Yury Olesha

This chapter reviews the degree to which Yury Olesha was familiar with James Joyce based on his own statements and the general availability of Joyce's work in Russia. It enumerates and analyzes the similarities between Envy and Ulysses at various important levels including character, plot, and theme. The chapter focuses on Olesha's use of Ulysses as both a subtext and a counterdiscourse throughout his short novel Envy (Zavist, 1927). Supplemented by archival research, it serves in part to demonstrate that Joyce's impact on Russian writers began early, just a few years after the publication of Ulysses in 1922. Despite his complex and seemingly contradictory attitude toward Joyce, Olesha inscribed several direct parallels and inversions of various elements from Joyce's novel into Envy in order to counter the idea that the gifted, creative artist may rewrite his past by selecting a literary forefather. Stephen Dedalus's project, Olesha intimates, was simply not possible under the Soviet system. While Olesha valued Joyce's project, which aligned with his respect for individualism and Western art, this chapter argues that Envy is as a counterresponse to many of Ulysses's basic modernist premises.