling. Locked in the prison of his blubbery body, sentimen- tally paternalistic, yearning to "give birth," he is the progenitor of utopia, but not its final real- ization. Out of that massive body, the future will be born. As he gives birth to a cafeteria that will wrest the function of nourishment from mothers, he would, through the marriage of his adopted son Volodia and his niece Valia, bring forth a "new breed" of human beings to inhabit "a new world" (pp. 76, 89).

Volodia and Valia at last free humanity from conflict and guilt. They relocate utopia from Babichev's incubator of infantile fantasies to a playground of adolescent daydreams. Ivan takes Kavalerov to view Valia and Volodia performing gymnastics in a hidden courtyard. Everything about the elaborate description is geared to demonstrate their removal from ordinary life. In a novel where paradisiacal fantasies have trouble escaping the terrors of castration and cannibalism or anal exercises in power, the courtyard is the locus of a pastoral idyll, a clean and calm place in a novel of anxious comedy. T'he day is "enchanting," light and shadow formi "geometrical pat-

19. Morson, Bounida-ies of Genre, 122. 20. See Andrew Barratt, Yutrii Olesha's EnvY, Birmingham Slavonic Monographs no. 12 (Bir-

mingham, U.K.: University of Birmingham, 1981), 29-30. Also Robert A. Maguire, Red Virgin Soil: So- viet Literatutre in the 1920s (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), 339. Maguire has interesting things to say about the oedipal conflict in the novel. Also Aleksandr Zholkovskii, "Dialog Bulgakova i Oleshi," Sintaksis 20 (1987): 105.

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Olesha's Zavist': Utopia and Dystopia 607

terns," dust could be taken for "waves in the ether." The green of the "mysterious" lawn where the young athletes perform is "sweet and cool to the eye," it fills one with a sense of "enchant- ment." "Everything here was intended for happy childhood." "It was as if they were not in Moscow, but Italy." Valia is at the center of the lawn, "her legs firm and wide apart." Her stance is "firm and solid-not at all the stance of a woman but of a man or perhaps a child. Her legs are dirty, suntanned, and shining with sweat. They are the legs of a little girl, exposed to air and sun" (pp. 102- 105).21

Valia, the ideal creature of this pastoral idyll, the figure over which Andrei and Ivan struggle to assert parental influence, for whose love Kavalerov and Volodia contend, is caught at that precarious moment between childhood and maturity. She has developed sufficient indepen- dence to escape the terrors of childhood but has not yet reached that stage where she will be vulnerable to the sexual passions of maturity. Neither child nor adult, she is sexually indetermi- nate. In the blissful playground where she and Volodia perform their calisthenics, no adults are present.

Their idyll circumvents the terrors of childhood simply by eliminating parents. Volodia es- capes the discomforts and appetites of the body by turning it into a machine, Valia by being a desexualized "man-child" or an icon of a poeticized nature. "I'm a human machine," Volodia tells Babichev, and he and Valia possess the athlete's power to turn the body into a finely con- trolled instrument. They have formed a society of adolescent peers, free from anxiety because free from authority, free from guilt because free from appetite and desire. Volodia, though he sees himself as Babichev's disciple and son, dissociates himself from his elder's connection, however secondhand, with nature: "Your line of work disposes to sentimentality: fruit, herbs, bees, calves, that sort of thing. I'm a heavy industry man" (pp. 58-59). Olesha is clearly uncom- fortable with this machine-man and would humanize him in an allegorical marriage of Nature and Technology.22 If Valia is Nature-"a branch thick with flowers and leaves" (p. 38)-she repre- sents a sublimated nature, "pure and clean," innocent of the darker impulses of biological being. Where Babichev's and Anechka's beds are throwbacks to primitive paradises of myth, archaic fantasies of return to the maternal womb, Valia's and Volodia's are in the tradition of pastoral, where nature is tamed, emasculated, made safe. The air of their idyll has been distilled into "ether," the landscape is ordered into "geometrical patterns," everything is "enchanting," as in "happy childhood." The only thing one does in this utopian playground is play.

No one, as far as I can tell-Soviet critics as well as non-Soviet-has found Valia and Volodia convincing. Lewis Mumford has divided utopias into "utopias of reconstruction" and "utopias of escape," or those that proceed from "a vision of a reconstituted environment which is better adapted to the nature and aims of . . . human beings," and those "impossible castles in the air" that account for neither human nature nor historical circumstance.23 Both Babichev's and Volodia's-Valia's utopias qualify as escapes, one to the beds of infancy, the other to the play- grounds of adolescence. But one interests us, the other bores. Babichev's and Anechka's beds are furnishings in a comic mode, and significant comedy appeals to our profoundest wishes, only to show them as limited by actuality and incompatible with the totality of our human nature. The dream of unlimited eats, of total safety, of power and absolute freedom runs so deep in our nature that we cannot resist their momentary seduction, and through the intellectual ironies of comedy we become aware of their dangers and reconciled to their loss. Valia's and Volodia's playground, on the other hand, seems manufactured, concocted without conviction, one of those airy pas- torals without roots in human flesh and desire. If Babichev's bed represents an escape from matu-

21. Elizabeth Beaujour locates the source of this paradisiacal scene in the work of H. G. Wells, whom Olesha admired. The Inivisible Land: A Study of the Artistic Imaginiation of Iurii Olesha (New York: Colum- bia University Press, 1970), 59.

