Envy by Yuri Olesha & Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Envy by Yuri Olesha (NYRB Classics, translated by Marian Schwartz)

This book follows one of my favorite literary traditions—A Book of Ravings. A satire on the futility of rejecting the conformity of 1920s Soviet Russia. There are no heroes in this book. The victors are arrogant showman, while the losers are deluded dreamers without the dedication to do more than turn to the bottle and wallow in memories of the wasted years. This is a grim book even when its very funny. It in equal measure mocks mindless nationalism and the weakness of nihilism.

Nikolai Kavalerov is young man who dreams of glory but does nothing but drink. He is found passed out in a gutter by Andrei Babichev, a sausage factory owner with ambitions to create a collective housing-cafeteria project, who gives him a home on his couch and vague work as his assistant. However, Andrei doesn’t have much use for Nikolai, at turns ignoring and insultingly pitying him. None of this would concern Nikolai much, left to himself on Andrei’s couch, but it is revealed that he is merely filling in for someone else. Volodya Makarov, described by Andrei as “a completely new man,” an athlete who saved Andrei’s life when he was a political prisoner. Nikolai’s irrelevancy and inadequacy in comparison to the posturing arrogance of Andrei and Volodya is why he is consumed by the titular envy. He sees their successes as vulgar, Andrei with his gluttony for food and success and Volodya with his snobbery and his chameleon-like ability to embrace anything that will gain him approval—he feels reminiscent of Julien Sorel. While Andrei and Volodya find easy success by adopting a showmanship that fits smoothly with the Communist nationalism of 1920s Russia, Nikolai finds himself ostracized with Andrei’s eccentric brother Ivan, who in drunken rantings tells tales of possible inventions he has created and talks about his project to immortalize the primal emotions abandoned by Communist collective values. There is only one result to this rivalry—confused chaos.

Yuri Olesha writes with a manic style that perfectly fits the moment in Russian culture that he is depicting. Simultaneously rejecting the the mass-produced, mob mentality direction that modern Russia is heading as well as the nostalgia for the traditional values and docile loyalty of the Tsarist period. Those who never stop to think of what it all means and focus solely on success are the ones who succeed, and on the other hand are those that drive themselves to madness by trying to understand the makings of a society modernizing faster than it can sustain.

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (NYRB Classics)

A fascinating book that didn’t fully work for me. Sylvia Townsend Warner blends a traditionally structured family saga with a supernatural tale of independence for an unconventional woman. Both parts are engrossing on their own, but don’t entirely fit together.

Laura “Lolly” Willowes is unmarried and rather eccentric. She enjoys a life of rural seclusion with her father until he dies, at that point she moves in with her brother and his family. When it becomes clear that her topics of interest, werewolves, witches and a passion for unseasonal flowers, are too strange to allow her to get married, it is assumed that she will live with them for the rest of her life. However, twenty years into her time with her brother’s family, Laura decides to move to a secluded town named Great Mop and live on her own. This causes a scandal among her family who don’t understand why she would make the crazy decision to live on her own. Laura leaves nonetheless. At Great Mop she rediscovers the idle, calming seclusion of her youth as well as a strange secret about the town.

I won’t say anymore to avoid any spoilers. The book goes in a gloriously strange and supernatural direction, and I knew this going in, having skim read some pieces on it as well as listening to Backlisted Podcast’s (fantastic) episode on the book. Unfortunately, I found that the supernatural shift wasn’t developed as well as I hoped. It all comes towards the end, after some overly subtle hints earlier on, and leaves most things unexplained. This would have been fine, as Laura and her passionate thirst for solitude and freedom is its true purpose, but the ending contrives a meeting with a certain mysterious figure to allow Laura to go on an extended monologue explaining what had already been adequately implied and then presenting ideas that had no been developed much at all. The actual ending of the book sees Laura finding true freedom in the melancholy seclusion of her situation, and this works very well, but it further makes the aforementioned meeting mostly irrelevant and unnecessary.

This is Warner’s debut novel, and it is an exciting one in spite of its flaws. The greatest aspect of it is Laura, a character who arrives fully developed and wonderfully complex from the opening pages. The irony that Warner giving Laura too much opportunity to voice her interior feelings ends up being one of the books major flaws is not lost on me, but this is because we don’t need a monologue to know everything we need to know about her, it has been present from her actions and carefully weighed expressions. Warner’s fault is creating a protagonist so full of life that the rest of the book can’t quite keep up—and I say there are far worse faults.

Initially I had planned to write this newsletter after I had finished Isaac Babel’s The Red Cavalry Stories, but then I read those stories and my thoughts were so inflamed and over-excited that I chose to hold off and give myself an intermission. Along with that, the edition I have that is published by W.W. Norton also includes Babel’s 1920 Diary and I’ve decided to read that before writing anything on The Red Cavalry Stories.