SOURCE: Hippisley, Anthony. “Symbolism in Oleša's ‘Love’.” Studies in Short Fiction 10, no. 3 (summer 1973): 281-86.

In the following essay, Hippisley finds parallels between “Love” and Olesha's novel Envy, and contends that Olesha obscures the main thematic concerns of “Love” under a complex system of symbolic imagery.

Jurij Oleša saw in the new Soviet way of life a potential threat to the individual. His Envy shares with Evgenij Zamjatin's We and George Orwell's 1984 the tragic theme of the individual's revolt against a monolithic, unfeeling society. The philosophy that only what was useful was acceptable spawned the inevitable reaction among many intellectuals, that beauty and feelings were to be valued for their own sake. In Envy the contrast is drawn between Andrej Babičev, a representative of the new, purposeful world-outlook, on the one hand, and his brother Ivan and Nikolaj Kavalerov, both representing the poetic and the useless...