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

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

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608 Slavic Review

rity and the fear of death (being "done, finished, through"), then Valia's and Volodia's play- ground is an escape from being human altogether, the dilemma of desire and death solved by man's becoming automaton.

Is there any third way for Olesha, a possible life that is not captive to an anxious nostalgia for the comfort of maternal succor or frozen in imbecilic puberty? Can man transcend the inevi- table ticking of the biological clock that mocks his hopes, so that he grows only to reach a desti- nation where possibility is exhausted and he has no alternative but to repeat the cycle ("Give birth to a son")?

Zavist' is one of those modernist novels that is not reducible to its story. How little of James Joyce's Ulysses or Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu would remain if we were limited to describing merely what happens in them! To restrict a reading of Zavist' to plot, char- acter, and idea would be to neglect what gives the novel much of its appeal: the play of language, the charm of its metaphors, its highly original, even idiosyncratic, apprehension of things. Though he simplified the complex syntax of early Soviet "ornamentalism," Olesha, like other writers of the period (Maiakovskii, Isaak Babel', Boris Pasternak), played with free-floating im- ages of startling imaginativeness. His style is highly pictorial. Made to delight the eye, it presents the world as spectacle. It is designed not only to advance a plot or delineate a character, but to evoke the aesthetic pleasure of language employed for its own sake, of images presented for their intrinsic beauty. "His primary images," M. 0. Chudakova writes, "spread, grow into something self-sufficient, which discovers its own life, separate from the whole, and commences its endless journey through his stories, novels, and notes." 24

Narrative evolves in time; pictorial arts freeze a moment. Stories follow patterns of neces- sity or probability, and the author, given certain characters and situations, may feel himself bound to continue in a fashion apparently not all of his own making, as if the story were "writing itself." The metaphor, self-contained and uncontingent, may appear as the realm of absolute freedom. Parallel to his story, Olesha creates a world of images relatively independent of the narrative, metaphors that he conceived of as timeless emanations of the imagination. In the drafts to one of his stories he wrote, "we must be able to stop the moment. We shall stop it." In Ni dnia bez strochki: "Someone said that from art only the metaphor remains for eternity. That is cer- tainly so. . . . What is eternity if not a metaphor?" 25

Kavalerov, who speaks and thinks "in a language of images" (p. 53), is gifted with the sensibility of an artist (the man of imagination who suffers from a debilitating psychic wound is a recurring figure in Olesha's work). The product of Olesha's art, he walks through the novel creating his own art of metaphors that are materialized ("realized") into self-sufficient minia- tures (p. 62).

It is raining. The rain is walking along Flower Street. It strides by Circus Square, turns onto

the boulevards on the right, and, reaching Petrovskii Heights, it suddenly becomes blind and loses its assurance.

I cut across Pipe Square thinking of the fabulous swordsman who walked under

24. M. 0. Chudakova, Masterstvo Iuriia Oleshi (Moscow, 1972), 93. 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 aes- thetic value." V. Badikov, "O stile romana Iuriia Oleshi Zavist'," Filologicheskii sbornik 5 (Alma-Ata 1966):58. Contemporaries compared Olesha to the French modernists-Proust, Jean Giraudoux-and Pas- ternak. He was jokingly referred to as "among Russians, the best French writer." See N. Berkovskii, "O prozaikakh," Zvezda 12 (1929): 15; and K. Gur'ev, "12 stul'ev," Na literaturnom postu 18 (1929):70.

25. Quoted by Kazimiera Ingdahl, in The Artist and the Creative Act: A Study of Jurij Olesha's Novel "Zavist" (Stockholm: Minab-Gotab, 1984), 15. Ingdahl makes a similar point about Olesha's use of meta- phor 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 meta- phorical hypostasis-in other words I saw it twice" (ibid., 269).

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Olesha's Zavist': Utopia and Dystopia 609

the rain beating off the raindrops with his sword. His sword glistened, the ends of his cape blew in the wind, he twisted his body, scattered himself like notes from a flute-and re- mained dry. He received his father's inheritance. Wet to the ribs, I received a slap in the face.

