Envy / Embezzlers

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ENVY

First published in 1927, a classic of Russian 20th-century fiction, in a new translation which is scrupulously faithful to the text.

Critics as far apart as Gleb Struve and Pravda have praised Olesha's novel. As Edward J. Brown writers in his Russian Literature Since the Revolution, "There are novels which catch and concentrate the essence of a particular historical moment. Such was Yury Olesha's novel Envy.... It was acknowledged by almost every literary faction as an important artistic statement. The literary critics reacted with interest and symptaht to the picture of an anti-Communist intellectual claiming to belong to the nineteenth century, reduced in the new world to sharing with a colleague a fat widow in a rococo bed. For them that image meant degradation and death of the old values.... The mark of genuine greatness attaches to the novel. No one can fail to recognize in it a part of his own human reality."

The twentieth-century Notes from Underground.

EMBEZZLERS

First published in 1927, a picaresque satire by one of the most durable Soviet writers, long out of print, in a new and accurate translation.

To follow the career of Valentin Kataev through satirical works such as the Embezzlers to Soviet construction novels, socialist realism of the thirties, war literature, avant-garde memoirs of the sixties, and experimental prose in the most recent issues of Novy Mir is to follow the whole history of Soviet literature. His Embezzlers is one of the best examples of NEP satire. Kataev is not the impeccable stylist that Olesha is, but he has a facile pen at the command of his considerable story-telling talent. The result in this case is the lively, funny story of drink and debauch which Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theater made into a very popular play, and which more sober generations of Soviet publishers were to pass over regularly. It is a light novel, but the characters have not lost their color, nor the barbs their point.