Gluttony and Power in Iurii Olesha's Envy

Abstract

Given the highly carnivalized view of the world that informs the narrative structure of Envy (Zavist'. 1927), one should not be terribly surprised to find that Iurii Olesha's controversial novella contains gastronomic and alimentary motifs that function in a highly Rabelaisian way, with food imagery being called upon to celebrate what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the material bodily principle (images of the human itself, food, drink, defecation, and sexual life) and thus to express a joyful sense of satiety, abundance, and excess.! Indeed, Olesha's story fairly reverberates with images of gluttonous overeating, heavy drinking, and physical corpulence, all of which Bakhtin identifies with the grotesque body portrayed in works of carnivalized literature.2 From the tubby aristocratic torso of Andrei Babichev, the Soviet salami king, to the flaccid figure of Anechka Prokopovich, the cook for the barbers' artel (who goes about entangled in the entrails of animals), Envy quite deliberately foregrounds the essential corporeality of the human and emphasizes many of its basic physiological functions: among them, mastication, ingestion, digestion, and elimination. The novella opens, appropriately enough, within the very bowels (nedra) of Andrei Babichev's apartment, his bathroom, where the effervescent food commissar can be