Not only does Kavalerov compete with his creator in employing language artistically, he is also Olesha's spokesman on aesthetic matters.26 For Olesha the creative imagination does not merely depict the world; it transforms it. Kavalerov, walking along "a common road," "an ordi- nary city road promising neither miracles nor visions," comes across a mirror-that venerable metaphor for the reflecting powers of art-but mirrors, he tells us, are magical. They do not reflect reality; they metamorphose it (pp. 63-64).

The world and its laws have undergone fantastic metamorphoses. The laws of op- tics, geometry have been broken. . . . Distances open before you. You're confident: that's a house, a wall, but you've been granted a superior vantage. There's no wall here, there's a mysterious world where everything you've just seen is repeated-with stereoscopic clarity and brilliance....

You're transported. So sudden is the violation of law, so incredible the change of proportions. But you're joyful over your dizziness. . . . Your face, immobile, is suspended in the mirror, it alone has kept its regularity of form, it is the only particle preserved from the true world, while everything else has collapsed, been transformed, acquired a new regu- larity. . . . Your face is set in a tropical garden. The grass is too green, the sky too blue.'7

In his brilliant allegory of the imagination, "The Cherry Stone," Olesha refers to private subjectivity as a third world. The other two worlds are "the old" and "the new"-that is, before and after the revolution. Taken together, however, they are one, the realm of the factual, of the biological and historical imperatives that shape human life. Tangential to the world of the real is the "invisible land" of individual mind (pp. 254-255):

The invisible land is the land of attentiveness and imagination. The traveler isn't alone! Two sisters walk at his side and lead the traveler by the hand. One sister is Atten- tiveness, the other Imagination.

Well, what does that mean? Does it mean that disregarding everything, disregard- ing society and the order of things, I create a world not subject to any laws except the illu- sionary laws of my private sensations? What does it mean? There are two worlds: the old and the new, so what sort of world is this? A third world? There are two paths. What then is this third path?

On the third path, the way of Imagination and Attentiveness, men give birth to beauty. The metaphor of birth is anything but casual. Olesha once again treats it with a literalness that indi- cates he means it. The narrator, like Kavalerov an impotent dreamer, discovers through imagina- tion the compensatory power to give birth. The "negative capability," imagination and recep- tivity ("attentiveness"), is perhaps more feminine than masculine, though Olesha sees it rather as infantile, exposing the individual to debilitating weakness in the arena of competitive striving, but enabling the self to create out of itself.28 He has loved Natasha, lost her to his rival Boris

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 be- long 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 imagi- nary 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

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Mikhailovich, but his unconsummated love has become the inspiration for a kind of creative parthenogenesis (p. 258).

1 planted a tree to commemorate the fact that you didn't love me. . . I was dreamy, infantile. . . . I was a romantic. But look now: this firm, manly tree has grown from the romantic's stone. You know-the Japanese believe the cherry blossom is the soul of a man. Believe me, Natasha, romanticism is a manly thing and shouldn't be laughed at. . . . If Boris Mikhailovich had seen me squatting in the empty lot, planting that infantile cherry stone, he would have once again savored his victory over me-the victory of a man over a dreamer. . . . I hid a seed in the ground. This tree is my child by you, Natasha. Bring along the son Boris Mikhailovich fathered by you. I want to see if he is as healthy, pure, and without blemish (bezotnositelei) as this tree born of an infantile subject?

The unusual adjective bezotnositelen literally means "irrespective" but its etymology sug- gests "unrelative"-that is "autonomous," "absolute," "perfect." The narrator of "The Cherry Stone" has reduplicated the feat of Andrei Babichev of Zavist', producing out of his own self utopian perfection.'

All three utopias-Andrei Babichev's ideal of production, Volodia's and Valia's pastoral playground, Kavalerov's realm of free imagination-have their roots in the desires, fears, and gifts of childhood. Yet the three utopias differ in important ways. Volodia and Valia solve the dilemmas of childhood by isolating themselves in a garden of adolescence so as to obviate the possibility of oedipal conflict. The price they pay is an attenuation of desire, a thinning out of impulse and reduction of life to mindless play. Theirs is the ultimate totalitarian fantasy-a so- ciety of children where not only the distinctions of class but those of parent and child have evapo- rated, and everyone has become indistinguishably alike. Freed from conflict engendered by dif- ference and authority, they are also cut off from the vital sources of creativity, which, as the novel continually reminds us, have their sources in the darker aspects of our nature.

