Past, present and future at odds

There are eerie parallels between the career of the author of this all too brief masterpiece and that of Nicolai Erdman, whose play The Mandate recently opened at the National Theatre. Novelist and playwright both achieved acclaim for pugnaciously satirical works produced in the mid-Twenties, a period of extravagant experiment in the Soviet Union. Then, within a short period, both were suffering the same denunciations — for formalism, objectivism, cosmopolitanism and so forth. Erdman spent three years in Siberia, Olesha fell precipitously from favour. Daunted, they devoted the rest of their lives largely to working on film scripts. Olesha died in 1960, Erdman some ten years later.

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Gavin Mortimer

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At first, even Pravda praised Envy for ‘exposing the envy of small despicable people’ against ‘the majestic reorganisation’ of life in the Soviet Union. But then, such was the even-handedness of the satire, readers soon began to realise that, although Olesha claimed himself to be a poputchik (reliable fellow traveller), he was as much out of sympathy with the world then struggling to be born as with the world so recently dead.

A pyramid of five leading characters gives the novel its shape. At the apex is Andrei Babichev, a vast, gross, good-natured stalwart of the regime, director of the Food Industry Trust. It is his ambition to free the women of Moscow from the drudgery of cooking meals by creating the largest cafeteria in the world. Below him there is firstly Nikolai, an unredeemed bourgeois, who, having been rescued by Andrei from the gutter, repays him with loathing and envy. Then there is Andrei’s estranged brother Ivan, a fantasist and conman consumed with nostalgia for the past. Below this pair are Volodya, a well-known footballer, also a protégé of Andrei, and Valya, Ivan’s daughter, with whom Nikolai is in love but who herself is in love with Volodya.