Andrei Babichev still has a body-flesh that feels and suffers-and it is the essence of his charm. He has the power of producing from the body, which Olesha identifies as the gift of childlike personalities, but he "has no imagination" (p. 23, 52). Though the poet's body is also involved in his labors (he gives birth "squatting in the empty lot"), the soul plays a part in artis- tic creation-"the cherry blossom is the soul of a man." Like Yeats's "masterful images," the products of Olesha's art may have originated in flesh but they "grew in pure mind." The impulse to technological production, though he admired and perhaps envied it, seems for Olesha to be less spiritual and more a drive for power and control.30 Babichev produces articles for consump- tion, things that are to be devoured; the artist creates things that are alive, like cherry trees. They exist not to be eaten but to be contemplated. Babichev's products do not escape the cycle of birth and decay; they merely substitute the cycle of production and consumption. A world organized about production and consumption (an ethos by no means limited to "socialist" societies) leaves nothing of intrinsic value and reduces man to a state of dependency, a child living to be fed. Objects of art outlast their consumers. They have value in their own right.

The utopia of art seems more than mere escapism, though there is some of that in it too. Art solves nothing in the "real world"-neither Kavalerov nor the narrator of "The Cherry Stone" gets his girl, and they suffer their failures. Out of their failed selves, however, artists find the

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 V. Sobelev, "Guliaia v sadu," Literaturnaia gazeta, 29 May 1933.

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 imnpotence is a budding scientist or engineer not a poet.

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Olesha's Zavist': Utopia and Dystopia 611

materials to create a parallel existence that transcends the remorseless biological rhythms of birth and death. Strolling aimlessly down a humdrum Moscow street, Kavalerov, through the trans- forming power of imagination, can simultaneously dwell in beauty. He goes down to defeat, but on his journey he (and his author through him) continues creating images of "invisible lands." Like the cherry tree-that commemoration of the artist's failure, of "the fact that you didn't love me"-his metaphors survive him. Also attentiveness as well as imagination is a "sister" of art. The artist does not manufacture a fanciful chimera of empty soap bubbles. Through careful ob- servation he locates the hidden beauty of things. "a new regularity" composed of the objects discerned by his gift of seeing the world anew, transfigured by the powers of his imagination.3' Artistic creativity for Olesha is nature's compensation for a flawed self. The artist is "infantile," his infantilism dooms him to failure in competitive life, but it allows him to hold on to the imagi- nativeness of the child and ward off the sterility of adult "perfection." The creative process also reaches for perfection, but of works not men.32 The perfections of art grow out of the imperfec- tions of the creator, his conflicts and unrealized wishes. If men were perfect, art would be impos- sible. In political utopia there would, it seems, be no need for it.

Characteristically, Olesha presents his "third path" and "third world" in the form of ques- tions. Had he lived in the symbolist period, from which the metaphoric character of his art ulti- mately derives, he might have felt more confident about "disregarding everything, disregarding society and the order of things" and creating a world not subject to any laws except the illusion- ary laws of [his] private sensations." His fate, however, was to live in an era when millenarian expectations had become common property. The clamor from outside was too loud to be muffled by solipsistic curtains. The bandwagons were hoisting the banners of the utopia of production and the totalitarian pastoral of heroic innocent youth, and Olesha felt anxious lest he be left behind: "See how difficult it is for me to keep up, but I go on running. I'm out of breath, my feet sink in the mud, but I still run after the roaring storm of the century!" " He hoped that the new order would leave room for the private and eccentric imagination-at the end of "The Cherry Stone" the narrator learns that the Five-Year Plan has allowed a place for his cherry tree. The pathos of his art, often moving, sometimes shading into sentimentality, stems from his continu- ing search to reconcile the visionls and desires of the individual with the demands of history and nature.

Zavist' is darker than his other works but not altogether despairing. The wedding of nature and technology Valia and Volodia perform is offered as a way out of human complication but it is unconvincing, off the top of the head. Valia and Volodia remain wooden characters, Kavalerov is driven, Ivan Babichev diabolical, but Andrei Babichev has vitality. He is also funny. Allegory reduces character to a single dimension-in utopian literature, one of its practitioners admits, "there are no indivdualities, but only generalized people." :4 Comedy thrives on incongruity. What miakes Andrei funny is the discrepancy between his megalomaniacal pretensions and his bumbling body. In a novel that turns upon the utopian dream of perfection, where men and women either seek it or flee it in terror, Andrei reminds us of the vulnerability of mortal flesh. We dream of utopia because we are unhappy, fear it because our conceptions of perfection turn out to be incompatible with what we really are. Comedy offers not a cure, but temporary relief, and it is a relief to learn that men, as they march boldly to utopia, continue to gargle, blow their noses, and stumble like the rest of us.

31. Olesha's view of art was clearly infiuenced 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." "lurii Olesha Talks with His Readers," trans. H. 0. Whyte, Initer-nationial Literatlure 3 (1936): 88.

33. "Tsep'," Povesti, 252. 34. H. G. Wells, A Moder-n Utopia (London: Thomas Nelson, n.d.), 20.

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